Notwithstanding the whole country
might be compared to a vast rabbit warren, it was nevertheless
intersected with canals crossing each other at various levels,
and though the subterranean operations were prosecuted with so
much avidity that it was not uncommon to observe whole rows of
houses awry, from the shifting and hollow nature of the land,
still, intermingled with heaps of mineral refuse or of
metallic dross, patches of the surface might here and there be
recognised, covered, as if in mockery, with grass and corn,
looking very much like those gentlemen's sons that we used to
read of in our youth, stolen by the chimneysweeps and giving
some intimations of their breeding beneath their grimy livery.
But a tree or a shrub--such an existence was unknown in this
dingy rather than dreary region.
It was the twilight hour; the hour at which in southern climes
the peasant kneels before the sunset image of the blessed
Hebrew maiden; when caravans halt in their long course over
vast deserts, and the turbaned traveller bending in the sand,
pays his homage to the sacred stone and the sacred city; the
hour, not less holy, that announces the cessation of English
toil, and sends forth the miner and the collier to breathe the
air of earth, and gaze on the light of heaven.
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