Various

“ The nomenclature of London presents an endless succession of problems which never seem to get much nearer solution; and so far as many disputed sites are concerned, there is every likelihood that they will soon be removed from the field of controversy by being obliterated and altogether forgotten. It is notoriously a perpetual cause of surprise to foreigners, and especially our American cousins, that we are so heedless of being a nation with a history as to take no pains to preserve our historical landmarks. ”

“ Think what might happen to me if any one knew!’
‘No wonder your countrymen fail, with such chicken-hearts among them,’ Isodore observed scornfully. ‘I do not want to do you any harm; quite the contrary. There is an advertisement in to-day’s Times. Your mistress is in search of a maid. Is that so?’
Timothy Varley began to breathe a little more freely. ‘Yes,’ he answered glibly; ‘she does want a maid. She must be honest, sober, and industrious; ready to sit up all night if necessary, and have a good temper—not that Miss Enid will try any one’s temper much. ”

“ Should the coal be worked on the stoop-and-room system, and pillars of coal of sufficient size be left in, the surface will not be injured to any appreciable extent, at least not for many years. As is often the case, however, seams of coal are worked out one below the other; and when the lower one gives way, the pillars above may fall like a pack of cards. There is no saying where the subsidence would reach in such a case. If the pillars do not break, the way in which the ‘rooms’ close up, if the floor is soft, is rather peculiar. ”

“ The railway in Ayrshire which runs over the old workings of the famous Wishaw coal-seam, especially suffers in the way of subsidence; and some parts of the railway in the west of Fife are known to have gradually sunk to an extent of over ten feet.
But railway lines are not the only parts of the surface which are subsiding owing to the working of minerals. The whole surface of the land surrounding the many pits and mines which are continually belching forth their wagon-loads of coal or other mineral, is gradually subsiding as the extraction of the mineral proceeds ”

“ There are a thousand-and-one buried sites in the streets of London alone, which have played their parts in our national and municipal development, and there is none that cares to put up a stone to preserve their traditions from oblivion. But for Bleeding Heart Yard no very heroic etymology can be claimed. Dickens, it is to be feared, drew largely on his imagination, which he doubtless found served him in better stead than any number of old folios, for his amusing derivations. Except in Little Dorrit, there seems to be but scanty authority for the tradition that this was the scene of a murder. ”

“ The roof does not all fall in, as would be expected; but the enormous weight of the superincumbent strata pressing on the pillars causes the floor between them to rise up or ‘creep,’ and the room becomes closed. On the other hand, if the stoops of coal are taken out, the roof comes down with a crash, and the effects on the surface may be disastrous; but of course it sometimes pays better to get out all the coal and let the surface go, than to allow the workings to get closed up and the coal in the pillars to be lost for ever. ”

“ I have a powerful interest in the Brotherhood; he knows me by name, but otherwise we are strangers. To-night, I saw my old lover in his company. Ah, had he but known!—Come, Valerie; give me that coin, the lucky piece of gold which shall lure him to destruction. Come with me; I must say more to you.’
Mechanically, Valerie le Gautier followed her companion out of the Kursaal gardens, through the streets, walking till they got a little way out of the town. At a house there, a little back from the road, Isodore stopped, and opened the door with a passkey. Inside, all was darkness ”

“ She said: ‘Well, Alfred, you should know best—perhaps you are right. Come and I’ll take you to our private parlour. Papa is sitting out in the garden. I must bring him in and introduce him to you.—He must know all now,’ she added with a slight tremor. She had put off the evil day as long as she could; but further concealment was now impossible. ”

“ The strata generally come to rest in about three or four years. A row of houses which have been cracked through and through on the subsidence reaching the surface, have been known to close up again when the strata have settled.
The damage done by pillar-and-room workings is irregular both as regards effect and time. It may commence, stop, and commence again. Houses are literally wrecked by it. So palpable is it, indeed, that actually the sound of the crushing and subsiding of the house can be distinctly heard. ”

“ The ‘longwall’ or Shropshire method of working is what is known as the system of complete excavation; that is, the miner takes out the whole coal as he proceeds, leaving only perhaps a foot on the roof, should the overlying strata be soft, and props up a passage with wooden supports as he proceeds, to enable him to keep an open way to the face of the coal. ”

“ Poor Alfred’s store of sovereigns was now pretty well reduced, and it was with reluctance that he sent this second remittance. In a week his manuscript was returned with a polite note, saying that while the story showed germs of genius, it was not of sufficient general literary merit to warrant publication. Inquiries made through a London friend revealed the fact that he had been the victim of a used-up penny-a-liner, a man without means, influence, or respectability, who made a discreditable living by playing on the credulity and vanity of amateur authors. ”

“ There is an apartment now used as a bedroom in Sir George Warrender’s house at Bruntsfield, near Edinburgh, which, however, can hardly be called a secret chamber, inasmuch as it possesses windows and two external walls, but having the interior walls on both sides of the entrance of great thickness. The history of this room is somewhat obscure. It is said to have been used as a place of concealment for certain Jacobites after the rebellion of 1745; and blood-stains, which are still distinctly visible on the floor, point remotely to this theory. ”

“ After the bed of coal is struck, ‘rooms’ are worked out, leaving ‘pillars’ or ‘stoops’ to support the superincumbent strata. The object to be attained in this system, as practised in the olden times, was to have as large a room worked out, and as small a stoop or pillar of the coal itself left, as was consistent with the safety of the mine and the support of the surface, while the mine was open. ”

