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Blood was water, money was leaves, and life was only common air until one flag floated over a Republic without a master and without a slave. And then was asked the question: "Will a free people tax themselves to pay a nation's debt?" The soldiers went home to their waiting wives, to their glad children, and to the girls they loved they went back to the fields, the shops, and mines.
If it be true that mountainous countries are favorable to mines, it may be presumed that this province, in which there are many extensive and high mountains, is not without its hidden treasures, no more than the other parts of the continent. Pennsylvania hath already exhibited to the world some useful minerals, and Carolina in time will probably do the same.
Houses, roofless or otherwise, had to be subdivided into safe, doubtful, or certain to 'go up. I cannot help regarding this Flanders retreat as a subject supremely dull. The constant suspicion of mines and booby-traps rendered doubly sordid the polluted ruins which formed the landmarks of our advance. One feature alone provided interest to some.
Again the scientific coil of approaches wound itself around and around the doomed stronghold; again were constructed the galleries, the covered ways, the hidden mines, where soldiers, transformed to gnomes, burrowed and fought within the bowels of the earth; again that fatal letter Y advanced slowly under ground, stretching its deadly prongs nearer and nearer up to the walls; and again the system of defences against a relieving force was so perfectly established that Verdugo or Mansfield, with what troops they could muster, seemed as powerless as the pewter soldiers with which Maurice in his boyhood not yet so long passed away was wont to puzzle over the problems which now practically engaged his early manhood.
The splendor of the world is due to mining and to the perfectness of man's ability to work the minerals which the mines supply. The fields of the world give men food; with food furnished, a few souls turn to the contemplation of higher things; but no grand civilization ever came to an agricultural people until their intellects were quickened by something beyond their usual occupation.
There is a small island lying not far off the east coast of Hispaniola, which the Spaniards have placed under the invocation of San Juan. This island is almost square and very rich gold mines have been found there, but as everybody is busy working the mines of Hispaniola, miners have not yet been sent to San Juan, although it is planned so to do.
One minute let mention be of the excitement over Protestant England when that rumour disseminated, telling of her wealthiest nobleman's visit to a monastery, up in the peaks and snows; and of his dwelling among the monks, and assisting in all their services day and night, hymning and chanting, uttering not one word for one whole week: his Papistical friend, Lord Feltre, with him, of course, after Jesuit arts had allured him to that place of torrents and lightnings and canticles and demon echoes, all as though expressly contrived for the horrifying of sinners into penitence and confession and the monkish cowl up to life's end, not to speak of the abjuration of worldly possessions and donation of them into the keeping of the shaven brothers; when either they would have settled a band of them here in our very midst, or they would have impoverished is not too strong a word the country by taking the money's worth of the mines, estates, mansions, freehold streets and squares of our metropolis out of it without scruple; rejoicing so to bleed the Protestant faith.
For ten years these mines had been abandoned. No new seams had been discovered, although the soundings had been carried to a depth of fifteen hundred or even of two thousand feet, and when James Starr had retired, it was with the full conviction that even the smallest vein had been completely exhausted.
There is wealth enough in thy mines and in thy green fields, room enough in thy starry spaces, O God! But a voice the echo of Falconer's teaching, awoke in my heart 'Because I would have these more blessed than those, and those more blessed with them, for they are all my children. By the Mall we came into Whitehall, and so to Westminster Bridge.
The most significant thing he said was that men did not last long at such labor, and in the mines six months appeared to be the limit of human endurance. How soon I had enough of that choking air in the room where the borax was ground! And the place where the borax was roasted in huge round revolving furnaces I found that intolerable.
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