Men and boys are passing to their work in that blackened, grimy, bare-surfaced dell. Their hands are black, their faces are black, and ghastly through the unnatural glare thus given to the white of the eye. They look haggard, and for the most part are undersized. Their flannel garb is fast assuming the hue of all around.

Black sheds, with more important black buildings of brick, of all sizes and shapes and forms, always excepting any form in the least approximating to picturesqueness or beauty, are grouped in the centre.

Black pieces of new and old machinery, a chaos of iron engines and parts of engines, and beams and parts of beams, and wheels and parts of wheels, and boilers and parts of boilers, and a hundred other unintelligible things, lie round the buildings, leaving here and there little oases of vegetation —that is to say, of grass—which, unable to turn black, has done the next most appropriate thing, and faded to a lurid yellow.

Black flying ridges high in the air unite building with building. Roads, with black mud, run beneath and between. Flights of black steps descend to the roads. A tall black chimney stands towering near.

Through the indescribable ugliness and pervading atmosphere of sordid squalor that at first glance characterises the place, three objects only stand out in pleasant relief— the row of bright red fires beneath the engine-shed, the light pure colour of the stone quarry in the background, and the wheels that surmount the hideous scaffold-like structure, built of great beams of timber with uprights, and a projecting angular arm, from which hangs a massive rope of wire to support the heavy cage that is continually descending and ascending between the black world above and the still blacker one below.

These wheels are a study. They revolve in opposite ways, they go at great speed, and are so close, side by side, that the resulting motion is to the eye something unique charming in its suggestiveness and beauty. They literally twinkle: no other word can express their lovely and silent motion.

There is one other trait, for the moment forgotten. On the black sludgy bridge that leads to the deeper blackness of the pit mouth, a group of birds, some of them of rare beauty and song, are fearlessly hopping about between the very feet of the tram drivers. They are picking up grains of corn,

and chattering, and quarrelling, and chirruping, as merrily as if they saw not the actual scene of to-day such as man has made it, but the pastoral one of a former century; or evenif birds, like men, dream of a golden age of the splendours of the still earlier primeval time, when Nature, as apart from man, was all in all.

See then the two aspects of the same locality; the black mine of Cwm Aber, and the dazzling glory of the tropical forest and lagoon! What is the meaning of so violent a contrast and change?

Would it not be remarkable if it were the very splendour and ashes of the dead beauty of the one era, that gives all its ugliness and discomfort to the other.

Would it not be stranger still if out of this ugliness and discomfort should again come the very essences of the light, and warmth, and glory of that morning of the world; colours which even that time could not outvie; means of enhancing indefinitely human health, wealth, and happiness, in all sorts of ways?

And as man is the author of all the degradation one sees here, so is he the hero who creates from it so much that is truly precious.

Man wants coal. He has accidentally discovered long ages ago how valuable a fuel it makes. He has eagerly sought for the storehouses of so precious a commodity. He has pertinaciously solicited Nature to give to him the keys.

She, on the contrary, appears to wish him to understand she has intentionally hidden away the coveted thing where he may never hope to get at it: far down in the very bowels of the earth, where human foot has never trod, where no form of life, however humble, can possibly exist.

Man heeds her not, except in so far as he may learn how to circumvent her. Having dug out whatever he can reach from the surface, he prepares boldly to follow the coal, whithersoever it may lead him, through any difficulties, any dangers, to any depth.

Learned men come to his help; and by the study of the earth-rocks, where these happen to be broken through by some primeval convulsion, and exposed, as in great ravines, show him how to track the unseen mineral, step by step, till at a given point they say, 'Strike down boldly there, and you will find it.'

He does so. He bores into the ground, sometimes through

long, weary, and most anxious months of unremitting and unremunerative labour, perhaps to find there has been a deplorable miscalculation and waste; but, if so, he only changes the arena where he means to fight out this great battle. He again ventures; and at last succeeds.

Who but those who have continually experienced the alternations of hope and despair can tell the deliciousness of the moment which brings the first tokens of such successthe little handful of coal that emerges from the boring-rodnot once, but continuously, through the space say of a couple of yards? Yes; the promised seam is there, is found at last; and no star-gazer ever looked on a new world discovered, with greater exultation, than the mining engineer looks upon the fragments of his earthly one; which now ensure reputation to him, wealth to the enterprising speculators, employment to hundreds of the needy, and a something of the glow and glory of the sun, from which all its virtue is derived, to innumerable hearths.

Yet Nature, with her sweet, impassive, sphinx-like countenance, still hostilely confronts him, and says, "Thus far and no farther." Thou knowest. Be content with that, and with the fact thy knowledge has taught thee, that the treasure thou seekest lies hundreds of fathoms deep. Go. Leave me to the solitudes thou hast already too much disturbed.'

