partly
compensates for the dreary look of the town itself, the comfortless
appearance of many of the miners' houses and the great heaps of slag and
refuse coal at the mouth of the mines. Mules hitched to little cars
serve to draw the coal out of several of the mines, but the largest one
is provided with an engine, which, by means of an endless rope of
twisted wire, pulls long trains of loaded cars out of the depths of the
mine and up to a high platform above the railroad, whence the coal is
pitched into the waiting cars beneath. Sixty-five railroad cars are
sometimes loaded in one day from this single mine. The coal is soft
coal, and is sold by retail at from six to seven cents a bushel.

One April day, when the woods were white and pink with the bloom of the
wild plum and crab trees and the ground was blue with violets, we rode
over to this place, and, hitching our horses to some trees growing over
the principal mine, we descended to the entrance. A miner, an
intelligent middle-aged man who was off work just then, volunteered to
be our guide, and after providing each of us with a little oil lamp like
the one he wore in his hat-brim, he led us into the dark opening that
yawned in the hillside. The passage was six or seven feet wide, and so
low that we could not stand erect. Under our feet was the narrow track,
the space between the ties being slippery with mud: over our heads and
on either hand were walls of rock, with a thick vein of coal running
through them, braced every few feet with heavy timbers. The track began
to descend, and soon we lost sight of the daylight and had to depend
entirely on the feeble glimmer of our lamps. We occasionally came to
smooth-plastered spaces in the walls, the closed-up mouths of old
side-tunnels, and placing our hands upon them felt that they were warm.
Fires were raging in the abandoned galleries, but, being shut away from
the air and from access to the main tunnel, they were not dangerous. The
dangers usually dreaded by the miners are the falling of heavy masses of
earth and rock from the roof of the gallery and the sudden flow of water
into the mine from some of the secret sources in the hillside. After
penetrating about a quarter of a mile into the mine and descending one
hundred and twenty feet, we reached the end of the main tunnel and saw
the great wheel, fixed in the solid rock, on which the endless steel
rope turned. A train of loaded cars had passed out just before we
entere