boots, and a coarse black felt sou-wester stuck on his head. My costume was ditto. With a stout stick in our hand, we were conveyed to the pit's mouth, and handed over to the custody of "Thomas"--a great man, in every sense of the word. He was the overseer of the under-ground workings, and was one of the finest men I ever saw. The shaft down which we were to descend was a perpendicular well, I won't say how many hundred yards deep, up and down which traveled two platforms side by side, about the size of an ordinary breakfast table; one bringing up a full wagon of coal, while the other took down an empty wagon. The platform comes up, the full wagon is wheeled away; but instead of the empty one, Thomas takes his stand in the centre, and desires us four to stand round him, and hold on by his jacket, but not to grasp any part of the platform. We obey, with an unpleasantly vivid remembrance of the description given of the last moments of Rush and the Mannings. Thomas becomes a sort of momentary Calcraft; and when he roars out, "Go!" and we feel the platform give way beneath our feet, we cling desperately to him with a savage satisfaction that he is with us, and must share our fate. We are rattled, rumbled, jolted down a gigantic telescope, with just light enough from above to make us painfully aware that there is exactly sufficient room between the edge of our platform and the sides of the shaft for us to fall through. We are conscious of clammy drops falling and clinging to us--they may be cold sweat, or perhaps dirty water from the sides of the pit--it occurs to us that five lives are at the mercy, or rather tenacity, of a rusty link, and I enter into unpleasant calculations of the time it might take to fall, say 350 feet. There is a sensation that may be vertigo, perhaps faintness--possibly an inclination to suicide, when a sudden jolt brings us to the ground, and, but for our hold on Thomas, would certainly capsize our perpendicular. We are at the bottom of the shaft, and quit the platform, very glad that the meeting is dissolved. We find ourselves in a small, dark vault, just visible by the glimmer of a single candle stuck in the wall. Thomas lights five candles, and we each take one. We then perceive that there is an iron tramway winding from under the shaft toward a couple of low doors. We are placed in single file in the centre of this tramway, and Thomas suggests a game of follow the leader. The gate-keeper (a most important person, upon whom depends very much the proper ventilation of the mine) opens the doors, and we enter a level--the doors being immediately closed behind us. We find it necessary at once to stoop, and we tramp forward through the dirtiest of all Petticoat-lanes--a thick, black mud coming half-way over our insteps, and our candles being now and then reflected in a running gutter that might be thought to discharge itself from a waste pipe from Day and Martin's. There is an