shaft wi' their
eyes all red an' swollen an' achin'. No, it warn't from gas, it was
just from rubbin' em to keep em' open. An' rubbin' your eyes with
hands all gritty with coal-dust ain't any too good for 'em."

"Well, Otto," the young fellow interrupted, "you can't deny that
modern methods have improved all that. There aren't any door-boys in a
modern mine. Most of the States in this country have passed laws
requiring that all doors through which coal cars pass must be operated
automatically. The United States Bureau of Mines keeps a sharp
lookout, too. There aren't any donkeys, either, not in up-to-date
mines; endless-chain conveyors take the coal from the face where the
miner has dug it clear to the mouth of the shaft, and load it into the
buckets by a self-tipping device. As for small boys in a mine, as you
said yourself, there aren't any, not in the United States, anyhow."

"I'm not denyin' that minin' has got easier," was the grudging reply,
"it'd be a wonder if it hadn't. What I'm sayin' is that all your
newfangled schemes don't stop accidents and won't never stop
accidents, not till you get rid o' the knockers an' gas sprites of a
mine. An' that you'll never do!

"You're like a whole lot o' these young fellows, Clem, who believe
nothin' that they don't see. You don't never stop to think that maybe
it's your own blindness an' not your own cleverness that keeps you
from seem'. Wait till I tell you what happened to me, one time, when I
was a door-boy in Germany.

"Long afore I first went down into a coal mine, I knew about the
knockers, and where they come from. Dad told me that all the
coal-seams o' the world were forests, once. Long afore Noah an' the
Flood. He'd seen ferns an' leaves o' trees turned into coal. One time,
when digging out a seam, he'd come across the trunk of a tree standin'
upright in the coal, with the roots still in the under clay."

"That's right enough," agreed Clem, "but the coal-forests were a good
many million years older than Noah!"

"Maybe, maybe; but you warn't there to see," Otto retorted. "Anyhow,
there were forests, an' these forests were standin' afore the Flood.
Judgin' by what's left, the trees o' these forests must ha' been big.

"All those trees, Dad used to say, had spirits o' their own, just like
trees have to-day. Elves an' dryads, he used to call 'em. When the
Flood came an' spread deep water over the whole world, the tops o' the
hills were washed into the valleys a