My friend was dressed first. He had got a suit which fitted him tolerably, and which, as far as appearances went, made a regular miner of him at once. Far different was my case. The same mysterious dispensation of fate, which always awards tall wives to short men, decreed that a suit of the big miner's should be reserved for me. He stood six feet two inches--I stand five feet six inches. I put on his flannel shirt--it fell down to my toes, like a bed-gown; his drawers--and they flowed in Turkish luxuriance over my feet. At his trowsers I helplessly stopped short, lost in the voluminous recesses of each leg. The big miner, like a good Samaritan as he was, came to my assistance. He put the pocket-button through the waist button-hole, to keep the trowsers up, in the first instance; then, he "hauled taut" the braces (as sailors say), until my waistband was under my armpits; and then he pronounced that I and my trowsers fitted each other in great perfection. The cuffs of the jacket were next turned up to my elbows--the white nightcap was dragged over my ears--the round hat was jammed down over my eyes. When I add to all this, that I am so near-sighted as to be obliged to wear spectacles, and that I finished my toilet by putting my spectacles on (knowing that I should see little or nothing without them), nobody, I think, will be astonished to hear that my companion seized his sketch-book, and caricatured me on the spot; and that the grave miner, polite as he was, shook with internal laughter, as I took up my tallow-candles and reported myself ready for a descent into the mine. We left the counting-house, and ascended the face of the cliff. Then, walked a short distance along the edge, descended a little again, and stopped at a wooden platform built across a deep gully. Here, the miner pulled up a trap-door, and disclosed a perpendicular ladder leading down to a black hole, like the opening of a chimney. "This is the shaft; I will go down first, to catch you, in case you tumble; follow me, and hold tight!" Saying this, our friend squeezed himself through the trap-door, and we went after him as we had been bidden.