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It was black with coal-dust, and in one corner was heaped a pile of shallow baskets, such as are used in coaling vessels at Japanese ports, being slipped from hand to hand in unbroken chain up the ship's side and down again to the coal barge. The work was finished. The lighter was empty except for a crowd of coal-stained coolies which it was bringing back to Nagasaki.

There are one or two colliers in the harbor, and if you took off your coat I could send it on afterwards rubbed yourself all over with coal-dust, and shaved off your moustache, I believe you would escape." "Shave!" ejaculated the skipper, in choking accents. "Rub ! Coal-dust!" "It's your only chance," said Miss Pilbeam.

I would reach that window "Hush! Hush! The noise, the noise!" whispered the girl, waving the candle frantically. But I was determined. Again I tried. This time I slipped and fell on my hands. As I strove to get up, the cord of my gown became tangled about my feet. The girl choked; whether with coal-dust or with laughter I could not say, as she still had on her cambric-mask.

The coal-dust was a positive aid to them, for it gave them a most useful resemblance to the devil. Jock-at-a-Venture sprang up as though launched from a catapult. "Is it thou, Jock?" cried the collier, astounded. "Ay, lad!" said Jock, briefly. And caught the collier a blow under the chin that sent him flying into the obscurity of the night. Other voices sounded in the road.

A long suburb of red brick houses some with patches of garden-ground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves, and coarse rank flowers, and where the struggling vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and furnace, making them by its presence seem yet more blighting and unwholesome than in the town itself a long, flat, straggling suburb passed, they came, by slow degrees, upon a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was seen to grow, where not a bud put forth its promise in the spring, where nothing green could live but on the surface of the stagnant pools, which here and there lay idly sweltering by the black road-side.

Notwithstanding this reduction, we could always procure a sufficiency, either of hot or cold water, for ablutions, rendered doubly necessary in consequence of the atmosphere of coal-dust which we breathed. Not that it was possible to continue clean for a single hour; nevertheless, there was some comfort in making the attempt.

In the brickfields at Uxbridge, near the Drayton Station, one of the brickmakers alone will frequently contract for fifteen or sixteen thousand chaldrons of this cinder-dust, in one order. Fine coke, or coke-dust, affects the market at times as a rival; but fine coal, or coal-dust, never, because it would spoil the bricks.

Many women waited out till sunrise, drawing their soaked cloaks about their shivering bodies, kneeling in the black mud and coal-dust on the Breakwater, shrieking their prayers to be sure that God would hear, or, again, in desperate rage, stopping to tear their hair and hurl the most frightful blasphemies of the Fishmarket up toward heaven. And when dawn came, what a glorious dawn it was!

He was apparently only a year or two older than herself, and clad in blue jean overalls, blackened and smeared with oil and coal-dust. Even his youthful face, which he turned towards her, had a black smudge running across it and almost obliterating a small auburn moustache.

He crawled down a short ladder and through low passageways dripping wet and so came into the stokehole. This was a long, narrow chamber with a row of glowing furnace doors. Wet coal and coal-dust lay on the floor.