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Updated: June 10, 2025


So Margaret shook and shook until her arms were tired, but though the fine ashes all came out, there was a handful of large coals which would not go through the grate. These, her mother explained, were partly good, unburned coal, and partly poor, hard bits, called clinkers. Some people just turned them all out with the ashes and threw them away, but this was wasteful.

You will think, perhaps, that it was easy enough to get clay, and so it was, for a thick bed lay only a few yards from the stream; but what about the clinkers? I'll tell you. There was quite a mine of them, hard, shiny fragments, some of which had run just like so much black or brown glass. How did they get there, looking like so much volcanic slag?

Lying in his hot steerage bunk, stripped to his under-shirt, Carl peered through the "state-room" window to the swishing night sea, conscious of the rolling of the boat, of the engines shaking her, of bolts studding the white iron wall, of life-preservers over his head, of stokers singing in the gangway as they dumped the clinkers overboard.

"P.S. Behind the clinkers, nigh the oven, you will find the old fowl. Do not kill it; be patient; I leave it setting; if it shall have any chicks, I hereby bequeath them to you, whoever you may be. But don't count your chicks before they are hatched." The fowl proved a starveling rooster, reduced to a sitting posture by sheer debility.

In the stokehole the fires were not yet up, but by the time the ship was at sea the furnace mouths would be white hot and the men at work half naked. They not only shoveled coal into the flames, they had to spread it out as well and at intervals rake out the "clinkers" in fiery masses on the floor. On these a stream of water played, filling the chamber with clouds of steam.

The surface of that narrow strip is for the more part of broken coral lime-stone, like volcanic clinkers, and excruciating to the naked foot; in some atolls, I believe, not in Fakarava, it gives a fine metallic ring when struck. Here and there you come upon a bank of sand, exceeding fine and white, and these parts are the least productive.

From Guayaquil Oberlus proceeded to Payta; and there, with that nameless witchery peculiar to some of the ugliest animals, wound himself into the affections of a tawny damsel; prevailing upon her to accompany him back to his Enchanted Isle; which doubtless he painted as a Paradise of flowers, not a Tartarus of clinkers.

Detached masses of lava, gnarled and scraggy like huge clinkers, seemed tossed out into the sea; towers, buttresses, and battlements, shaped by the very elements of destruction, reared their stern crests against the waves; glaciers lay glittering upon the blackened slopes behind; and foaming torrents of snow-water burst through the rifted crags in front, and mingled their rage with the wild rage of the surf all was battle, and ruin, and desolation.

For forty years Capital and Labor have taken out all the things that bothered them, their laziness in understanding one another, their moral garbage, their moral clinkers, tin cans and ashes, and dumped them in what seems to them apparently to be a great backyard on this nation called The Public. And we have carted it all away and paid for carting it away without saying a word.

"Oh, Brother Jack, as you pass by, As you are now, so once was I. Just so game, and just so gay, But now, alack, they've stopped my pay. No more I peep out of my blinkers, Here I be tucked in with clinkers!"

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