nown, and he is reminded that "Britons never
shall be slaves"--to things that destroy good work as well as souls.
Maybe the Company acts only in its own interest, but the result is good.

Best and prettiest of the many good and pretty things in Jamalpur is the
institute of a Saturday when the Volunteer Band is playing and the
tennis courts are full and the babydom of Jamalpur--fat, sturdy
children--frolic round the band-stand. The people dance--but big as the
institute is, it is getting too small for their dances--they act, they
play billiards, they study their newspapers, they play cards and
everything else, and they flirt in a sumptuous building, and in the hot
weather the gallant apprentice ducks his friend in the big
swimming-bath. Decidedly the railway folk make their lives pleasant.

Let us go down southward to the big Giridih collieries and see the coal
that feeds the furnace that smelts the iron that makes the sleeper that
bears the loco. that pulls the carriage that holds the freight that
comes from the country that is made richer by the Great Company Badahur,
the East Indian Railway.

THE GIRIDIH COAL-FIELDS

CHAPTER I

ON THE SURFACE.

Southward, always southward and easterly, runs the Calcutta Mail from
Luckeeserai, till she reaches Madapur in the Sonthal Parganas. From
Madapur a train, largely made up of coal-trucks, heads westward into the
Hazaribagh district and toward Giridih. A week would not have exhausted
"Jamalpur and its environs," as the guide-books say. But since time
drives and man must e'en be driven, the weird, echoing bund in the hills
above Jamalpur, where the owls hoot at night and hyenas come down to
laugh over the grave of "Quilem Roberts, who died from the effects of an
encounter with a tiger near this place, A.D. 1864," goes undescribed.
Nor is it possible to deal with Monghyr, the headquarters of the
district, where one sees for the first time the age of Old Bengal in the
sleepy, creepy station, built in a time-eaten fort, which runs out into
the Ganges, and is full of quaint houses, with fat-legged balustrades on
the roofs. Pensioners certainly, and probably a score of ghosts, live in
Monghyr. All the country seems haunted. Is there not at Pir Bahar a
lonely house on a bluff, the grave of a young lady, who, thirty years
ago, rode her horse down the cliff and perished? Has not Monghyr a
haunted house in which tradition says sceptics have seen much more than
they cou