It will be wise to select the oldest and most extensive part of the mines for exploration, and _it_ is that most to the east; so, when you are properly equipped, and have procured candles and a guide, proceed at once to the horse level mouth, light your candles, open the door and walk in, and as you proceed, it were well, once in a way, to take a lesson from your respectable fellow-biped the goose, who, I have been told, always lowers his head when entering even the highest doors; for if you disdain the Saviour of the Capitol’s example, you will hardly save your own capital, the arch of living rock beneath which you travel being too low for even a little man to walk with an erect front. When you have progressed thus with your crest lowered for some distance, you may straight your back and look up, for you are under the “Cobbler’s hole,” a tremendous chasm, from which a vein of copper, extending to above the water-wheel you saw on the hill-side, has been wrought, and when you are advanced about a quarter of a mile into the level, you are at the side of the shaft which reaches from the said water-wheel through all the workings down to the deepest level; and by which the kibbles containing the ore are hoisted a few fathoms above your head, and there emptied into a large hopper, the mouth of which is six or seven feet above the level, and under it the waggons are run to be loaden. [Sidenote: VISIT TO THE INTERIOR.] If you are determined to descend the shaft, it must be by a series of ladders, with wooden sides and iron steps, and you come upon a platform, or “landing,” at every few fathoms. Diverging occasionally from, but generally following the line of the shaft, you pass several old “bunnins”—I am not sure about the orthography, but the derivation is, I fancy, from _bound in_—which are short logs of wood jammed between the opposite walls of rock for the miners to stand upon when working in such situations. As you proceed on your perilous journey, you must not allow the thundering echoes of the distant blast, or the astounding rattle of the rapidly descending kibble and its chain, to deprive you of your presence of mind, else you are “but a dead” tourist. But supposing that you carry your senses along with you, and are resolved to stop at nothing short of the deep workings, you continue, sometimes crawling down the ladders, and sometimes stepping cautiously across the landings, and pass several levels in your descent—viz., one twenty fathoms down, one thirty-five, one fifty, and at length you arrive at the seventy fathom, when you are some where about the level of the village, or about 420 feet below the place where you commenced your underground knight errantry—or, again, about 640 feet below the top of the shaft. There is, “at the lowest depth a lower still,” some twenty fathoms below this another working called “the ninety;” but you are already deep enough for any useful purpose.