"Yes, I did forget to tell you that he's got frightfully red hair."
Now, lead-mining has been stopped in Upper Wharfedale these thirty years, but still a boy who has been brought up in a village there may well have some general knowledge of ores and the methods of getting them. The mining first began in those dim British days before the Romans came, and it has continued on down through the centuries till the influx of foreign lead brought prices below £25 a ton, and the mines could not be worked at a profit.
Raw dumps and grass-covered dumps are traceable on every hand, and though the older tunnels are obliterated, there are still enough shafts and drifts and adits to be found in the gray stone hills to occupy many months' exploration.
George Carter had heard of the past glories of lead from his earliest years, and old residents pointed to the ruined cottages that were filled and flourishing when the village held 500 people who lived by the mines, instead of the 200 who dwelt there now and made a lean living out of a little limp farming. With pockets stuffed with candle-ends he had splashed into the old levels and wandered for miles in the heart of the limestone hills and hacked with rusty pickheads at forgotten working faces; he had raked amongst the old ruined machinery beside the dumps; he had studied the run of the water races, and as far as a man with a natural engineering bent may reconstruct these things from memorials of the past, he had done so most thoroughly, and, in the old unscientific way, was as good a miner as any of those blue-gummed ruffians of the past, and that without even having seen a lead mine in real work.
Tin-stone he had seen in a not very well-equipped school museum; a tin mine he knew only from an old book on Cornwall, which treated that country more from the picturesque point of view than the mechanical or the scientific.
But the thing that had fired his mind one baking day at Malla-Nulla was a newspaper paragraph which spoke of the price of tin. Up till then, like the majority of the human race, he had not troubled his head as to whether tin was £5 a ton or £50. But here he saw that it had gone up to no less a figure than £207 10s. per ton. He wished he could find a tin mine, but concluding he might as well search that particular part of steamy West Africa for great auk's eggs, went no further than framing the wish.