"Yes, this shaft is very old," thought the miner to himself; "I remember the day it was sunk, and it must be quite sixty years ago, if I recollect right. It is quite time to repair the lining; the wood has decayed till it is black. I wonder how it can still hold together. Jesus must certainly be watching over us. I am getting old too; they say I am eighty-four. It is a lucky thing that they don't dismiss me, and only give me easy work; otherwise I should starve, or at any rate be obliged to beg." Thoughts of all kinds passed through the old man's head. He was accustomed to think much but never spoke. It was a long time since any one had heard the sound of his voice, and it was thought that he had forgotten how to speak because he had always lived surrounded by the silence of the mine. The fact was that, hearing nothing but the sound of his pickaxe, the noise of the ore being crushed, etc., he had lost the habit of replying to questions. When any one spoke to him, he quickly removed his leather cap, and answered by a bow so low that one could see the top of his head adorned only by two locks of yellow hair. People finished by leaving him in peace. No one went so far as to ridicule him. He was, so to speak, one of the curiosities of the mine, for it was known that he had been present at its opening. The proprietors of the mine knew that in former days he was always the first to go down, and that it was he who had loosened the first yellow block from which the first piece of copper had been extracted. All his contemporaries who were not dead had grown old around him, and he himself, decrepit and bent, was still alive and even worked, as far as his strength permitted. "Old Ivan is a true miner; he was born in a gallery of the old mine," the workmen often said to one another. They had forgotten for a long time past where the old worked-out mine which had been abandoned sixty years ago was situated. His disuse of speech only augmented the respect they felt for him. Some even thought that his silence was in consequence of a vow. "He is Ivan the Silent," they would say. "Disbelieve it if you like, but it is quite ten years since he has been silent." Meanwhile the bucket suspended from the chain which rattled remorselessly continued to descend. The greyish patch of the orifice was no more visible at all, and its last vague glimmer had been swallowed up in the damp cold darkness of the pit. The wooden lining had come to an end, and the walls were formed of strata of different metals. On one hand the sides and sharp edges of a great black stone projected, on the other was damp mud encrusted with fragments of rock. Then the pale light of the little lamp glided windingly over the rounded outlines of flint fossils. It then zigzagged over a layer of brilliant white mineral, which was soon succeeded by another of mud.