ing a weight
on your shoulders. The air is lifeless and leaden. This is assuredly
The City of Dreadful Night. You feel as if you were the last survivor
in a dead world. But presently, a strong hand will take yours in his
and lead you through the Stygian darkness till your eyes become
habituated to the gloom, when you will become aware of two tracks
stretching away in the channel which has been hollowed out of the coal.
Then you will be warned to step aside and keep close to the wall while
a stocky-car holding probably three tons is, with a vast grinding of
wheels, whirled by you to the cage, there to be hoisted to the tipple.

Your guide will explain that you are in the main entry or tunnel of the
mine, and that there are other entries at right angles. These with the
rooms which open off them, are surveyed by engineers with great
exactness and according to certain regulations laid down in the mining
statutes.

Here and there in the blackness, thin tongues of flame move about like
fireflies. These are the lamps in the miners' caps. You have also a
fire-fly in your bonnet, but, of course, it is only visible to the
onlookers. These lamps are like little coffee-pots and are filled
either with carbide or seal oil. In the more modern mines which are
lighted by electricity, lamps are not required so much, although no man
ventures into the mine without one. Faith is not nearly so estimable a
virtue as sight, no matter what the theologians may say. It was a
miner poet (you must not spell it a minor poet) who wrote the lines--

"God, if you had but the moon
Stuck in your cap for a lamp,
Even you'd tire of it soon
Down in the dark and the damp.

Nothing but blackness above
And nothing moves but the cars--
God, in return for our love,
Fling us a handful of stars."

These lamps are the footlights the miners hold up to Old King Coal as
they pierce his sides with their electric drills, and wrench open his
wounds with their ripping charges of dynamite. They call this shooting
the coal, so it is just as well to keep your peculiar fantasies to
yourself.

In a coal-mine one loses his sense of direction, for there is no heaven
above, no earth beneath--nothing but silence and black impenetrableness.

And yet, when you are alone in a mine, you may hear a sound like the
sighing of great trees. This is probably the utterance of your own
blood to which you are giving audience as when you put you