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London, that immense heart, with its systole and diastole, its ebb and flow and putrefying growth, lay beating behind me. Ahead lay that grey, brooding North, that vast coal-field whose output had made us masters of the world. Take it how you will, you must have roads. That is America's need to day roads. Without roads no art, no literature, no real progress. No canals or railroads will do.
In the South Welsh coal-field Millstone Grit occurs in like manner at the base of the productive coal. It is called by the miners the "Farewell Rock," as when they reach it they have no longer any hopes of obtaining coal at a greater depth in the same district.
Our sudden exodus from Bedford Place had been determined upon immediately after Chad's dismal failure to locate the coal-field: Fitz having carried the day against Yancey, Kerfoot, and even the agent himself, who was beginning to waver under the accumulation of uncertainties. "Dat's enough roses to bury up de dishes. Rub yo' nose down in 'em. Ain't dey sweet! Now, come along wid me, Major.
The Derbyshire coal-field is not of sufficient magnitude to supply, for any long period, more than is required for home consumption, and that of the adjacent counties.
Turning, however, to that part of the coal-field regarded as precarious, and consisting of first, second, and third-rate household coal, we have for future use 300 square miles. London was formerly supplied from the pits east of Tyne Bridge, where is the famous Wallsend Colliery, which gave the name to the best coal.
They vary in thickness from six inches to more than ten feet; and Sir William Logan first announced to the scientific world in 1841 that they were regarded by the colliers in South Wales as an essential accompaniment of each of the eighty or more seams of coal met with in their coal-field.
In Stafford-shire, too, which is now almost the middle of England, another small coal-field tells the same story, while in South Wales the deep coal-mines and number of coal-seams remind us how for centuries and centuries forests must have flourished and have disappeared over and over again under the sand of the sea. But what is it that has changed these beds of dead plants into hard, stony coal?
This strike had no such consequences for the consuming public as attended the anthracite coal strike of 1902, which was more bitterly fought in that it was a conflict over wages. The standard of living had been lowered in one of the coal-fields by the introduction of cheap foreign labor. Now the same process threatened the other coal-field.
Again, in the remarkable basin of the Saône-et-Loire, although there are but ten beds of coal, two of them run from 30 to 60 feet each, whilst at Creusot the main seam actually runs locally to a thickness varying between 40 and 130 feet. The Belgian coal-field stretches in the form of a narrow strip from 7 to 9 miles wide by about 100 miles long, and is divided into three principal basins.
At the Farnbrook Coal-field, in the Red Colt Pit, my inexperience nearly ended my life: for though I had a minute theoretical knowledge of all British workings, I was, in my practical relation to them, like a man who has learnt seamanship on shore.
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