fixed always on the shallow
streams of broken coal passing down the iron-sheathed chutes, and
falling out of sight below them; and it was their duty to pick the
particles of slate and stone from out these moving masses, bending
constantly above them as they worked. It was not the physical exertion
that made their task a hard one; there was not much straining of the
joints or muscles, not even in the constant bending of the body to
that one position.

Neither was it that their tender hands were often cut and bruised by
the sharp pieces of the coal or the heavy ones of slate. But it was
hard because they were boys; young boys, with bounding pulses, chafing
at restraint, full to the brim with life and spirit, longing for the
fresh air, the bright sunlight, the fields, the woods, the waters, the
birds, the flowers, all things beautiful and wonderful that nature
spreads upon the earth to make of it a paradise for boys. To think of
all these things, to catch brief glimpses of the happiness of children
who were not born to toil, and then to sit, from dawn to mid-day and
from mid-day till the sun went down, and listen to the ceaseless
thunder of moving wheels and the constant sliding of the streams of
coal across their iron beds,--it was this that wearied them.

To know that in the woods the brooks were singing over pebbly bottoms,
that in the fields the air was filled with the fragrance of blossoming
flowers, that everywhere the free wind rioted at will, and then to
sit in such a prison-house as this all day, and breathe an atmosphere
so thick with dust that even the bits of blue sky framed in by
the open windows in the summer time were like strips of some dark
thunder-cloud,--it was this, this dull monotony of dizzy sight and
doleful sound and changeless post of duty, that made their task a hard
one.

There came a certain summer day at Burnham Breaker when the labor and
confinement fell with double weight upon the slate-pickers in the
screen-room. It was circus day. The dead-walls and bill-boards of the
city had been gorgeous for weeks and weeks with pictures heralding the
wonders of the coming show. By the turnpike road, not forty rods from
where the breaker stood, there was a wide barn the whole side of which
had been covered with brightly colored prints of beasts and birds, of
long processions, of men turning marvellous somersaults, of ladies
riding, poised on one foot, on the backs of flying horses, of a
hundred other