“ To obviate this loss, the method now generally adopted is to drive narrow rooms or passages, seldom exceeding fourteen feet, through the seam, leaving large pillars—about seventy-five per cent. of the mineral—until the extremity of the available coal is reached. When, however, no regard is to be had for the surface, and the coal has been thus worked out as far as can be done, the miner commences to work backwards, taking out the stoops or pillars as he goes. The whole roof of the mine then comes down; and this is the most dangerous kind of subsidence. ”

“ The Order is to be betrayed when the pear is ripe, and the traitor will be Hector le Gautier. The price of his treachery will enable him to become respectable, and lead a quiet life henceforward with his loving fair-haired bride. ”

“ An instance of this is to be found in the{650} salt-workings of Cheshire, in the neighbourhood of which, houses are constantly being wrecked. Thousands of pounds are paid every year by mine-owners for damages done to surface proprietors, farmers, and others; and there is no more fruitful source of litigation than surface-damage.
Even under public roads, we find the minerals being worked. The public have only a right of passage, the minerals underneath belonging to the adjoining proprietor, and it is not an uncommon circumstance in mining districts for a road to suddenly sink several feet. ”

“ Upton Court, near Reading, the former residence of the Perkyns family, has also its hidden retreat, which is difficult of access, being approached by a trap-door in the midst of a chimney-stack near the lesser Hall.
About the beginning of the present, or the end of last century, a secret chamber was accidentally discovered in the ancient mansion of Bourton-on-the-Water, a ‘large rambling house of many gables,’ situated in Gloucestershire. The door appeared on tearing off the paper which was about to be removed. ”

“ I think you should take a cheap lodging in Edinburgh, or some place where you would have the advantage of good reference libraries, and set to work at once.’
‘True, Nan; I must think of making a start one of these days.—But you don’t wish me away, dearest, do you?’ he said in a tender way.
‘Oh, you know well enough I don’t!’ she returned with the slightest trace of impatience in her tone. ‘But if we are to get married, it will not be by your idling your time away here. You’ll find a hundred pounds won’t keep you long in a large city ”

“ There is a hiding-hole in the closet of one of the bedrooms, where the boards of the flooring are so arranged as to be easily moved; and underneath is a trap-door, by which a small ladder leads down into a dark hole where there is just room enough for a man to change his position with ease from a standing to a sitting posture. There is a shelf, on which the concealed person could eat his food. Tradition states that a priest was actually concealed there for a fortnight whilst Cromwell’s soldiers were posted outside the gates ”

“ Indeed, piles of massive warehouses, which have sprung up on all sides, have already almost swamped their habitations; and any one seeing them in the gray gloaming of a wet winter afternoon, will have some difficulty in devising pleas for their preservation. ”

“ If this literary venture was to be gone into, its success must be thoroughly demonstrated in actual pounds, shillings, and pence, before the marriage could take place. Anne thought this a reasonable stipulation: her lover didn’t. His pride felt hurt at finding obstacles where he imagined he had an easy walk over. He had, however, to pocket his pride and submit to the inevitable. On these conditions the lovers became engaged, with the old gentleman’s approval. A great weight of concealment was now off Anne’s mind. ”

“ In connection with the old mansion of the Carylls at West Grinstead, the Abbé Denis tells us that it also has two hiding-places. ‘One of these is between the mantel-piece and ceiling of the dining-room; and the way to get to it is to go up the flue of the chimney as high as the ceiling of the room on the second floor; and then, by an aperture in the side of the chimney or flue, to drop down into the hiding-hole. Another opening also exists in the chimney of the room above. The second place of concealment is quite underneath the roof of the house. ”

“ For instance, we read that a young lady of birth and fortune was forced from her friends, ‘and by the assistance of a wry-necked swearing parson, married to an atheistical wretch, whose life was a continual practice of all manner of vice.’
Again, we learn that a young lady appointed to meet a gentlewoman at the Old Playhouse, Drury Lane; but something prevented the gentlewoman coming, and the young lady being alone when the play was over, told a boy to fetch a coach for the city. ‘One like a gentleman helps her into it and jumps in after her. ”

“ It is the case, however, though it may not be generally known, that subsidences—fortunately only gradual, and comparatively inappreciable—are taking place over many of our railway lines, and that ‘minerals’ are actually being extracted from underneath nearly every line of railway under which there is any mineral to get. ”

“ The incumbents claimed to be exempt from the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London, and performed the marriages without banns or license. It is not exactly known in what year these gentlemen started their lucrative profession; but one named Elliot, who was rector of St James’s, was suspended by the Bishop of London in 1616 for performing these ceremonies. The trade was then taken up by clerical prisoners living within the Rules of the Fleet; and Mr Burn tells us that, as a rule, these were just the men—having neither money, character, nor liberty to lose—to adopt the profession ”

“ The indecency of these practices, and the facility they afforded for accomplishing forced and fraudulent marriages, were not the only evils, for we are told that marriages, when entered in the register, could be antedated without limit, on payment of a fee, or not entered at all; and women frequently hired temporary husbands at the Fleet, in order that they might be able to plead marriage to an action for debt. These hired husbands were provided by the parsons at five shillings each ”

“ The far-famed ‘Burleigh Park by Stamford Town’ is also in possession of a secret chamber. This concealed apartment, of whose existence the{644} family were altogether unaware, was brought to light in the course of this century through the instrumentality of the law agent, and was found to contain furniture of an old-fashioned description, together with several framed engravings. ”

“ Some of the cart-sheds and stables which form the ground-floor—to use an appellation that properly belongs{654} to suburban villas—have been converted into shops, but bear no signs of ever having done a thriving trade ”