‘You don’t find the coal countries quite so bright and merry as London town, do ye, Flashley?’ said old Dalton, with a good-natured smile.

‘I can’t say I do, uncle,’ answered the youth, frankly. ‘As to merriment, that is all very well at the present moment, in front of that great family bonfire; but all the rest of the day—’ and here Flashley laughed with easy impudence and no small fun; ‘the house and garden are in a state of dingy mourning, so are all the roads, and lanes, and hedges,—in fact, the passage of lines of little black waggons to and fro, rumbling full of coals, or rattling by, empty, seems like the chief business of life, and the main purpose for which men came into the world.’

‘And so they be!’ ejaculated old Dalton, jocosely; ‘so far as these parts are concerned. You know, Flashley, the world is made up of many parts, and this be the coal part. We be the men born to do the world’s work of this sort; and we can’t very handsomely pass all our time a-sitting before a shiny fire, and drinking ale,—though, that’s good o’ nights, after the work’s done.’

With this laconic homily, old Billy-Pitt Dalton rose smiling from his chair, emptied his mug of ale, and, shaking the young man kindly by the hand, trudged off to bed. With much the same sort of smiling ‘good night,’ the sons all trudged after him. The good dame and her daughter went last. Flashley remained sitting alone in front of the great fire.

He sat in silence for a long time, watching the fire decline into great dark chasms, black holes, and rugged red precipices, with grim smouldering chaotic heaps below.

A word or two about this young man. Flashley Dalton had some education, which he fancied was quite enough, and was very ambitious without any definite object. His father had proposed several professions to him, but none of them suited him, chiefly because, to acquire eminence in any of them, so long a time was needed. Besides, none seemed adequate to satisfy his craving for distinction. He looked down rather contemptuously on all ordinary pursuits. The fact was, he ardently desired fame and fortune, but did not like to work for either. One of the greatest injuries his mind had sustained, was from a certain species of ‘fast literature,’ which the evil spirit of town-life has squirted into the brains of our young men during the last three or four years, whereby he had been taught and encouraged to laugh at everything of serious interest, and to seek to find something ridiculous in all ennobling efforts. If a great thing was done, he endeavoured to prove it a little one; if a profound truth was enunciated, he sought to make it out a lie; to him a new discovery in science was a humbug; a generous effort, a job. If he went to see an exhibition of pictures, it was to sneer at the most original designs; if to see a new tragedy, it was only in the hope of its being damned. If a new work of fiction were admirable, he talked spitefully of it, or with supercilious patronage; and as to a noble poem, he scoffed at all such things with some slang joke at ‘high art;’ besides, he wrote himself, as many a young blade now attempts to do, instead of beginning with a little study and some decent reading. To Flashley all knowledge was a sort of absurdity; his own arrogant folly seemed so much better a thing. He therefore only read books that were like himself, and encouraged him to grow worse. The literature of indiscriminate and reckless ridicule and burlesque had taught him to have no faith in any sincere thing, no respect for true knowledge; and this had well-nigh destroyed all good in his mind and nature, as it unfortunately has done with too many others of his age at the present day.

After sitting silently in front of the fire for some half an hour, Flashley gradually fell into a sort of soliloquy, partaking in about equal degrees of the grumbling, the self-conceited, the humorous, and the drowsy.

‘So, they’re all snoring soundly by this time—all the clodpole Billy Pittites. Uncle’s a fine old fellow. Very fond of him. As for all the rest!—Wonder why the mine was called the William Pitt? Because it is so black and deep, I suppose. Before my time. Who cares for him now, or for any of the bygones! Why should we care for anybody who went before us? The past ones give place to the fast ones. That’s my feather.

‘But a pretty mess I’ve made of my affairs in London! My father does not know of half my debts. Hardly know of half of them myself. Incontinent contractions. Tavern bills, sixty or seventy pounds—maybe a hundred. Tailors? can’t calculate. Saloons and night-larks, owing for—don’t know how much, besides money paid. Money borrowed, eighty or ninety pounds. Books—forget—say sixpence. Like Falstaff’s ha’pennyworth of bread to all that quantity of sack! Think I paid ready money for all the light reading, and young gent’s books.’

