to save us.  ‘God bless them!’ said we all.  We laid our ears close to the rock, and presently heard the strokes of the pick, but not very distinctly.  When the other said he was afraid the rock was thick, the old man cried out:  ’No, it was not that; it was because we were dull of hearing.’  The fact was, that the seam was not only thick, but very hard.  It was strange, indeed, though sounds are easily transmitted through rocks of considerable thickness, how our feeble taps had been heard at all.  Day after day, and each day a black night, went on; every hour was to be the last of our captivity, according to the old man; as for me, I was almost worn out, and heavy with sleep, but he was in constant motion, knocking and listening.  Then suddenly we heard a splash in the water beneath us—­he had lost his balance, slid down the inclined plane, and been drowned.  He never stirred a limb nor uttered a cry.  His fate discouraged and alarmed us two survivors exceedingly.  If help was coming, we now felt it would never come in time.  We dug into the shale with the handles of our lamps and with our fingers, to make our position more secure.  We did not venture to speak of our late companion’s fate to one another.  Horror overwhelmed us, so enfeebled had we become through famine and fatigue.  We had devoured our leather belts, and even crumbled the rotten wood of the timber-props in water, and eaten that; but we were now consumed by thirst, which we dared no longer quench.  We were afraid to venture down as before for the water in which the old man had sunk to death; and it was that which had kept us alive.”

“Don’t forget about how you made a bucket of your boots, Sol,” suggested Trevethick, gravely.

“Yes, at last we tied a string to a boot, and got the water up that way,” continued Solomon; “but our stomachs turned against it.”

“It was not so good as my punch,” observed the landlord, parenthetically, and emptying his steaming glass.

“More dark days came and went, though, of course, we could not tell how many; then, all of a sudden, we heard a human voice, inquiring:  ’How many are you?’ ‘We are three,’ was our reply.  We had not the courage even then to own that one of us had already been taken; death seemed still so near to us.  The aperture which had thus let in the world upon us was also very small.”

“And what was it you asked for first?” interrupted the landlord, with a nod at Richard, as much as to say:  “Listen now; this is curious.”

“What we wanted was light.  ‘Light above all things!’ was our cry.  But our deliverers could give us but little of that, for they had scarcely any themselves.  They had been working in a narrow gallery, by means of five inclined driftways, at each of which only one man could ply his pick at a time, and where light and air could only be procured artificially.  The coal was carried out in baskets as fast as it was hewn out:  the atmosphere in which they thus toiled like giants, naked to the waist,