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Foolish man! he had been long enough in the Highlands by that time to have known that to walk down the bed of a mountain-burn was about as possible as to walk down the shaft of a coal-mine. They came to the edge of its banks, however, and, looking over, tried to pierce its gloom. There was a pale gleam of white foam a rumbling, rustling sound beneath, and a sensation of moisture in the atmosphere.
One day, while at work in the coal-mine, I happened to overhear two miners talking about a great school for coloured people somewhere in Virginia. This was the first time that I had ever heard anything about any kind of school or college that was more pretentious than the little coloured school in our town.
I had heard of him at Singapore; I had heard of him on board; I had heard of him early in the morning and late at night; I had heard of him at tiffin and at dinner; I had heard of him in a place called Pulo Laut from a half-caste gentleman there, who described himself as the manager of a coal-mine; which sounded civilized and progressive till you heard that the mine could not be worked at present because it was haunted by some particularly atrocious ghosts.
They speak only of water power and looms, but they would be valueless but for the thousands of human workers bound to the machines by bodily necessities as fixedly as if they were chained there. So of these coal-mine shares. But for the multitude of wretched beings condemned by want to labor in living graves, of what value would have been these shares which yet make no mention of them?
When vegetable matter is excluded from air and under great pressure, it decomposes slowly, parting with carbonic acid gas; and is first changed into lignite or brown coal, and then into bituminous coal, or the soft coal that burns with smoke and flame. I have been in a coal-mine where the carbonic acid gas, pouring from a crevice in the coal, put out a lighted candle.
My brother John helped me all that he could, but of course that was not a great deal, for his work was in the coal-mine, where he did not earn much, and most of what he did earn went in the direction of paying the household expenses.
I could not see the boy at all when he was a hundred feet ahead of the team. We struggled along for four miles, and, since it was then evident that we could not go much farther without useless risk, we turned to a spot on the bank where Walter knew another deserted cabin to stand; for he knows every foot of this section of the river and once spent a summer, camped at the coal-mine, fishing.
"There was very little of that, as far as I can learn; very little encouragement indeed! What we saw here was the worst of it. He was hardly with her at all at Mistletoe." "I hope it will make him more cautious; that's all," said Miss Penge. Miss Penge was now a great heiress, having had her lawsuit respecting certain shares in a Welsh coal-mine settled since we last saw her.
Look at it well, for this wood is being turned into coal; but for what was once a forest to become a coal-mine takes a very long time indeed, with a strange history of change and decay; yet it is true that the coal dug out of mines is nothing else than trees and ferns and mosses, long ago buried by mud and sand, and so crushed together that they have become like a piece of black stone.
"The fifteenth," said Caleb; smoking reflectively through another long pause before he added. "And then come the business fireworks. Have you made up your mind what-all you're goin' to do, Buddy?" "Oh, yes," said Tom, as if this were merely a matter in passing. "We'll consolidate the two plants and the coal-mine, if it's agreeable all around." The iron-master took a fresh hitch in his chair.
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