“The speaker now turned to the religious part of his subject, on which he expressed himself with great fluency and plausibility. He stated that much, which was mistaken for religion, was in reality nothing more than early prejudice and weak superstition. He instanced this, by ridiculing the strange belief in ghosts and spirits which was once so prevalent in these valleys, but was now fast disappearing before the light of advancing knowledge and science. ‘The miner,’ said he, ‘used to hear the mysterious knocking, and the supernatural signals of the rock-demon, where he now only listens to the echoes of the strokes of his own pick-axe.’ “‘True,’ said a brawny miner, leaning upon his spade, ‘_I_ used to be afraid of evil spirits in these dark holes of ours, and was driven to say my prayers in a morning before I came to work, to keep them away; but I am grown wiser now; and, for my part, I will never believe that there is a devil at all, until I see him.’ “‘You may see him NOW, then!’ exclaimed a voice from the lower end of the cave. ‘There are two of them!’ cried another; upon which the whole assembly rose in the utmost terror, and rushed out of the cave, tumbling one over another into the darkness without, and some not recovering their feet till they had rolled to the very bottom of the hill. The stranger was the last to lose his presence of mind; but even he, it seems, had some latent suspicions that there might be such a being as the devil, for he soon rushed after his audience towards the mouth of the cave, and was lost in the gloom. This absurd termination of the meeting is easily accounted for. The stone on which Gawen Braithwaite was standing had been gradually sinking under his weight, and at last gave way altogether, rolling half way down the upper part of the cave towards where the audience were assembled. Gawen, of course, gave way with it, and in his fall dragged me after him. The sight of two human beings making their entrance into the cave with such a clatter in a place where no entrance was known to exist, and the fiendish-looking figures which we had made ourselves by besmearing our faces with the ruddle and coal, were too much for the nerves of the valorous audience, who suspected, from what they heard and saw, that the devil was really looking after his own; and so they disappeared like magic, relieving us from the terror which we felt at making so untimely an entrance into the assembly, as we had reason to expect a by no means civil reception had we been discovered. Having quite forgotten the disguised state of our faces, it was not till we approached the light of their fire that we found out the cause of their sudden terror; and you can well imagine how we enjoyed the success of our very involuntary exploit. Yet there was indeed much to grieve my own heart in what I had learned, for the first time, that night. My poor sister Martha was, it now appeared, engaged, probably heart and hand,