Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/308

294 about 5,000 men. His uncle, whose fortune he inherits, made it by his own talent and industry, beginning with £500, and ending his life with about £3,000,000. In one year the census-taker found the number of men employed by this Black Prince of the Mines to be 14,000, an army which few German princes could bring into the field. The present crown prince, inheriting such a vast fortune, is increasing it by investing in estates which already have made him a peer in property with the wealthiest noblemen of the country. I am inclined to think that he recently made the largest purchase that has been effected in one private transaction in England for the last fifty years. He bought the Whitmore estate on the Severn, paying £750,000 for it, or about 3,750,000 dollars in American gold. He is now adding to the buildings and expending, in fitting them up for his occupation, a sum which will make, with the purchase money, a total of £1,000,000. And this vast sum does not abstract anything from the capital necessary to carry on his great iron and coal works. It looks well to see men win their way to a peerage by the hammer as well as by the sword. Just before coming to Stourton Castle, we passed one of those old farm-houses of a better sort which you will find here and there in England, and which once constituted the mansions of what might be called the middle-class