Travel onwards, with belts of plantations occupying all conceivable, and some inconceivable inequalities of ground on your left, and “mountains and moorlands, bleak, barren, and bare,” on your right, till, as you approach Hodgeclose, you pass one or two very awful-looking chasms, yawning in close proximity to the road. These are slate-quarries, which have, for many years, been placed upon the superannuated list. At Hodgeclose, you must turn from the road, pass through the farm-yard and a wood-girdled field or two, to inspect an adjacent slate-quarry, in which inspection you will find the proprietor an intelligent and obliging cicerone. He will first conduct you by a subterranean passage two hundred yards long, to the principal quarry, where the men are busy boring and blasting, and loading the carts with masses of slate metal, technically called clogs. It is in truth a strange looking spot this same quarry, being about eighty yards long and twenty wide, with perpendicular walls of living rock rising to a height of, at least, fifty yards, fringed at the top by low trees and bushes, the circumscribed portion of white clouds and blue sky appearing, from below, to rest upon the tree tops. The only exit is by the level through which you entered, though there is another level branching off to the right, and leading to an enormous dark cavern, “Where, far within the darksome rift, The wedge and lever ply their thrift.” [Sidenote: MOUNTAIN HANDICRAFT.] Its great extent is shewn by the candles of the workmen at its farther extremity—its height, by a chink in the roof, where a few stray rays of daylight faintly and feebly struggle through.