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They had but to descend Pollard Street and climb the path across the cinder-heaps beyond, and they would be, as it were, in harbour. In Pollard Street Simeon had the happy idea of taking to the roadway. It was rougher, and, therefore, less dangerous, than the pavement. At intervals he shoved the wheel of the barrow by main force over a stone.
Next day I was in the middle of the Black Country. I had no letters of introduction to employers in Wolverhampton; so that, without stopping there, I proceeded at once to Dudley. The Black Country is anything but picturesque. The earth seems to have been turned inside out. Its entrails are strewn about; nearly the entire surface of the ground is covered with cinder-heaps and mounds of scoriae.
There was malicious amusement in the eye he turned on Von Wetten. "And we don't want that, do we?" he suggested. Von Wetten shuddered. The siding at which the special train finally came to rest was "outside the station" in the sense that it was a couple of miles short of it, to be reached by a track-side path complicated by piles of sleepers and cinder-heaps.
She saw the valley with different eyes: she saw it now with a woman's eyes; before she had seen it with a child's eyes. She remembered the ruined collieries and the black cinder-heaps protruding through the hillside on which she was now standing. In childhood, these ruins were convenient places to play hide-and-seek in.
Now, although the Hanbridge Park is a wonderful triumph of grass-seed and terra-cotta over cinder-heaps and shard-rucks, although it is a famous exemplar to other boroughs, it is not precisely the Vale of Llangollen, nor the Lake District. It is the least bit in the world tedious, and by the sarcastic has been likened to a cemetery.
There is, besides, the pleasantest variety of scenery as one wanders along from the sombre granite of Brittany to the volcanic cinder-heaps of Auvergne. There is the picturesque contrast between the vast dull corn-flats to the north of the great river and the vines and acacias to the south.
Mansfield, too, with its flaming forges and its vast cinder-heaps, where Hans Luther, the miner, toiled to feed his wife and babes, we had seen; and historic Erfurt, with memories of the University where he studied and the monastery into which he went, taking with him, of all his books, only his Plautus and his Virgil, to study the Latin Bible chained to its post, and to fight that mental battle which toughened his sinews for the world-conflicts awaiting him; and whence he emerged at the call of his Superior, a young priest of twenty-five years, to take the professorship offered him at the new University of Wittenberg.
Altogether, the cabin was not very inferior to their old home; but, instead of the soft green turf and the fragrant air of the hills, they were surrounded by barren cinder-heaps, upon which nothing would grow but the yellow coltsfoot and a few weeds, and the wind was blowing clouds of smoke from the limekilns over and round the dismal cabin.
A loose flannel shirt, which had once been red, a pair of indescribable trowsers, and thick-soled shoes, completed his dress, an attire which I at once recognized as that common among the coal-miners of the district. "'Deed and truth, Sur, they is cinder-heaps and slag from the iron-works, Sur; and yon is Merthyr-Tydvil, sure."
When I passed it, after the Germans had gone that way, the gables and the turrets had fallen down, and instead of mullioned windows there were gaping holes in blackened walls. The gardens were a wild chaos of trampled shrubberies among the cinder-heaps, the twisted iron, and the wreckage of the old mansion.
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