s a _hard_ brick, it was a non-porous brick. It was an
ugly brick, painfully heavy and parched-looking.

This time he was sure: Dame Fortune would rise like Persephone out
of the earth. He was all the more sure, because other men of the
town were in with him at this venture: sound, moneyed grocers and
plumbers. They were all going to become rich.

Klondyke lasted a year and a half, and was not so bad, for in the
end, all things considered, James had lost not more than five per
cent. of his money. In fact, all things considered, he was about
square. And yet he felt Klondyke as the greatest blow of all. Miss
Pinnegar would have aided and abetted him in another scheme, if it
would but have cheered him. Even Miss Frost was nice with him. But
to no purpose. In the year after Klondyke he became an old man, he
seemed to have lost all his feathers, he acquired a plucked,
tottering look.

Yet he roused up, after a coal-strike. Throttle-Ha'penny put new
life into him. During a coal-strike the miners themselves began
digging in the fields, just near the houses, for the surface coal.
They found a plentiful seam of drossy, yellowish coal behind the
Methodist New Connection Chapel. The seam was opened in the side of
a bank, and approached by a footrill, a sloping shaft down which the
men walked. When the strike was over, two or three miners still
remained working the soft, drossy coal, which they sold for
eight-and-sixpence a ton--or sixpence a hundredweight. But a mining
population scorned such dirt, as they called it.

James Houghton, however, was seized with a desire to work the
Connection Meadow seam, as he called it. He gathered two miner
partners--he trotted endlessly up to the field, he talked, as he had
never talked before, with inumerable colliers. Everybody he met he
stopped, to talk Connection Meadow.

And so at last he sank a shaft, sixty feet deep, rigged up a
corrugated-iron engine-house with a winding-engine, and lowered his
men one at a time down the shaft, in a big bucket. The whole affair
was ricketty, amateurish, and twopenny. The name Connection Meadow
was forgotten within three months. Everybody knew the place as
Throttle-Ha'penny. "What!" said a collier to his wife: "have we got
no coal? You'd better get a bit from Throttle-Ha'penny." "Nay,"
replied the wife, "I'm sure I shan't. I'm sure I shan't burn that
muck, and smother myself with white ash."

It was in the early Throttle-Ha'penny days that Mrs. Hou