However, as I was saying, I took a walk with a friend along the street, and presently became aware above me, high up on the hillside, of a great collection of buildings, with countless windows (I mean that I did not try to count them) lit up, and looking exactly like some theatrical night-scene. These were the mills of the Ontario, which work night and day, and seven days to the week, a perpetual flame like that of the Zoroastrians, and as carefully kept alive by stalwart stokers as ever was Vestal altar-fire by the girl-priestesses of Rome. It was a picturesque sight, with the huge hills looming up black behind, and the few surviving pine-trees showing out dimly against the darkening sky. Next morning I went up to the mine--and down it. Having costumed myself in garments that made getting dirty a perfect luxury, I was taken to the shaft. Now, I had expected to see an unfathomably black hole in the ground with a rope dangling down it, but instead of that I found myself in a spacious boarded shed, with a huge wheel standing at one end and a couple of iron uprights with a cross-bar standing up from the floor at the other. Round the wheel was coiled an enormous length of a six-inch steel-wire band, and the disengaged end of the band, after passing over a beam, was fastened to the cross-bar above mentioned. On the bridge of the wheel stood an engineer, the arbiter of fates, who is perpetually unwinding victims down from stage to stage of the Inferno, and winding up the redeemed from limbo to limbo. Having propitiated him by an affectation of intelligence as to the machinery which he controlled, we took our places under the cross-bar, between the stanchions, and suddenly the floor--as innocent-looking and upright-minded a bit of boarded floor as you could wish to stand on--gave way beneath us, and down we shot apud inferos, like the devils in "Der Freischütz." We had our lamps in our hands, and they gave just light enough for me to see the dripping wooden walls of the shaft flashing past, and then I felt myself becoming lighter and lighter--a mere butterfly--imponderable. But it doesn't take many seconds to fall down 800 feet, and long before I had expected it I found we were "at the bottom."