and a quicker intelligence than that of any of
his young companions. He was the only son of Gilbert Sterling, who had
been one of the mining engineers connected with the Raven Brook
Colliery. The father had been disabled by an accident in the mines, and
after lingering for more than a year, had died a few months before the
date of this story, leaving a wife and two children, Derrick and little
Helen.

For nearly five years before his father's death Derrick had attended a
boarding-school near Philadelphia; but the sad event made a vast
difference in his prospects for life, and compelled his return to the
colliery village that he called home.

Mr. Sterling had always lived up to his moderate income, and though his
salary was continued to the time of his death, the family then found
themselves confronted by extreme poverty. They owned their little
vine-covered cottage, at one end of the straggling village street, and
in this Mrs. Sterling began to take boarders, with the hope of thus
supporting her children. Her struggle was a hard one, and when one of
the boarders, who was superintendent of the breaker, or "breaker boss,"
offered Derrick employment in his department, the boy was so anxious to
help his mother that he gladly accepted the offer. Nothing else seemed
open to him, and anything was better than idleness. So, after winning a
reluctant consent from his mother, Derrick began to earn thirty-five
cents a day, at that hardest and most monotonous of all forms of
youthful labor, picking slate in a coal-breaker.

He had been brought up and educated so differently from any of his
companions of the chutes that the life was infinitely harder for him
than for them. He hated dirt, and loved to be nice and clean, which
nobody could be for a minute in the breaker. He also loved the sunlight,
the fields, and the woods; but no sunshine ever penetrated the thick
dust-clouds within these walls. In the summer-time it shone fierce and
hot on the long sloping roof, just above the boys' heads, until the
interior was like an oven, and in winter they were chilled by the cold
winds that blew in through the ever-open windows.

Here, and under these conditions, Derrick must work from seven o'clock
in the morning until six in the evening. At noon the boys were allowed
forty minutes in which to eat the luncheons brought in their little tin
pails, and draw a few breaths of fresh air. During the first few weeks
of this life there were times