“If they liked the work,” we added; but the Captain had walked on, attracted by a picture in one of the panels. It was a portrait of a miner in his underground dress—when he wears any—the darkness of his figure and position in the mine being pleasantly and appropriately relieved by an immense quantity of highly coloured _tropical_ fruits, flowers, griffin vultures, long and sleek-necked cranes, arborescent ferns, various logs of wood known in fossil botany, with here and there a string of choice jewels,—rubies, emeralds, and carbuncles of prodigious size, such as one has seen in “Blue Beard” and “Pizarro.” The next figure was a miner with a Davy-lamp, whom Captain Oldcastle shrewdly conjectured to be looking out for some of those jewels so profusely accorded to the fortunate miner in the previous picture. In walking round these galleries, amidst so many adornments attracting the attention, a visitor might be excused for not too hastily turning his thoughts to utility. But this thought, in these too practical days, will obtrude itself. The number of the private rooms for offices, on each gallery, is considerable; their accommodations, all that could be desired; their appearance most neat, quiet, and unexceptionable; but by far the greater part are _empty_. Nobody will take them. Many of those on the ground-floor, or area of the market—obviously the best place by far—are unlet. These are of the high-priced, of course; still, as the price decreases with the ascent, why are not more of the upper offices taken? Here—in the very centre of all the great Coal trade of England!—and not one-third, not one-fourth, we think, of the offices let? We expressed our astonishment to the Captain. “Oh!” said he, “the City is a queer place, and the City authorities are a rum sort of reasoners. They asked too much rent for these berths at first; and though but a few factors and merchants can afford to give it, the City still persists. And so they are obliged to go to the expence of fires in all the empty offices to keep them aired three-quarters of the year round, rather than see the place full at a moderate rent. That’s how I read their log.” We now ascended to the third gallery. Here, the cold, though not the “beggarly array of empty boxes,” was most expressive of the mismanagement, _somehow_ and _somewhere_ of this well-placed, and most commodious building, on which so much money has been expended.