“No thank ye, sir,” said the man, grinning, as he stopped to snuff his candle with Nature’s own snuffers. “I never had no taste for breaking bones. Now, then, we’ll go round by a bit I come to one day, if you don’t mind a long walk back. Take us another two hours, but the floor’s even, and I want to have a look at it.”
“What sort of a place is it?” said Gwyn; “anything worth seeing?”
“Not much to see, sir, only it’s one of the spots where the old miners left off after going along to the west. Strikes me it’s quite the end that way. And I want to make sure that we’ve found one end of the old pit.”
“Does the place seem worn out?” said Joe, who had been listening in silence.
“That’s it, sir. Lode seems to have grown a bit narrower, and run up edge-wise like.”
“Why, we went there,” said Joe, eagerly. “Don’t you remember, Ydoll?”
“Yes, I remember now. I’d forgotten it, though. I say! Hark; you can hear quite a murmuring if you put your ear against the wall.”
“Yes, sir, you can hear it plainly enough in several places.”
“Don’t you remember, Ydoll, how we heard it when we were wet?”
“Now you talk about it, I do, of course,” said Gwyn; “but, somehow, being down here as we were, I seemed to be stunned, and it has always been hard work to recollect all we went through. I’d forgotten lots of these galleries and pools and roofs, just as one forgets a dream, while, going through them again, they all seem to come back fresh and I know them as well as can be. But what makes this faint rumbling, Sam? Is it one of the little trucks rumbling along in the distance?”