United States or Malawi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Your faither was saying last nicht that ye're too young to gang into the pit. Ye maun be twelve years auld afore ye get doon the pit noo, ye ken. So I suppose it'll be the pithead for ye for a while." She had often dreamed her dream, even though she knew it was an impossible one, that she would like to see her laddie go right on through the Secondary School in the county town to the University.
Plumes of smoke rose out of the valley and trailed languidly across the sky, for the river flowed past well-cultivated fields, old-fashioned villages, and rows of sooty cottages that clustered round pithead towers. Human activity had set its stamp upon the sheltered dale, alike in scenes of quiet pastoral beauty and industrial ugliness.
Besides attending to the underground arrangements, the improved transit of the coals above-ground from the pithead to the shipping-place, demanded an increasing share of his attention. Every day’s experience convinced him that the locomotive constructed by him after his patent of the year 1815, was far from perfect; though he continued to entertain confident hopes of its eventual success.
Suddenly, above the rattle of the door a cracking noise was heard. A voice of agony rang through the roadway. "Run, Sir George! run!" A rattle like thunder roared through the mine. It was heard at the pithead, and the people crowded there ran hither and thither in dismay, thinking it was another explosion. Hours passed. At last in George's numbed brain there was a faint stir of consciousness.
On she battled, already feeling weak and tired; but always the thought of home waiting for her impelled her onward. Home was waiting over there waiting just two miles off, where she could see the twinkling of the lights from the pithead at which she had worked, and where she had been so happy at the dreams conjured by six and sixpence per week.
The great wheels at the pithead seemed terrible in their never-ending revolutions, as they flew round to bring up the loads of coal. The big yawning chasm, with the swinging steel rope, running away down into the great black hole, was awesome to look at, as the rope wriggled and swayed with its sinister movements; and the roar and whir of wheels, when the tables started, bewildered them.
It was as easy aye, it was easier! to work while I waited, since wait I must. I hauled down my old greasy working clothes, and went off to the pithead. They were glad enough to take me on gladder, I'm thinkin', than I was to be taken. But it was sair hard to hear the other miners laughing at me. "There he gaes the stickit comic," I heard one man say, as I passed.
These threads in the web of industry, which had shone that day for the first time, were the lives of two little children. Months passed, and Robert still worked on the pithead.
Devine, and allowed three words to drop out of him. "Sovietski no good!" He paused for a moment, set the machinery working again, and delivered five more at the pithead. "I spit me of Sovietski!" There was a painful sensation. The lot of a popular idol is in many ways an enviable one, but it has the drawback of uncertainty. Here today and gone tomorrow.
Despite her advantage the prices remain astonishingly low, when you compare them with those prevailing elsewhere. English coal, which in 1912 cost about nine shillings a ton at pithead, costs considerably more than thirty shillings today.
Word Of The Day