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Updated: May 1, 2025
If little Nan and his grandfather were to be provided for, he must be a man, with a man's thoughtfulness, doing man's work. There seemed enough work for him to do in the field and garden alone, without his twelve hours' toil in the coal-pit; but his weekly wages would now be more necessary than ever.
I have been dragged, half-drowned like a rotten ewe, from the bottom of a river; and who knows but I may be next dragged quite dead from the bottom of a coal-pit if so be as I am, I shall go to hell to be sure, for being consarned like in my own moorder, that I will, so I will; for, a plague on it! I had no business with the vagaries of this crazy-peated measter of mine, a pox on him, say I."
So long as the sunlight inspires our Rat with confidence, however, he will work at his coal-pit, while one comrade is away in the forest, snaring game, and another has, perhaps, been dispatched to the precincts of civilization with his wagon-load of coal.
The coal which has been drawn from below ground is blazing on the surface. The district is crowded with iron furnaces, puddling furnaces, and coal-pit engine furnaces. By day and by night the country is glowing with fire, and the smoke of the ironworks hovers over it. There is a rumbling and clanking of iron forges and rolling mills.
Many landed proprietors who have rich veins of coal on their estates, are, under the present regulation, actually compelled to purchase the Agricultural Company's coal for the use of their own kitchens. It may well be imagined, that the money is paid with a very bad grace. Up to the time I left Sydney, the only coal-pit in operation was one at Newcastle, at the mouth of the river Hunter.
The rags which cover them leave no room for the observer to guess at the sex. Only one person upon the premisses presumes to carry a belly, and he a landlord. We might as well look for the moon in a coal-pit, as for stays or white linen in the City of Mud. The principal tool in business is the hammer, and the beast of burden, the ass.
On reaching the notable age of six years, a very important change came over the even course of his young life. His parents sent him to work in a coal-pit; people in these days will scarcely credit such a thing, but it is nevertheless true; nor was this an extraordinary case, for children of poor parents were commonly sent to work in the pits at that early age, when Abe was a child.
To this subterranean office there are two entrances, one through the cellar of the house, the other down steps from the garden. The steps were beams the size of a railroad-tie. Had they not been whitewashed they would look like the shaft leading to a coal-pit. A soldier who was an artist in plaster had decorated the entrance to the shaft with an ornamental façade worthy of any public building.
His road lay down a steep brow after he had passed along one field which separated the village from a wooded gorge. Here all had once been green and beautiful in spring and summertime; but now, for many years past, thick clouds of smoke from coal-pit engines and iron furnaces had given to trees and shrubs a sickly hue. Nature had striven in vain against the hot black breath of reeking chimneys.
Let oak branches smite the too slowly stooping skull, or rider's back not timely levelled with his steed's; let faithless bank give way, and bury in the brook; let hidden drain yield to fore feet and work a sudden wreck; let old coal-pit, with briery mouth, betray; and roaring river bear down man and horse, to banks unscaleable by the very Welsh goat; let duke's or earl's son go sheer over a quarry fifty feet deep, and as many high; yet, "without stop or stay, down the rocky way," the hunter train flows on; for the music grows fiercer and more savage, lo! all that remains together of the pack, in far more dreadful madness than hydrophobia, leaping out of their skins, under insanity from the scent, now strong as stink, for Vulpes can hardly now make a crawl of it; and ere he, they, whipper-in, or any one of the other three demoniacs, have time to look in one another's splashed faces, he is torn into a thousand pieces, gobbled up in the general growl; and smug, and smooth, and dry, and warm, and cozey, as he was an hour and twenty-five minutes ago exactly, in his furze bush in the cover, he is now piece-meal, in about thirty distinct stomachs; and is he not, pray, well off for sepulture?
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