The Descent from the Mine. 15 



miles an hour, but they were obliged to reduce the speed, as it in- 

 jured the machines, and by agitating and wearing the coal, involved 

 the driver in a cloud of black dust. The empty wagons are drawn back 

 by mules; fourteen wagons to eight mules; twenty eight mules draw 

 up forty two coal and seven mule wagons, and the arrangement is so 

 made thai the ascending parties shall arrive in due season at die proper 

 places for turning out. The same is true of the pleasure cars, which 

 are allowed to use the rail way ; only they must not interfere with 

 its proper business, and should they do it, it would be at their 

 peril, as they might be crushed by the momentum of the descen- 

 ding wagons. When they happen to be caught out of their prop- 

 er place, the drivers make all possible haste to remove them out 

 of the rail way track, but they carefully avoid these meetings, and 

 they rarely happen, unless the cars go out of their proper time. 



The mules ride down the rail way ; they are furnished with prov- 

 ender placed in proper mangers, four of them being enclosed in one 

 pen mounted on wheels; and seven of these cars are connected into 

 one group, so that twenty eight mules constitute the party, which, with 

 their heads all directed down the mountain, and apparently surveying 

 its fine landscapes, are seen moving rapidly down the inclined plane 

 with a ludicrous gravity, which, when observed for the first time, 

 proves too much for the severest muscles. 



They readily perform their duty of drawing up the empty cars, but 

 having once experienced the comfort of riding down, they appear to 

 regard it as a right, and neither mild nor severe measures, not even the 

 sharpest whipping, can ever induce them to descend in any other way. 



The return of the traveller, in the pleasure cars, is so rapid that it 

 is not easy entirely to suppress the apprehension of danger ; we per- 

 formed the eight miles from the summit in thirty three minutes; 

 should an axle-tree break — an accident which sometimes happens 

 with the coal wagons — it would be impossible that the passengers 

 should escape unhurt, especially in the turnings of the road and in 

 places where trees, rocks and precipices allow no safe place of lan- 

 ding. All danger would however be avoided by checking the mo- 

 tion, so that it should not exceed eight or ten miles an hour and 

 this is easily done in the same way as that practised in the coal wag- 

 gons. Happily no accident has yet occcurred. It would be prudent 

 at least to require the manager to check the motion of the car at the 

 steepest places ; but these are the very situations where he chooses to 

 make a display of cracking his whip and cheering his wheels, in- 

 stead of his horses, and the increased impulse, given by gravity, as 



