, but to my relief my father
laughed also. I believe that was the first real, honest, human communion
that he and I had ever known together, and Mr Randall's poem did more
to make us friends and to break down the life-long shyness which had
existed between us than anything else I can remember. I remember this
gem from Randall's hand concerning a comrade who met death by his side
in the mine in which he worked:--

"John Williams was a godly man
Whose name was on Wesleyan Methodist plan,
He rose one morning and kissed his wife
And promised to be home at night.
But ah! he met the fatal flame
And never he went home again."

The indifference with which these men lived in the face of danger was
something truly remarkable. One would barely encounter a working miner
at that time who had not, on face or hands, a deep blue mark like an
irregular tattoo, branded where the blast of the exploding gas had
driven the coal-dust into his skin, and every man thus marked had been
in imminent peril of his life at least once, and had probably found
himself in the midst of a dozen or a score of his dead comrades. After
one of my own earliest descents into the underground region of the old
Staffordshire ten-yard coal, I found myself in a great dimly lighted
hall, where the men were pursuing the dangerous task of cleaning out
the pillars which had hitherto been left to support the roof. This was
a common enough procedure at the time, and many a life was lost in it.
I was seated on an upturned wheel-barrow, talking to a doggy or ganger,
who was taking his mid-day meal of bread and meat and cold tea. We
were perhaps half a dozen yards apart when right between us from the
invisible roof, thirty feet above, a cartload of rocky fragments fell
without warning. A foot this way or that and one or other of us must
inevitably have been crushed. It was the first close and immediate
danger of which I had been conscious in my life, and I do not scruple
to say that it set me trembling and shaking and left me with a curious
sense of emptiness and nausea. But the old doggy just cocked his eye
towards the invisible roof and looked down at the heap of debris, and
saying, "That stuck up till it couldn't stuck up no longer," went on
quite composedly with his meal.

CHAPTER VII

George Dawson as Editor--Birmingham Politicians--John
Blight's Nervousness--The Black Lake Rescue--The Pelsall
Hall Colliery Disas