Arriving at the main horse-road, as Flashley quickly distinguished by the wider space, higher roofing, and candles stuck against the sides, his mad persecutors never stopped, but increasing their speed the moment the wheels were set upon the rails, they drove the waggon onwards with yells and laughter, and now and then a loud discordant whistle in imitation of the wailful cry of a locomotive; passing ‘getters,’ and ‘carriers,’ and ‘hurryers,’ and ‘drawers,’ and ‘pushers,’ and other mine-people, and once sweeping by an astonished horse—gates and doors swinging open before them—and shouts frequently being sent after them, sometimes of equivocal import, but generally _not_ to be mistaken, by those whom they thus rattled by, who often received sundry concussions and excoriations in that so narrow highway beneath the earth. In this manner did our unique _cortège_ proceed, till sounds of many voices ahead of them were heard, and then more and more light gleamed upon the walls; and the next minute they emerged from the road-way, and entered a large oblong chamber, or cavern, where they were received with a loud shout of surprise and merriment. It was the dining-hall of the mine. This cavern had been hewn out of the solid coal, with intervals of rock and sandstone here and there in the sides. Candles stuck in lumps of damp clay, were dabbed up against the rough walls all round. A table, formed of dark planks laid upon low tressels, was in the middle, and round this sat the miners, nearly naked,—and far blacker than negroes, whose glossy skins shine with any light cast upon them,—while these were of a dead-black, which gave their robust outlines and muscular limbs the grimness of sepulchral figures, strangely at variance with the boisterous vitality and physical capacities of their owners. These, it seemed, were the magnates of the mine—the ‘hewers,’ ‘holers,’ ‘undergoers,’ or ‘pickers,’—those who hew down the coal, and not the fetchers and carriers, and other small people.