Chapter 10

CHAPTER X COAL TOWN

THREE years after the events which have just been related,
the guide-books recommended as a "great attraction,"
to the numerous tourists who roam over the county of Stirling,
a visit of a few hours to the mines of New Aberfoyle.

No mine in any country, either in the Old or New World,
could present a more curious aspect.

To begin with, the visitor was transported without danger
or fatigue to a level with the workings, at fifteen
hundred feet below the surface of the ground. Seven miles
to the southwest of Callander opened a slanting tunnel,
adorned with a castellated entrance, turrets and battlements.
This lofty tunnel gently sloped straight to the stupendous crypt,
hollowed out so strangely in the bowels of the earth.

A double line of railway, the wagons being moved by hydraulic power,
plied from hour to hour to and from the village thus buried in the subsoil
of the county, and which bore the rather ambitious title of Coal Town.

Arrived in Coal Town, the visitor found himself in a place where
electricity played a principal part as an agent of heat and light.
Although the ventilation shafts were numerous, they were not
sufficient to admit much daylight into New Aberfoyle, yet it had
abundance of light. This was shed from numbers of electric discs;
some suspended from the vaulted roofs, others hanging on
the natural pillars--all, whether suns or stars in size, were fed
by continuous currents produced from electro-magnetic machines.
When the hour of rest arrived, an artificial night was easily
produced all over the mine by disconnecting the wires.

Below the dome lay a lake of an extent to be compared to the Dead Sea
of the Mammoth caves--a deep lake whose transparent waters swarmed with
eyeless fish, and to which the engineer gave the name of Loch Malcolm.

There, in this immense natural excavation, Simon Ford built his
new cottage, which he would not have exchanged for the finest house
in Prince's Street, Edinburgh. This dwelling was situated on the shores
of the loch, and its five windows looked out on the dark waters,
which extended further than the eye could see. Two months later a second
habitation was erected in the neighborhood of Simon Ford's cottage:
this was for James Starr. The engineer had given

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himself body and soul to New Aberfoyle, and nothing but the most
imperative necessity ever caused him to leave the pit.
There, then, he lived in the midst of his mining world.

On the discovery of the new field, all the old colliers had hastened
to leave the plow and harrow, and résumé the pick and mattock.
Attracted by the certainty that work would never fail, allured by
the high wages which the