of houses that have windows are blocked up
with slates. There are slates everywhere but
where they ought to be. These slate symptoms
show that we are approaching the object of
our drive.

After a steep descent, we turn up a left
hand road which shows abundant marks of
wheels—of wheels broad enough for an ancient
Pickford's waggon. This is the road which
ascends to the slate-quarries, and down which
come those enormous blocks of slate—some
of them weighing fifteen tons—of which the
world is beginning to hear, and, in fact, has
heard a good deal since the Great Exhibition.

A few years ago, people who knew nothing of
slate but as a material to roof houses with
and do sums upon, were charmed to find it
could be made to serve for so large a thing as
a billiard-table. For billiard-tables there is
nothing like slate, so perfectly level and
smooth as it is. Then, fishmongers found
there was nothing like slate for their slabs
(till they are rich enough to afford marble);
and farmers' wives discovered the same thing
in regard to their dairies. Plumbers then
began to declare that there was nothing like
slate for cisterns and sinks: and builders,
noticing this, tried slate for the pavement of
wash-houses, pantries, and kitchens, and for
cottage floors; and they have long declared
that there is nothing like it; it is so clean,
and dries so quickly. If so, thought the
ornamental gardener, it must be the very
thing for garden chairs, summer-houses,
sundials, and tables in arbours; and it is the
very thing. The stone mason was equally
pleased with it for gravestones. "Then,"
said the builder again, when perplexed with
complaints of a damp wall in an exposed
situation, "why should not a wall be slated as
well as a roof, if it wants it as much?" So
he tried; and in mountain districts, where
one end of a house is exposed to beating rains,
we see that end as scaly as a fish—slated like
its own roof. Thus it is with the small
houses erected for business at the quarry in
Valencia; and the steps leading up to them
are of slate; and the paths before the doors
are paved with slate. We look in upon
the steam-engine; and we observe that the
fittings of the engine-house are all of slate, so
that no dust can lodge, and no damp can
enter.

It is the quarry that we care most to see;
and up to it we go, under the guidance of the
overlooker, as soon as he has measured a
block of slate with the marked rod he carries
in his hand. He is a Welshman—from
Bangor—the only person among the hundred
and twenty about the works who is not Irish.
Is it really so? we ask, when we are in the
quarry. There is nobody there—not one man
or boy among all those groups—who can
properly be called ragged. Many have holes in
their clothes; but all have clothes—real
garments, instead of flapping tatters, hung
on, nobody knows how. Another thing.

These people are working steadily and gravely.
If spoken to, they answer calmly, and with
an air of independence—without vociferation,
cant, flattery, or any kind of passion. Yet
these people are all Irish; and they speak as
they do because they are independent. They
have good work; and they do their work well.
They earn good wages; and they feel
independent. These are the people who, in famine
time, formed a middle class between the few
proprietors in the island and the many paupers.
The receivers of relief, we have said, were two
thousand two hundred. The proprietors and
their families were two hundred. These work-
people and their families were the remaining
six hundred. They look like people who
could hold their ground in a season of stress.
This quarry was their anchorage.

What a noble place it is! We climb till we
find ourselves standing on the upper tramway,
or the verge of a precipice of slate, with
a rough wall of slate behind us—of all shades
of grey, from white to black, contrasting well
with the orange line of the iron mould caused
by the drip from the roof upon the tramway;
but the ceiling is the most prodigious thing
about the place. It is, in sober truth, in its
massiveness, greyness, smoothness, and
vastness, somewhat like the granite roof in the
great chamber of the great Pyramid. It
takes away one's breath with something of
the same crushing feeling. And then, look at
the groups clustered or half hidden in this
enormous cavern. How small every one looks
—the men with the borers and mallets,
making holes for the blasting; the men with
the wedges and mallets, splitting off great
blocks: some on shelves high up over head;
some in cupboards far within; some in dark
crevices in the mighty walls! Knock, knock,
knock go the mallets, with an. echo following
each knock,—far, near, incessant; and the
echo of the drip heard through all—an echo
for every plash.

What are they doing below—those two
men with the chain and hooks, that they can
scarcely shift? They are fixing the hooks in
crevices under that horizontal mass of slate.
It rises, and as it rises they shift the hooks
further into the cracks, till the block breaks
off. When the hooks are in the middle of its
weight it rises steadily—why and how? Look
at that waggon on that tramway in the air
overhead, the waggon way supported on those
enormous beams, which are themselves
upheld by clamps fixed in the slate walls of the
cavern. On each side of that airy truck there
is a stage, and in each stage is a man working
a windlass, which turns a cog wheel, by which
the truck is moved forward or backward.
The chains and hooks which are raising the
block hang down from this machinery; and
as the men in the air work their cog wheel,
the men on the ground stand away from
under the block, and see it moved and
deposited on the truck which is to convey it to
the saw mill. That truck is on the tramway