The boy's father reiterated to me the account of the accident, just as I had already heard it from the doctor. How it happened, he said, could only be guessed, for his son had completely forgotten all the circumstances immediately preceding the fall; neither could he communicate any of the sensations which must have attended it. Most probably, he had been sitting dangling his legs idly over the mouth of the shaft, and had so slipped in. But, however the accident really happened, there the sufferer was before us--less seriously hurt than many a lad who has trodden on a piece of orange peel as he was walking along the street. We left him (humanly speaking) certain of recovery, now that the dangerous lump in his side had begun to decrease. I have since heard from his medical attendant, that in two months from the date of the accident, he was at work again as usual in the mine; at that very part of it too, where his fall had taken place! It was not the least interesting part of my visit to the cottage where he lay ill, to observe the anxious affection displayed toward him by both his parents. His mother left her work in the kitchen to hold him in her arms, while the old dressings were being taken off and the new ones applied--sighing bitterly, poor creature, every time he winced or cried out under the pain of the operation. The father put several questions to the doctor; which were always perfectly to the point; and did the honors of his little abode to his stranger visitor, with a natural politeness and a simple cordiality of manner which showed that he really meant the welcome that he spoke. Nor was he any exception to the rest of his brother-workmen with whom I met. As a body of men, they are industrious and intelligent; sober and orderly; neither soured by hard work, nor easily depressed by harder privations. No description of personal experiences in the Cornish mines can be fairly concluded, without a collateral testimony to the merits of the Cornish miners--a testimony which I am happy to accord here; and to which my readers would cheerfully add their voices, if they ever felt inclined to test its impartiality by their own experience. SATURDAY IN A LONDON MARKET.[12] [Footnote 12: From MAYHEW'S "London Labor and the London Poor," in the press of Messrs. Harper and Brothers.]