LONDON'S "FIERY MINE."

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3031, 14 March 1881, Page 4

LONDON'S "FIERY MINE."

It is a " fact not generally known" that there is in London a "fiery mine" of so very excitable a disposition that no artificial light of any description has ever yet been allowed to be brought even into its neighborhood. Its product, however is not coal, but Turn. The rum-shed, as it is called, of the West India dock, covers a space of two hundred thousand square feet, with vaults of corresponding size, all crammed with hugh casks of spirit, from every pore of "which—and the most carefully-closed have pores in plenty—the fiery vapor is forever streaming out into the air, only begging for the smallest chance of converting the whole area of the docks, with their two hundred and fifty odd ships, and two or three hundred thousand tons or so of cargo, and their more or less incalculable stores of timber and tea, silk and sugar, cigars and cereals, coals and cotton, wine, wool, whisky, whale-* sr~,5r~, and what not, into the most magnificent bowl of snap-dragon ever imagined in infaut nightmare. Into these fiery regions not even a bull's-eye lantern is or ever has been allowed to penetrate. Even the wharf along the side ■where tho great puncheons are landed is forbidden to the approach of vessels, every cask being transferred from ship to shore in the company's own lighters. Each cask in that va?t range of dim, dark vaults is marked and numbered, and on the right leading of these marks and numbers depends the efficient execution of every one of the numerous opera , ions to which every individual cask has to be subjected before its contents can go forth for the mixing of the ■world's grog. How any one but an experienced Japanese juggler ever to manages perform his beat in the very brightest weather by the simple aid of a little plate of polished tin, artfully turned and twisted to catch the solitary ray of highly diluted daylight, which here and there filters down from the floor above, is a mystery by no means among the least wonderful of the many of which the visitor to this commercial paradise catches here and there a tantalizing glimpse.