And how does man answer her? Where my boring-rods have gone, I too can go, and will.'

So he digs a great shaft down from the surface of the fernclad soil, making its rounded sides into safe and strong walls at every step of the descent, until he can plant his foot at bottom firmly on the coal-bed: and thence look up as through an interminable chimney to where, diminished to a mere point of light, is the opening indicating the spot where he quitted the safeguards of mother earth.

Now then, surely he has only to strip, and dig away with a will, and be content! The strife is over. Nature owns defeat, and gives up the contest.

Ah no! The strife is now only beginning in its real intensity.

Water floods the bottom of the shaft, and threatens at once ruin to the works, and death to the workmen.

But this had been foreseen and provided for. Man has already erected his powerful engines, and stretched down his pumps, ever lengthening with the depth of the shaft, and now

laughs at the idea of inundation. With sublime audacity he mocks at Nature's law that makes water ever tend to go down; he takes it, as it were, into his hands, even to the volume of a small river, and at once sends it flowing perpendicularly upwards to the surface, straighter than arrow could be made to fly; and having got it there, is only too glad to let Nature reassert herself, and help him by carrying it away in her own manner, and like Wordsworth's stream, at its own sweet will.'

Even in this, however, he is often beaten, prostrated, rendered helpless; but only uses the experience to make himself progressively ever stronger, and still more strong, till he sees a dry bottom, and has ample means to keep it so.

Nature must now retreat before her assailant; it is, however, only to lie in wait for him in the deeper recesses of the mine; to make his every act of locomotion, of labour, even of breathing, a source of deadly danger, a cause of constant unrest.

How many of us sitting at ease in our light and pleasant chambers, so carefully ventilated that not even the slightest taint may be feared of sufficient potency to shorten the natural term of life even by the most infinitesimal amount, would have the individual courage, the fortitude to continue such a contest, no matter how brilliant the temptations, seeing that it is not for a day, for a special effort or occasion, bringing with it its own sufficing motive and reward, but for the whole life through, of the actual working collier?

Ah, yes! the world has yet to know, to feel with, and to act justly by this humble, patient, undemonstrative, but truly heroic example of manhood. A model in some respects surely for the whole of his kind. Watch him as he goes daily to his labour, asking no inconvenient questions, parading none of his unhappiness through the press unto the world, fainting before no obstacles, losing heart at the contemplation of no perils. He simply says, or, better still, feels it without saying, This is the work I have got to do, and which, please God, I mean to do;' and this work he goes to do.

Not certainly rejoicingly, rather perhaps sadly, but he goes.

And still the strife proceeds, to even more tragical issues, but varied by incidents that lend a certain piquant, almost a humorous, interest to it.

Meeting artifice by artifice, Nature one day plays the miner an odd trick. His pick strikes into something that is clearly

not coal, and the unwelcome discovery is made that the treasure-house is suddenly empty.

Incredulous miner! He is not thus to be cheated out of his lawful prey. He guesses what has happened-‘a fault’— geologically speaking, but which he no doubt might like to express by a stronger term. He guesses rightly. As if expressly to circumvent him whose whole life is spent in circumventing her, Nature has here broken the seam asunder; and cunningly dropped the yet untouched end some distance below the other, and covered it with intervening rocks as useless as they are baffling to the miner.

Well, the boring-rod is again set to work; the lost treasure re-discovered that had been so cunningly hidden, and down go sloping roadways into it. Man is again victorious.

But at what a cost! Some day or other-however distant, it will surely come, at least so fears every thoughtful miner-an unlucky accident to a lamp, or a vengeful swinging of it in a moment of passionate anger against the head of a comrade, or a criminal yet scarcely thought-of negligence or disobedience in exposing the naked flame to kindle a pipe of tobacco, causes an explosion. Nature during one moment of terrible vengeance seems to make herself visible in all-destroying flame, but those who see her-die. In the space of a breath-a spasm, without even time for a single cry or prayer, the whole of the busy workers in that black hive may be plunged into eternity, leaving not even one solitary survivor to narrate how the ghastly tragedy happened.

Then new efforts perhaps a new shaft made, interminable inquests, legislative enquiries, sudden spasmodic efforts to improve-then the old relapse into inaction once more—and so the conflict goes on.

And will continue to do so, till the hour of truer knowledge, of more Christian-like faith in the ultimate good attainable through brotherly sympathy and help, shall reconcile the combatants.

But when that blessed hour comes, man will find how true and noble has been the friend he has so long struggled with as his worst enemy-how she has disciplined and elevated him -and how necessary and vital it is to him to sit at her feet in reverence, and learn from her what he so much needs to know.