strike them at every blow of his pick, old Tom Hamon was the keenest
explorer and opener of new leads in the mine.

"The silver's there all right," he said, time and again, "it only wants
finding," and he pushed ahead, here and there, wherever he thought the
chances most favourable.

He took his rightful pay along with the rest for the work he did, but it
was not for wages he wrought. Ever just beyond the point of his
energetic pick lay fortune, and he was after it with all his heart and
soul and bodily powers.

For months he had been following up a vein which ran out under the sea,
and grew richer and richer as he laid it bare. He believed it would lead
him to the mother vein, and that to the heart of all the Sark silver.
And so he toiled, early and late, and knew no weariness.

His tunnel, in places not more than three and four feet high and between
two and three feet wide, extended now several hundred feet under the
sea, and was fitted at the gallery end with the usual raised iron door.

It was hot work in there, in the dim-lighted darkness, in spite of the
fact that the sea was close above his head. Fortunately, here and there,
he had come upon curious little chambers like empty bubbles in one-time
molten rock, ten feet across and as much in height, some of them, and
curiously whorled and wrought, and these allowed him breathing spaces
and welcome relief from the crampings of the passage.

When he had broken into such a chamber it needed, at times, no little
labour to rediscover his vein on the opposite side. But he always found