Looking steadily up this pleasant valley from the threshold of the
cottage, we can just see a fine, light film of white smoke against the
blue sky. Two miles away, right down off the mountains, there is a small
coal-field and a quarry of limestone. In a distant part of the country
there are large tracts of land where coal and iron pits are sunk on every
side, and their desolate and barren pit-banks extend for miles round,
while a heavy cloud of smoke hangs always in the air. But here, just at
the foot of these mountains, there is one little seam of coal, as if
placed for the express use of these people, living so far away from the
larger coal-fields. The Botfield lime and coal works cover only a few
acres of the surface; but underground there are long passages bored
beneath the pleasant pastures and the yellow cornfields. From the
mountains, Botfield looks rather like a great blot upon the fair
landscape, with its blackened engine-house and banks of coal-dust, its
long range of limekilns, sultry and quivering in the summer sunshine, and
its heavy, groaning water-wheel, which pumps up the water from the pits
below.
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