AN OLD DRIVE.

Westport Times, Volume VIII, Issue 1147, 3 February 1874, Page 4

AN OLD DRIVE.

[tuames evening star ]

I don't mean such a drive as the " Ladies Mile," in .Rotten Row ; nor do I mean such a drive as many of us remember having taken in Windsor Park, when Victoria and Albert rode side by side; but such a drive as hundreds of my readers have helped to make. I mean a drive in " mining " parlance —or what new chums would call a small tunnel. Hundreds daily pass the old drive I am now writing about, and see nothing but what is a good representation of the entrance to an old Egyptian tomb, only the entrance to the drive is a wooden frame, instead of a stone one. But come with me four, five hundred feet along it and you will see one of the most beautiful sights that the imagination can paint. The story of the wonders that Aladdin's Lamp could conjure up are far and away beneath the wonderful beauty of the interior of this old drive.. No painter ever painted, no poet ever dreamt of the splendid sight I am now witnessing. 1 am four hundred feet under ground. I have neither daylight nor any artificial means of illumination, yet I can see to write, aud have written the words—" I have thousands of lamps." In the old drive there are not thousands but tens of thousands of little tiny lamps ; they never want trimming, yet they are always shining brightly. No fairy dell was ever so illuminated; no art could produce an effect so beautiful. Every bit of timber the miner has used in his work is richly studded with gems, which emit a kind of half emerald half sapphire light, each glint distinct in itself. Every protruding stone is richly gemmed with the same beautiful illumination. The most charming is the beauty of the end of the archway, taken perspectively. The old drive itself is only seven feet high and five feet wide, but the illumination of the whole is so perfect that the vista is as plain as noonday. The light aud lamps I write of are only the New Zealand glow worms. In the drive I am trying to describe they swarm in hundreds of thousands, each living gem giving out its tiny ray of phosphorous light. I have often thought what a magnificent appearance some of the crypts in the old churches at home would present if illuminated by the New Zealand glowworm ; how magnificent some of the arches would look so vividly and so livingly illuminated. The " tombs of Paris" would be painful in their grandeur if illuminated by this little insect. Damp will not kill it; it lives on old timber and damp stone; but what would be darkness but for its own illuminating power, which seems an essential to its vitality. I have seen the glow worm of the old country and the luminous plant in the Australias, but I never saw anything so beautiful as the appearance of a place illuminated by the New Zealand glow worm. There is no difficulty in obtaining a few. Get a smal! box the size of a cigar box, put a little damp moss in it, and get a brother or some friend to go up an old drive, and carefully take the insects off the timbers ; let him damp his handkerchief and cover the box and bring the little worms home, and you will thank the writer for having caused you to see one of the many beautiful insects belonging to the world we live in.

IiEEFEIt.