s in the middle of a
wide working, when my life depended on a single nail driven into a
plank. Had the nail slipped, I should have been pitched headlong on
the broken rocks more than twenty feet below. Sometimes I stood on a
narrow board high up in some dark working, holding the drill, or
smiting it with the mallet, smeared all over with mineral, so that my
nearest friends would hardly know me, until my hands ached with the
severity of my task, and the blood dropped off my elbows. Sometimes I
had to dig through the ground where it was impossible to stand
upright, and sometimes to work all day as if standing to the face of a
cliff. Sometimes I have been so exhausted as to lie down and sleep on
the sharp flints." (There are no flints in Cornish mines.) "And
sometimes so thirsty that I have drunk stale water from the keg,
closing my teeth to keep back the worms. Sometimes I had wages to
receive at the end of the month, and sometimes I had none. But I
despaired not, nor turned the nymph of song from my side. She murmured
among the tinctured slabs," etc. etc. That the water brought down from
the spring for the use of the miners was ever full of worms is not to
be believed, nor that he did not receive his regular monthly wages.
John Harris was evidently vastly sorry for himself, thinking he was
born for better things. I have known many a man who has worked
underground as a common miner, without whining and breaking into
extravagance such as this.

"We were at supper one evening in Troon-Moor house, our two daughters
in a window, I at the end of the kitchen table, and Jane sitting on a
chair beside it. We had fried onions, and the flavour was very
agreeable. I was hungry, having just returned from a long day's labour
in the mine. Suddenly we heard a step in the garden, and then a knock
at the door. My wife opened it, and I heard a gruff voice say, 'Does
the young Milton live here?' My wife asked the possessor of the gruff
voice to walk in; and we soon discovered that it was the Rev. G.
Collins. We invited him to partake