fety might not be found.

Hitherto young David had been preserved, but now he felt his strength
failing. The hot air was coming up behind. He sprang forward, he
thought that he was near the shaft. Cries, and groans, and loud,
roaring, hissing sounds were in his ears. All thought and feeling
passed from him. Not a human voice was heard throughout the long
galleries and passages of the mine, lately so full of active life. The
bodies of the men were there charred and withered, and the only sound
was the roar of the escaping gas, as it caught fire and exploded in the
far-off passages of the mine.

STORY SIX, CHAPTER 6.

Dick had wandered out in the afternoon to get a little more of the fresh
air than he could find in the hot street of the village. Not that there
was what would be called fresh air in other parts of the country. Even
the purest air was full of smoke and coal-dust and gas. He sat himself
down to rest on a stone wall, and his eye wandered over the scene.
There were the tall chimneys sending forth wreaths and clouds of smoke,
and the odd shaped buildings, and the cranks and the beams moving up and
down without ceasing, as if they could never get tired, and the railways
in all directions, with train after train of coal wagons moving rapidly
over them, some loaded, and others flying back empty from whence they
came. He had been sitting there for some time, when he saw, by the way
that people were running towards the pit's mouth, that something was
wrong. He got up, and as fast as his lame foot would let him, hurried
in the same direction. Too soon he learned what had happened. There
had been a fearful explosion. The corve, or basket, by which the men
went up and down the shaft, had been knocked to pieces, and even the
machinery over the pit had been injured. Of all those working below it
was believed that not one could have escaped.

Dick's heart sickened when he heard this. His father, his eldest
brother, and his friend, David Adams, were all below. Besides them, he
knew all the people working in the pit; men and boys, they all came
before him as he had last seen them, and now not one alive!

"Oh yes, yes; surely there must be some who have escaped," he cried out,
when he was told that all had been killed.

The sad news quickly spread, and numbers of women and children came
rushing from the village; wives to ask for their husbands, mothers for
their sons, girls for their fathers and bro