’We thought you’d purchased out all the shareholders said Caldigate.

’So I did, and now I’m redividing it.  I’d rather have a company.  It’s pleasanter.  If you can put in a couple of thousand pounds or so between you, you can travel about and see the country, and your money’ll be working for you all the time.  Did you ever see a gold mine?’

They owned that they never yet had been a yard below ground.  Then he opened his gate preparatory to taking them down the ’Old Stick-in-the-Mud,’ and brought them with him into one of the front rooms.  It was a large parlour, only half furnished, not yet papered, without a carpet, in which it appeared that Mr. Crinkett kept his own belongings.  Here he divested himself of his black clothes and put on a suit of miner’s garments,—­real miner’s garments, very dirty, with a slouch hat, on the top of which there was a lump of mud in which to stick a candle-end.  Any one learned in the matter would immediately have known the real miner.  ’Now if you like to see a mine we will go down, and then you can do as you like about your money.’

They started forth, Crinkett leading the way, and entered the engine-house.  As they went he said not a word, being aware that gold, gold that they could see with their eyes in its raw condition, would tempt them more surely than all his eloquence.  In the engine-house the three of them got into a box or truck that was suspended over the mouth of a deep shaft, and soon found themselves descending through the bowels of the earth.  They went down about four hundred feet, and as they were reaching the bottom Crinkett remarked that it was ’a goodish deep hole all to belong to one man.’  ‘Yes,’ he added as Caldigate extricated himself from the truck, ’and there’s a precious lot more gold to come out of it yet, I can tell you.’

In all the sights to be seen about the world there is no sight in which there is less to be seen than in a gold-mine.  The two young men were made to follow their conductor along a very dirty underground gallery for about a quarter of a mile, and then they came to four men working with picks in a rough sort of chamber, and four others driving holes in the walls.  They were simply picking down the rock, in doing which they were assisted by gunpowder.  With keen eyes Crinkett searched along the roof and sides, and at last showed to his companions one or two little specks which he pronounced to be gold.  ’When it shows itself like that all about, you may guess whether it’s a paying concern!  Two ounces to the ton, my boys!’ As Dick and Caldigate hitherto knew nothing about ounces and tons in reference to gold, and as they had heard of nuggets, and lumps of gold nearly as big as their fist, they were not much exalted by what they saw down the ‘Old Stick-in-the-Mud.’  Nor did they like the darkness and dampness and dirt and dreariness of the place.  They had both resolved to work, as they had often said, with their own hands;—­but