work, seldom affording more space to the digger than barely
enough to permit him to stand upright. You did not go down through a
shaft, but straight in through the side of a hill to the bowels of the
mountain, following a track on which a little donkey drew the coal to
the mouth of the mine and sent it down the incline to run up and down a
hill a mile or more by its own gravity before it reached the place of
unloading. Through one of these we marched in, Adler and I, one summer
morning, with new pickaxes on our shoulders and nasty little oil lamps
fixed in our hats to light us through the darkness, where every second
we stumbled over chunks of slate rock, or into pools of water that
oozed through from above. An old miner whose way lay past the fork in
the tunnel where our lead began showed us how to use our picks and the
timbers to brace the slate that roofed over the vein, and left us to
ourselves in a chamber perhaps ten feet wide and the height of a man.

We were to be paid by the ton--I forget how much, but it was very
little--and we lost no time getting to work. We had to dig away the
coal at the floor without picks, lying on our knees to do it, and
afterward drive wedges under the roof to loosen the mass. It was hard
work, and, entirely inexperienced as we were, we made but little
headway. As the day wore on, the darkness and silence grew very
oppressive, and made us start nervously at the least thing. The sudden
arrival of our donkey with its cart gave me a dreadful fright. The
friendly beast greeted us with a joyous bray and rubbed its shaggy
sides against us in the most companionable way. In the flickering
light of my lamp I caught sight of its long ears waving over me--I
don't believe I had seen three donkeys before in my life; there were
none where I came from--and heard that demoniac shriek, and I verily
believe I thought the evil one had come for me in person. I know that
I nearly fainted.

That donkey was a discerning animal. I think it knew when it first set
eyes on us that we were not going to overwork it; and we didn't. When,
toward evening, we quit work, after narrowly escaping being killed by a
large stone that fell from the roof in consequence of our neglect to
brace it up properly, our united efforts had resulted in barely filling
two of the little carts, and we had earned, if I recollect aright,
something like sixty cents each. The fall of the roof robbed us of all
desire to try minin