Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/16

2 the sun; but the richer half, averted thence, looks by gaslight towards the central fires. If that subterranean half could be for an hour inverted to the sun; if its inky vaults and tortuous pathways, and all its black-roofed chambers could be but once laid open to the light of day, the spectacle would be a world's wonder, especially if it were uncovered when all the thousands of the subterranean road-makers, or the begrimed armies of pickmen, were bending to their work. What a neighing of the pit-horses would come up out of those deep coal-craters at the sight and sense of the sunlight! What black and dripping forests of timber would be disclosed, brought from all the wild, wooded lands of Norway. Sweden, and Canada, to prop up the rough vaults and sustain the excavated acres undermined by the pick! Such an unroofing of the smoky, palpitating region would show how soon the subterranean detachments of miners and counter-miners must meet, and make a clean sweep of the lower half of that mineral world. For a century or more they have been working to this end; and although the end has not come yet, one cannot but think that it must be reached ere long. Never was the cellar of a district of equal size stored with richer or more varied treasures. Never a gold-field on the face of the earth, of ten miles radius, produced such vast values as these subterranean acres have