Title: The Underground City
Author: Jules Verne
CHAPTER I
CONTRADICTORY LETTERS
To Mr. F. R. Starr, Engineer, 30 Canongate, Edinburgh.
IF Mr. James Starr will come to-morrow to the Aberfoyle coal-mines,
Dochart pit, Yarrow shaft, a communication of an interesting nature
will be made to him.
"Mr. James Starr will be awaited for, the whole day,
at the Callander station, by Harry Ford, son of the old
overman Simon Ford."
"He is requested to keep this invitation secret."
Such was the letter which James Starr received by the first post,
on the 3rd December, 18--, the letter bearing the Aberfoyle postmark,
county of Stirling, Scotland.
The engineer's curiosity was excited to the highest pitch.
It never occurred to him to doubt whether this letter might
not be a hoax. For many years he had known Simon Ford,
one of the former foremen of the Aberfoyle mines, of which he,
James Starr, had for twenty years, been the manager, or,
as he would be termed in English coal-mines, the viewer.
James Starr was a strongly-constituted man, on whom his fifty-five
years weighed no more heavily than if they had been forty.
He belonged to an old Edinburgh family, and was one of its
most distinguished members. His labors did credit to the body
of engineers who are gradually devouring the carboniferous
subsoil of the United Kingdom, as much at Cardiff and Newcastle,
as in the southern counties of Scotland. However, it was more
particularly in the depths of the mysterious mines of Aberfoyle,
which border on the Alloa mines and occupy part of the county
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