nger.

I remember once paying a visit to the Tump Pit at or near Rowley Regis
at a time when the men were taking their midday meal. There was a sort
of Hall of Eblis there, a roof thirty feet high or thereabouts, and the
men sat in a darkness dimly revealed by the light of one or two
tallow candles. Down in the midst of them fell a portion of the rocky
roof--enough to have filled a wheelbarrow, and enough certainly to have
put out the vital spark of any man on whom it might have fallen. One
coal-grimed man, at whose feet the mass had fallen, looked up placidly
and said, 'That stuck up till it couldn't stick no longer;' and that
was all that was said about the matter. I suppose there was a tacit
recognition of the fact that the same thing might happen in any part of
the mine at any moment, and that it was useless to attempt to run
away from it. A passive scorn of danger is an essential element in the
miner's life, and when need arises he shows an active scorn of it which
is finer than anything I have ever seen in battle.

The Pelsall Hall Colliery disaster was the hinge on which the door of my
fate was hung. I wrote an unspeakably bad novel which had that disaster
for its central incident, and it was published from Saturday to Saturday
in the _Morning News_, to the great detriment of that journal; and so
long as the story ran, angry subscribers wrote to the editor to vilify
it and its author. There was some very good work in it none the less;
and an eminent critic told me that, though it was capital flesh and
blood, it had no bones. It resulted years afterwards in 'Joseph's Coat,'
which is, if I may say so, less inchoate and formless than its dead and
buried original.

But it was not that exasperating novel which made the Pelsall Hall
disaster memorable in my personal history. I made an acquaintance
there--an acquaintance curiously begun--which did much for me. I met
there the king of all special correspondents, and had an immediate
shindy with him. There was only one decent room to be found by way of
lodging in the village, and this was in the cottage of one Bailey, a
working engineer. Mr. Bailey, without his wife's knowledge, had let
that room to me for a week at a rent of one sovereign, and Mrs. Bailey,
without her husband's knowledge, had let the room at a similar rent
to the great Special. Box and Cox encountered, each determined on his
rights and each resolute to oust the other.

I was leaving the cottage at ab