ORGANIZATION OF OPERATIVES. 75 



sake, is almost as dangerous to handle ; this instrument, 

 after cutting away clean the four sides of the slate, pushes 

 the latter from the block into the basket. Not far from 

 the guillotine is the large graving tool for planing billiard 

 tables. 



Every now and then the bugle sounds from the door of a 

 small white hut, conspicuous about the centre of the moun- 

 tain, not as at Tedworth, to cheer gallant steed and hound, 

 but to warn the workmen and spectators that the blasting- 

 coil is about to be set fire to. Scarcely have they time to 

 get behind the rocks, when splinters of slate are falling in 

 all directions, and huge fragments of mountain are hurled 

 into the lake below. The office of Mr. Ellis, the manager. 

 Las been made bomb-proof to prevent accidents. In July, 

 1857, 220,000 tons were levelled at one blast from the 

 Wellington quarry, and at a very trifling cost. The blast- 

 ing takes place once an hour, when grace, as it is called, 

 is given to the men for ten minutes, during which each 

 labourer is allowed to take out and light his pipe. Smoking 

 is not permitted except at these intervals. A number of 

 boys begin their education as future quarrymen in collecting 

 the odds and ends of broken slate, picking out those pieces 

 which may be useful, and wheeling them in their tiny car- 

 riages along a tramway to the huts, where they are clipped 

 and turned to account. Occasionally a shout of glee is a 

 sign that they have lit upon a piece of quartz, which they 

 offer to visitors in exchange for copper. The number of 

 tons annually carried away by the railway averages 1,200,000. 

 The quarries abound with a vast number of workshops, 

 ■where almost everything is manufactured " on the pre- 

 mises," from the first loaf the quarryman eats, to the slab 

 which forms his gravestone, and tells in rude Welsh poetry 

 his past good qualities and his future hope. 



A large proportion of the young men now employed 

 upon the mountain were born almost in the quarries ; some 

 from the condition of daily labourers have risen to a consi- 



