"My good boy, these will not be cool enough to touch yet.

They retain the heat for a long while." He stopped talking to me for some time, and explained how the men were closing the bottom of the furnace again with fire-clay, and that they would now go on pouring in at the top barrows full of charcoal and broken-up ore.

How that dark grey stuff was the molten stones and refuse which remained after the metal had been cleared, and then he laughed at what he called my innocence, as I asked him if the ingots, as he called the square masses which now looked quite white, were silver.
"No, my boy," he said; "we are not so rich as that.

If those pieces of coarse metal, when melted down again, and submitted to a fresh process, give us three pounds' weight of silver out of every hundred pounds of lead we shall do well.

Now then, would you like to go down the mine ?" He spoke as if he expected to hear me decline; but I had made up my mind to go, and he looked quite pleased when he heard me say that I was ready.
"Well," he said, as we reached the top of the shaft, "I'll go down first, and you can follow.