better places for himself about the
breaker and the mines, as his age and strength would permit, and so to
do his work as to gain the confidence of his employers. When he should
become old enough, he would be a miner's laborer, then a miner, and
perhaps, eventually, he might rise to the position of a mine boss.
He would improve his leisure with self study, get what schooling he
could, and, finally, as the height of his ambition, he hoped that,
some day, he might become a mining engineer; able to sink shafts, to
direct headings, to map out the devious courses of the mine, or to
build great breakers like the one in which he spent his days.

Having marked out his course he began to follow it. He labored
earnestly and with a will. The breaker boss said that no cleaner coal
was emptied into the cars at the loading place than that which came
down through Ralph's chute.

His plan was successful as it was bound to be, and it was not long
before a better place was offered to him. It was that of a driver boy
in the mine below the breaker. He accepted it; the wages were much
better than those he was now receiving, and it was a long step ahead
toward the end he had in view.

But the work was new and strange to him. He did not like it. He did
not think, at first, that he ever could like it. It was so dark in
the mines, so desolate, so lonely. He grew accustomed to the place,
however, as the days went by, and then he began not to mind it so
much after all. He had more responsibility here, but the work was not
so tiresome and monotonous as it had been in the screen-room, and he
could be in motion all the time.

He went down the shaft every morning with a load of miners and
laborers, carrying his whip and his dinner-pail, and a lighted lamp
fastened to the front of his cap. When he reached the bottom of
the shaft he hurried to the inside plane, and up the slope to the
stables to get his mule. The mule's name was Jasper. Nobody knew why
he had been named Jasper, but when Ralph called him by that name he
always came to him. He was a very intelligent animal, but he had
an exceedingly bad habit of kicking.

It was Ralph's duty to take the mule from the stable, to fasten him
to a trip of empty mine cars, and to make him draw them to the little
cluster of chambers at the end of the branch that turned off from the
upper-level heading.

This was the farthest point from the shaft in the entire mine. The
distance from the head of the pl