IV
From another side we had ascended the mountain by the tram line
which climbs it to the top, and at every twist and turn lavishes
some fresh loveliness of landscape upon your vision. Near by, we
noticed many depressions and sinkages in the ground, and a
conversable man in well-oiled overalls who joined us at a power-
house, said it was from the giving way of the timbers in the
disused copper-mines. Were they very old, we asked, and he said
they had not been worked for forty years; but this, when you come
to think of the abandoned Roman mines yet deeper in the hill, was
a thing of yesterday. The man in the oily overalls had evidently
not come to think of it, but he was otherwise a very intelligent
mechanic, and of a hospitable mind, like all the rest of our
chance acquaintance in Great Britain. I do not know that I like
to think of those Roman mines myself, where it is said the sea
now surges back and forth: they must have been worked by British
slaves, who may be fancied climbing purblindly out when the
legions left Britain, and not joining very loudly in the general
lamentation at their withdrawal, but probably tempering the
popular grief with the reflection that the heathen Saxons could
not be much worse.
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