hen the noxious
vapors from the coal-mines rise to the surface and poison the very
air--then men sicken and die.

All through the day Ivan had felt cold shudders running over his whole
body. His limbs were contracted by that unpleasant feeling called
goose-skin, and when he got home he shivered, although his room was
warm. He was restless, uneasy. He could occupy himself with nothing;
everything palled upon him. The worst symptom of all, he could not
even work.

When a man refuses food or drink, when he does not care for the
company of a pretty woman, when his club wearies him, these are
unhealthy signs; but when he turns away from work, and finds no longer
any interest in his usual occupation, then it is time to send for the
physician.

Ivan's head throbbed, yet he could not sleep, and to stay awake was
torture. He lay down, and with a resolute effort closed his eyes. A
panorama of past, present, and future kept dancing before him. Peter
Saffran's hot, stinking breath seemed to breathe again in his
nostrils, and the very horror brought back to his memory the man's
long-forgotten words:

"No more during my life shall I drink brandy--_only once_; and when I
do, and when you smell from my breath that I have been drinking, or
see me coming out of the public-house, then take my advice and stop
safe at home, for on that day no man shall know in what manner he
shall die."

Who cares for the threat of a drunken man? Let me sleep. No, the
drunken man would not allow Ivan to sleep; his breath was there.
Faugh! it made him sick. His blear-eyed, pallid face was there bending
over the bed, looking into Ivan's eyes with his blood-shot eyes; his
open mouth and shut teeth came quite close to the sleeper, who, vainly
beating his arms in the air, tried to drive away this horrid
nightmare.

Ah, what is that sound? A crack like the crack of doom awoke Ivan; not
alone awoke him, but threw him violently out of bed and on to the
floor, where he lay stunned.

His first consecutive thoughts were, "The choke-damp has exploded! My
mine is in ruins!" This was enough to get him on his legs and to send
him out in the darkness--darkness, raven-black darkness, the stillness
only broken by a whistling sound in the air. Ivan stood for a moment
wondering. He felt the earth swaying under his feet; he heard a
subterranean grumbling. There! the pitch-dark night was suddenly
illumined; a bright pillar of fire rose out of the Bondavara Company's