y swore in half a
dozen languages--they gritted their teeth and vowed that they wouldn't
be treated like pigs.

[Illustration: In a Mucker's Camp in Alabama]

[Illustration: Irvine and Three Other Muckers as They Left Greenwich
Street for the South]

We went to the wash-house and the outlook was less encouraging. There
was a long, narrow trough in the centre. It was half full of red ore.
The floor was wet and covered with ore, rags, old papers and other
rubbish. There were compartments intended for shower-baths, but there
again the work had been arrested and was incomplete. We washed, made
our beds, ate dinner and proceeded to the company store to be fitted
out.

Each man was furnished with a number. By that number he was to be
known while in the company's employ. Each man showed his number and
drew what he needed--overalls, lamps, and heavy boots. There was
nothing niggardly in the credit. The deeper the debt the tighter the
grip on the debtor. The goods cost just one hundred per cent. more
than anywhere else. The company paid wages once a month. If a labourer
borrowed of his own within that time, he paid ten per cent. on the
loan.

As we came back from the store, the miners were just leaving the mines
and it was interesting to see them gaze into our faces and address us
in Russian, Hungarian, Swedish and various other languages. It was
one of the excitements of camp life--to inspect and classify the
newcomers.

One of the men had a wheezy accordion and he relieved the monotony of
the evening with some German airs. The big shed was unlighted, save as
each man was his own lamp-post. Each made his own bed by the light of
the lamp on his cap. As he undressed, the cap was the last article to
be set aside and the extinguishing of the smoky, flickering blaze the
last act of the night.

As the first streak of the gray dawn came in through the bare windows,
four of our gang dressed and deliberately marched out of the
camp--never to return.

The first number in the programme of a "mucker's" toilet is to adjust
his cap with his lamp in it, trimmed and burning. The second is to
light his pipe; then he dresses.

It was half-past five and still dark, when those nude, shaggy men with
heads ablaze with smoky, flickering lamps, began to move around. They
looked grotesque--unearthly--denizens of some underground pit. They
were good-humoured and full of boisterous laughter.

A breakfast of pork, beans, potatoes, bread and