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Remember they are mines not gold mines, but something richer still food mines, which Madam How thrust into the inside of the earth, ages and ages since, as molten lava rock, and then cooled them and lifted them up, and pared them away with her ice-plough and her rain-spade, and spread the stuff of them over the wide carses round, to make in that bleak northern climate, which once carried nothing but fir-trees and heather, a soil fit to feed a great people; to cultivate in them industry, and science, and valiant self-dependence and self-help; and to gather round the Heart of Midlothian and the Castle Rock of Edinburgh the stoutest and the ablest little nation which Lady Why has made since she made the Greeks who fought at Salamis.
What steep hills, and cliffs too, and with quarries in them! What can have made them so steep? And what can have made this little narrow valley? Madam How's rain-spade from above, I suppose, and perhaps the sea gnawing at their feet below. Those freestone hills once stretched high over our heads, and far away, I suppose, to the westward.
Now, up on the parapet of the bridge. I will hold you tight. Look and see Madam How's rain-spade at work. Look at the terrible yellow torrent below us, almost filling up the arches of the bridge, and leaping high in waves and crests of foam. Oh, the bridge is falling into the water! Not a bit. You are not accustomed to see water running below you at ten miles an hour. Never mind that feeling.
And be sure of this, that next to Madam How's steam-pump and her rain-spade, her great ice-plough has had, and has still, the most to do with making the ground on which we live. Do I mean that there were ever glaciers here? No, I do not. There have been glaciers in Scotland in plenty.
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