a strange contrast to the ploughed fields, the sheep browsing on the plain, and other pleasing pictures of rural life. 2. The image of the ocean becomes still more lively when we remember that the Cheshire springs owe their mineral wealth to old seas petrified into salt rocks. At such a moment the visitor does not fancy himself separated from the stormy waves by districts of land, but only by the shores of time. 3. Though the salt springs are very productive, the mines offer the stranger a scene of facts and works even more interesting. A vague tradition tells us that the salt-mines, like the brine springs, were formerly worked by the Romans; it is more probable, however, that the salt rocks were discovered, if not found out again, about a mile from Northwich in 1670 by miners who were looking for coal. Before this period salt was obtained from the Droitwich springs in Worcestershire. 4. The opening of the Cheshire mines increased the internal and external trade of the country to a very considerable extent. At the present day the nature of the subsoil is known, and the English, by a wise feeling of foresight, have measured the depths of the treasure buried by terrestrial revolutions. At Northwich a first bed of rocksalt is found, separated from a second and deeper one by a bed of hard stone and clay. These two saline masses, nearly free from earthy matter, have the astonishing thickness of ninety to one hundred feet; from this fact we may form an idea of the richness of this formation, but in order to read the secret of the British race, which incessantly renews its force and means of supply by industrious contact with the interior of the earth, we must go down into a salt-mine. 5. I was led along a path by the side of a field, on which a flock of rooks had settled, and beneath this field the mine extended. High chimneys and buildings of clumsy construction indicated the mouth of the pit; beneath a shed, covered with tiles, and in which lay pellmell enormous fragments of rock-salt, was the shaft, on the edge of which I found a man, who asked me if I wished to go down. On my reply in the affirmative, a large barrel, three or four feet in circumference, suspended by a powerful chain, was lowered. I mounted the platform and jumped into the tub, which covered me nearly to the neck. As there were three of us, we were advised to keep close together, because the mouth of the pit was narrow, and lined with iron to a certain depth, and we ran a risk of coming into a rude contact with the sides of the shaft. 6. The barrel, lifted by the chain, oscillated for a second over the pit's mouth, and then rapidly descended in the increasing darkness. Already all was silent; nothing was to be heard save the filtering of the salt water through the rock. Though the depth of the shaft was not more than three hundred and thirty feet, and the descent only lasted a few minutes, this journey even seemed to be long and monotonous. It is natural enough in such a case to raise the eyes to the pit's mouth in order to seek the light, the circle of which grew momentarily narrower. When about the middle of the shaft this light appeared like a moon; when the barrel reached the bottom it was only a star. 7. We were received by a man with gray hair and a venerable face, who had worked in the mine since the age of twelve. He gave each of us a candle; in his own hand he had a miner's candlestick, that is to say, a lump of soft clay, which allowed the light to be fixed against the sides of the rock. These lights only seemed to render the darkness more visible, which, at the first glance especially, seemed to cover the cavern like a black veil. The salt-mines, however, have nothing of that solemn horror which reigns in the entrance to coalmines, and you do not feel those drops of muddy water fall on your head which trickle through the damp and low roof like the tears of night. 8. A salted but dry air, a pleasant and uniform temperature penetrate these gloomy places, and the roof of the mine, supported by side walls, or by pillars cut in the solid rock, is of considerable elevation. For the rest, the works and the system of excavation are nearly the same as in collieries; man forces a way through the thickness of the solid and crystallized masses by the aid of pick and wedge, or gunpowder. 9. As you advance in a salt-mine the scene widens, and the internal space is revealed to you. It is then difficult not to admire this simple but grand architecture; these empty spaces extending in the darkness like the nave of an immense subterranean church; these works, which have the shape, colour, and transparency of sugar-candy; these massive pillars, whose fronts shine in the reflection of the light you carry in your hand; and more than all this, the religious character which silence and night shed over these labours of human industry. 10. From time to time you see one or more of the workmen's lights flashing in the dark extremity of the mine. As the men move about, these lights vaguely shadow forth human forms like those we fancy to ourselves inhabiting a wizard's cave. From time to time, too, the habitual silence of these vaults is violently disturbed by explosions that sound like thunder; it is the powder dislocating the limbs of the rock. You walk over a pile of ruins; the uneven floor is covered with gigantic fragments of crystal, which have principally a yellow or reddish colour, though some are white and transparent as glass. At the sight of these rocks, this mineral wealth, which seems to grow again beneath the strokes of the pick or the train of gunpowder for the mass appears inexhaustible-you cannot but believe in a wise Providence of nature. 11. Man likes to imagine that for him, and in view of his wants, these enormous magazines of salt were swallowed in the earth; that departed seas laboured for him and built these rocks at an infinitely remote period, when none of the animal forms now living on the surface of the British Isles had left the mould of creation. 12. At length we reached the end of the mine; some workmen were engaged here in extracting blocks of salt, which were piled up nearly to the roof. Among the workmen some were performing a very hard task, they were digging out large pieces of crystal in the thickness of the wall, or forming the channel which, when filled with powder, would blow up the masses of rock. The number of workmen and the mode of transport vary according to the importance of the mine; in the one I was visiting, fifty men extract weekly fifteen hundred tons of raw salt. In other mines, horses, ponies, and donkeys are employed to draw the blocks of salt on a tramway. 13. From the mouth of the pit the rock-salt is conveyed to the boiling-house, where it is purified and assumes the whiteness of snow. These boiling-houses are clumsy buildings, with furnace and tall chimneys, which at night flare in the sky like torches; you ascend by a wooden ladder to a platform, in the centre of which steams a cauldron, open and of but slight depth, about twenty feet long by twelve feet wide. Into this, the salt is thrown, more or less loaded with earthy matter, and just as it is brought from the bowels of the earth. When it has been boiled for six or seven hours, it is collected on barrows, and conveyed to a hot room, where it is left to dry for some days. 14. From this moment the salt is made, and it only remains to place it in the storehouse. The whiteness of the manufactured salt contrasts strikingly with the gloomy and smoke-stained walls of the factory, and the surrounding heaps of coals. 15. The sight of such works arouses more than one thought as to the care and sacrifices required for the preparation of the most ordinary matters. The Cheshire furnaces have roared, the engine-wheels have turned, the lives of workmen have even been destroyed, in more than |