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Then over it all hang heavy clouds of soft-coal dust from trains and shovels, shifting down upon the black, white and mixed, and the enumerator alike; a dirty, noisy, perilous, enjoyable job. Everywhere are gangs of men, sometimes two or three gangs working together at the same task.
A sort of spiritual asphyxiation overtook one at last, in which the mere stony Briticism of the London hotel seemed to have a part. If you awoke again into that taste of soft-coal smoke, went down to another of those staggering lamp-lit breakfasts. But why staggering? "Can you not take coffee and rolls in London as well as in some Paris café"? It would seem so, yet it cannot be done.
Nourished by railroads, a division headquarters of the great A. and P., near the soft-coal beds, with a tin-plate factory, a carpet factory, a carriage factory, and a dozen other mills and factories, Torso is a black smudge in a flat green landscape from which many lines of electric railway radiate forth along the country roads.
Then way in under the portico comes the door with the name-plate, and next to it, level with the floor of the piazza or portico either you please, for it is a combination of both are two long French windows, always open in summer evenings and a-light on winter nights with the reflection of the Doctor's soft-coal fire, telling of the warmth and cheer within. For it is a cheery place.
While wilting in the enervating atmosphere, as we pursued our way from the shore, the thought naturally suggested itself that just then, on the other side of the globe, our friends at home were probably sitting before cheerful soft-coal fires and quietly enjoying the genial heat and the enlivening blaze.
Indeed, throughout all the great soft-coal country, people who consider themselves comparatively poor may find this consolation: cleanliness has been added to the virtues and beatitudes that money can not buy. Alice brightened a little as she went forward to the front door, and she brightened more when the spring breeze met her there.
There were ten of the beautiful bonds of the Great Lakes and Canadian Southern Railroad Company with their miniature locomotives and fields of wheat, and ten equally lovely bits of engraving belonging to the long-since defunct Bluff Creek and Iowa Central, ten more superb lithographs issued by the Mohawk and Housatonic in 1867 and paid off in 1882, and a variety of gorgeous chromos of Indians and buffaloes, and of factories and steamships spouting clouds of soft-coal smoke; and on the top of all was a pile of the First Mortgage Gold Six Per Cent obligations of the Chicago Water Front and Terminal Company all of them fresh and crisp, with that faintly acrid smell which though not agreeable to the nostrils nevertheless delights the banker's soul.
Wood smoke smells good, but it is just as black as the soft-coal kind." When he looked at himself a moment later in the mirror of the spring, Oliver realized that he was scarcely fit to start on a journey, since, in his energetic wielding of the smoker he had smudged his face far worse than even Polly had.
He took the chair she gave him, and looked across at her, where she sat on the other side of the hearth, in a chair lower than his, with her hands dropped in her lap, and the back of her head on her shoulders as she looked up at him. The soft-coal fire in the grate purred and flickered; the drop-light cast a mellow radiance on her face.
Outside in the sunshine-flooded canyon, long lines of cars rolled down with their freight of soft-coal; coal which would go to the ends of the earth, to places the miner never heard of, turning the wheels of industry whose products the miner would never see.
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