flood, and filled the air with heated cinders and red-hot scoria. The horrid lurid light and heat and noise were dreadful. Many said ‘The day of God’s wrath is come;’ ‘Let us fly to the rocks and to the hills.’” After a pause, and re-lighting his pipe, he added: “I think I forgot to say it was Sunday, and that the Darbys were at meeting; the Meeting-house was in Tea-kettle-row, it was before the neat little chapel at Sunnyside was built. It was a silent meeting,—outside among the elements there was noise enough—I mean among the members there had been no speaking, and if there had they may have heard plain enough what was going on outside. Well, when the furnace blew up they broke up and came down to see what was the matter. They never appear in a hurry, Quakers don’t, and did not then, though thousands of pounds of their property were going to rack every minute. ‘Is any one hurt?’ that was the first question by Miss Darby; she is now Mrs Rathbone. She was an angel of a woman; indeed, every one of the Miss Darbys have been. ‘Is there any one hurt, Adam;’ she said. I said ‘no, ma’am, there’s nobody hurt, but the furnace, and blowing mill, the pool dam, and the buildings are all gone.’ ‘Oh, I am so thankful,’ she said; ‘never mind the building, so no one’s hurt’; and they all looked as pleased—if you’ll believe—as if they had found a new vein of coal in the Dawley Field, instead of having lost an estate at Coalbrookdale.” Old age sat as fittingly on Adam as glory upon the sun, or as autumnal bloom upon the mellow fruit ripened by the summer’s heat. Nature, in the old man, had completed her work, religion had not left him without its blessings; and, while lingering or waiting, rather, upon the verge of another world, he liked to live again the active past, and to amuse himself by talking of scenes with which he had been associated. He had none of the garrulous tendencies of age; and when once upon his favourite topic, he was all smiles immediately. “We used,” he said, “to bring the mine for the Dale on pack-horses; and Horsehay being one of the halting places, was, as I believe, called Horsehay in consequence. We used, also, to take minerals on horse-back all the way to Leighton, where there was plenty of wood and charcoal, and water to blow the bellows. Strings of horses, the first having a bell to tell of their coming, used to go; they called them ‘Crickers’—and a very pretty sight it was to see them winding through upland, wood, and meadow, the little bells tinkling as they went.”