What a moment that is!  I dare not breathe. Mon Amie stands statue-like, awaiting the death which she believes is upon her.  Not many words are spoken.  I think I feel all that her one glance conveys.  But the brave men beyond her, with instant unanimous action bracing themselves against the sliding rocks, oppose their feeble force to the down-sweeping agents of destruction; a moment more, and they would have been too late.  With the step of a frightened antelope Mon Amie trembles past them.  I see her safe, and hasten on.  “Step lightly!” says a voice full of suspense and fear, despite its calmness.

Step, indeed!  As if I rest on those treacherous stones!  My feet brush them no more than the wing of a butterfly grazes the roses among which it flutters.  Step, forsooth!  If ever the angels concerned themselves for this atom in Creation’s myriads, they hover round me now, they bear me up, they teach me how to fly!  Deprived now of their human props, how the angry fragments leap and tumble and chase one another through the echoing abyss below!  These reverberations seem freighted with elfin voices that jeer the insensate rocks for their baffled scheme of mischief.

But they chanted a far different chorus, and the darkness saw another sight, when, a few moons later, they dashed themselves down in irresistible array, and bore with them in their desperate plunge the lifeless bodies of two passing miners, in whose hearts, it may be, dwelt at the moment only happy thoughts of the homes ’neath the blue skies to which they were hurrying, the dear familiar sunlit Paradise that would succeed the endless night of their Inferno of toil.

  “But men must work, and women must weep;
  And the sooner ’tis over, the sooner to sleep!”

Well, we take up our march again presently, and, led by a monotonous hammering, proceed toward the sound.  Some of the miners are at work here, clearing a mass of ore from the stubborn rock.  Their strokes fall as regularly as those of machinery, and the grim men who wield the ponderous hammers accompany each blow with a peculiar loud indrawing of the breath, like the pant of a blacksmith at his anvil.  So strong is this resemblance, that we burst forth all together in the strains of the “Anvil Chorus”; and the accompaniment is beaten with tenfold more regularity and effect than on the stage, in the glare of the footlights, by “Il Trovatore’s” gypsy-comrades.  I doubt if Verdi’s music was ever so rendered before, amid such surroundings.  The compliment may be the higher, coming from so low a region.