The fire sank lower and lower, and so did the candles, one of which had just gone out, and began to send up a curdling stream of yellow smoke.

‘What a place this is for coals. What a smutty face Nature wears! From the house upwards, all alike,—dull, dusky, and detestable. Pfeu! Smell of fried mutton fat! Now, then, old Coal fire, hold up your head. I’m sleepy myself. This house is more like a hearse than a dwelling-place for live stock. The roadway in front of the house is all of coal-dust; the front of the house is like a sweep’s, it only wants the dangling sign of his “brush.” The window-ledges have a constant layer of black dust over them; so has the top of the porch; so have the chimney-pieces inside the house, where all the little china cups and gimcracks have a round black circle of coal-dust at the bottom. There is always a dark scum over the water of the jug in my bedroom. How I detest this life among the coals! Where’s the great need of them? Why don’t the stupid old world burn wood?’

The fire had by this time sunk to dull red embers and grey ashes, with large dark chasms around and behind. The shadows on the wall were faint, and shifting with the flickering of the last candle, now dying in the socket. Flashley’s eyes were closed, and his arms folded, as he still continued to murmur to himself. Sooth to say, the ale had got into his head.

‘Margery, the housemaid, has large black eyes, with dark rings of coal-grime round them. Her hair is also black—her cap like a mourning mop—and she has worn a black patch on one side of her nose since last Friday, when I gave her a handful from the coal-scuttle for comparing me to the lazy young dog that lay asleep before the fire. Margery Daw!—you shall slide down to the lower regions,—on an inclined plane, as the Useful Knowledge books would say.

‘Ale is a good thing when it is strong; but a coal-mine is all nonsense. Still, they seem to make money by it, and that’s some excuse—some reason for men wasting in work lives which ought to be passed in pleasure. Human time—human——I thought something touched my elbow.

‘Human time should not be passed——why there it came again! I must be dreaming.

‘Old Billy-Pitt Dalton understands brewing. But human time should not be passed in digging and groping, and diving and searching—whether to scrape up coals, or what folks call “knowledge.” For the fuel of life burns out soon enough of itself, and, therefore, it should not be wasted over the baser material; because the former is all for one’s self, while coal-fuel, and the search after it, is just working for other people. Something did touch my elbow! There’s something astir in the room out in the darkness! It was standing at my side!’

Flashley made an effort to rise; but instead of doing so, he fell sideways over one arm of the chair, with his arms hanging down. Staring up helplessly from this position, he saw a heavy dwarfed figure with shining eyes, coming out of the darkness of the room! He could not distinguish its outline; but it was elf-like, black, and had a rough rocky skin. It had eyes that shot rays like great diamonds; and through its coal-black naked body, the whole of its veins were discernible, not running with blood, but filled with stagnant gold. Its step was noiseless, yet its weight seemed so immense, that the floor slowly bent beneath it; and, like ice before it breaks, the floor bent more and more as the figure came nearer.

At this alarming sight, Flashley struggled violently to rise. He did so; but instantly reeling half round, dropped into the chair, with his head falling over the back of it. At the same moment the ponderous Elfin took one step nearer; and the whole floor sank slowly down, with a long-drawn moan, that ended in a rising and rushing wind, with which Flashley felt himself borne away through the air, fleeter than his fast-fleeing consciousness.

In the progress of generations and cycles—in that wealth and dispensation of Time ordained by +Him+, before whose sight ‘one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day’—mere grains of sand running through the glass that regulates the operations of never-ending work—the bodies of all living things, whether animal or vegetable, fulfil their destinies by undergoing a gradual transmutation into other bodies and things of the most opposite kind to their own original being. Original being, accurately to speak, there is none; but we must call that thing original to which some other thing is traced back as to its ultimate point, or starting place, and at which we are obliged to stop, not because it is the end, but because we can go no further; nevertheless, up to that antediluvian period, and during a great part of it, we are moving in the dusky yet demonstrable regions and tracts of substantial facts, and scientific knowledge.