Year: 1873

Has the reader any idea of what coal-pit, viewed from the earth ssurface, is like :? It has a not very imposing ap- pearance, It is simply 8 round black hole about twice the size of an ordinary "loo' table, and straddling over it is sort of gallows, a wire rope as thick as one's wrist hanging down over wheel and lost in the depths below. By and by the action is reversed, a clicking and a wheezing is heard in the adjoining engire-shed and up comes the "tub" Ia square box holding twenty-two hundred weight) filled with coal. It came up so while our little party of six q being the only novice present. was waiting to go down. I viewed the coarse, strpng tub with 9approbat ation, making sure that as soon as it was emptied. we should all get into it but in this Twas disap- pointed. It. was not in the tub, but standing on the grating on which the tub had stood, that we had to descend; or the naked. grating with nothing to "hold on" to ogbut cross-chain over head. But the pit was only six hundred feet deep, and the coal smoke that arose from the enormous mine furnace was not unbearable by the time it had be- numbed ones senses bit.

 Six hundred feet down, and a half mile this way or that under low-arched roofs, from which. depended frequent fieeces of fungus, snowy white, and looking like lambs, wool, and making the black floor and the black walls-lit by feeble tallow dips stuck there in dabs of clay-blacker than ever. y We all carried tallow dips stuck in balls of clay, and i'll Indian file followed the "Buttey" and his foreman through the turnings and windings that led to the chambers" from which coal was being hewn. Chambers as wide as an ordin ary street and as high as the top of the three-storied houses; and on every side, whenever the tiny light of the red-nosed dip was shifted, was revea1eds a human creature naked to the waist and blacker than any sweep, with savage, gleaning eyes and savage glittering teeth, sand with weapon in his hand that in the uncertain light looked like tomahawk, grinning at you, or making dash with his weapon apparently in the direction of your visage, but which alights harm lessly on the face of the coal wall.

 Heavers, packers, tubbers, filters, these are all men, and hard as the work is they earn good wages, and if they dislike the labor they are at liberty to leave it. But they don't dislike the labor, and they are jolly enough-al ex- cept the, boys. It was these boys that so perpetua11y haunted my coal-scuttle when I returned from Staffordshire. It is villainously cruel to serve the poor little chaps so. The matter stands this way. The newer is the man whose business it is to break in" at the foot of coal wall. He lies on his sides or on his stomach, and he breaks in with his peck right along for length, say of twenty feet. Naturally in the process of pecking he makes deal of "slack, ]" and the boy in question is called the "slack boy" Regarded as a boy, as a human creature, he is slack indeed. He is not much like boy. He is more like large-sized monkey. All fours is his perpetual posture, and he wears a leather girdle about his waist from which an iron chain depends, the other end of it being attached to an iron cart The slack boy has an iron shovel as we'll, and the business of his wretched life is to crawl in at the hole the newer makes, to fill his cart with chips and dust, and then to crawl out again with his load, always on his hands and knees, and with his poor limbs hung about with few rags of which nakedness might be ashamed.-Loa1do,a Society.