ery on the surface. Two men place the
charges, and then signal to be drawn up in the cage which hangs in the
pit-eye. Once two natives were intrusted with the job. They performed
their parts beautifully till the end, when the vaster idiot of the two
scrambled into the cage, gave signal, and was hauled up before his
friend could follow.

Thirty or forty yards up the shaft all possible danger for those in the
cage was over, and the charge was accordingly exploded. Then it occurred
to the man in the cage that his friend stood a very good chance of
being, by this time, riven to pieces and choked.

But the friend was wise in his generation. He had missed the cage, but
found a coal-tub--one of the little iron trucks--and turning this upside
down, crawled into it. When the charge went off, his shelter was
battered in so much, that men had to hack him out, for the tub had made,
as it were, a tinned, sardine of its occupant. He was absolutely unhurt,
but for his feelings. On reaching the pit-bank his first words were, "I
do not desire to go down to the pit with _that_ man any more." His wish
had been already gratified, for "that man" had fled. Later on, the story
goes, when "that man" found that the guilt of murder was not at his
door, he returned, and was made a mere surface-coolie, and his brothers
jeered at him as they passed to their better-paid occupation.

Occasionally there are mild cyclones in the pits. An old working,
perhaps a mile away, will collapse: a whole gallery sinking bodily. Then
the displaced air rushes through the inhabited mine, and, to quote their
own expression, blows the pitmen about "like dry leaves." Few things are
more amusing than the spectacle of a burly Tyneside foreman who, failing
to dodge round a corner in time, is "put down" by the wind,
sitting-fashion, on a knobby lump of coal.

But most impressive of all is a tale they tell of a fire in a pit many
years ago. The coal caught light. They had to send earth and bricks down
the shaft and build great dams across the galleries to choke the fire.
Imagine the scene, a few hundred feet underground, with the air growing
hotter and hotter each moment, and the carbonic acid gas trickling
through the dams. After a time the rough dams gaped, and the gas poured
in afresh, and the Englishmen went down and leeped the cracks between
roof and dam-sill with anything they could get. Coolies fainted, and had
to be taken away, but no one died, and behind the fir