We are now four hundred yards out, _under the bottom of the sea_; and twenty fathoms, or a hundred and twenty feet, below the sea level. Coast-trade vessels are sailing over our heads. Two hundred and forty feet beneath us men are at work, and there are galleries deeper yet, even below that! The extraordinary position down the face of the cliff, of the engines and other works on the surface, at Botallack, is now explained. The mine is not excavated like other mines under the land, but under the sea! Having communicated these particulars, the miner next tells us to keep strict silence and listen. We obey him, sitting speechless and motionless. If the reader could only have beheld us now, dressed in our copper-colored garments, huddled close together in a mere cleft of subterranean rock, with flame burning on our heads, and darkness enveloping our limbs--he must certainly have imagined, without any violent stretch of fancy, that he was looking down upon a conclave of gnomes! After listening for a few moments, a distant, unearthly noise becomes faintly audible--a long, low, mysterious moaning, that never changes, that is _felt_ on the ear as well as _heard_ by it--a sound that might proceed from some incalculable distance--from some far invisible height--a sound unlike any thing that is heard on the upper ground, in the free air of heaven--a sound so sublimely mournful and still, so ghostly and impressive when listened to in the subterranean recesses of the earth, that we continue instinctively to hold our peace, as if enchanted by it, and think not of communicating to each other the strange awe and astonishment which it has inspired in us both from the very first. At last, the miner speaks again, and tells us that what we hear is the sound of the surf lashing the rocks a hundred and twenty feet above us, and of the waves that are breaking on the beach beyond. The tide is now at the flow, and the sea is in no extraordinary state of agitation: so the sound is low and distant just at this period. But, when storms are at their height, when the ocean hurls mountain after mountain of water on the cliffs, then the noise is terrific; the roaring heard down here in the mine is so inexpressibly fierce and awful, that the boldest men at work are afraid to continue their labor--all ascend to the surface to breathe the upper air and stand on the firm earth; dreading, though no such catastrophe has ever happened yet, that the sea will break in on them if they remain in the caverns below.