For ’tes the Quakkers’ gurt meetin’ to-dye.
At one of these gatherings, when the monthly advices to the members were being read out, and there was one specially enjoining forbearance from “vain sports,” up rose a lately-joined member, and with an anxious voice inquired what these vain sports embraced. “Now,” said he, “Do’ee reckon that kissing the mydens (maidens) in the hye (hay) be a vain sport?—vor my part I can’t see it.”
There was unquestionably a vast amount of roguery in the mining business in Devon and Cornwall. Salting a mine, so as to induce capitalists to embark their money in one, was by no means an uncommon practice. But occasionally a specialist was too sharp to be taken in. “Ah!” said one, handling the ore that professed to have been raised in a new mine on Dartmoor, “Carnbrea tin. How the dickens did that find its way up here?”
Originally the tin was worked by a small company of adventurers with very simple machinery, and the adventurers shared the profits among themselves. The tin lodes on Dartmoor are thin, and in my opinion and in that of those who know best, will never pay for expensive working with costly plant. But little men, working for themselves, have made mining pay there. The abandoned engine-houses, huge wheels, and stamping pans show where large ventures have everywhere proved to be failures.
Chaw Gully, that runs up between Birch Tor and Challacombe Down, is one of the most interesting examples of “old men’s workings” that there are upon Dartmoor. It extends about half a mile. In places it is some forty feet deep, and two or three hundred feet wide. In the bottom are several circular shafts, lined with stones dry-laid, which communicate with a dip formerly used for drainage purposes. There are no “jumper” marks on the rocks in Chaw Gully. In following the shallow lode of tin the old adventurers must have torn out the rock with wedges. Sometimes fire was applied to the rock and then water was dashed on it to crack it; as softened by the heat it was more easily worked. Another system of splitting the granite was to cut a groove on the surface of the rock, fill that with quicklime, and then throw on water. The swelling of the lime rent the rock.
The old works in Chaw Gully were taken in hand by Captain Palk, who deepened and successfully worked a shaft there. A good deal of money was made, but “the eyes of the mine were picked out,” and it is now, like nearly all the Dartmoor mines, a “knacked bal,” a picture of desolation, and the ravens now build in the chasm, on a ledge of the rock.[54]
Palk was intimate with Jonas Coaker, the “Poet of the Moor,” as he styled himself. His poetry was, however, only rhyme, and that often bad.
“What’s the difference between poetry and blank verse?” asked one miner of another.
“Why, the difference be this,” was the reply. “Ef you say,
He went up to the mill-dam