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180 voices of devotion, the pickmen are at work grubbing lanes under towns, hills, railways, and canals. Everybody seems to feel that they live, labour, eat, and sleep on a very uncertain and unsteady footing. But the decline is very gentle. A house seldom if ever sinks so deep that its occupants have to escape through the roof. The railways and canals, which require better levels, have to be looked to with some care; but no serious disasters have ever occurred in the district in consequence of this honey-combing of its under-priming.

When I first thought of making walks in The Black Country and its Green Border-Land, I proposed to explore the former pretty thoroughly before I entered upon the latter. But I soon found that one loses the vivid freshness of transition by this process of inspection, so that you do not look at the sceneries of nature or the noisy and busy scenes of human industry with such lively sensation, when seeing only one of these spectacles the same week or day. It matters not which you see first; whether you dip into this district of fire and smoke and artificial thunder and lightning from the greenest and quietest of rural landscapes, or into these from the black forest of forge and furnace chimneys; each produces a sensation of mind from the .contrast, which it would not if seen by itself