Twilight and Dawn; Or, Simple Talks on the Six Days of Creation

by Caroline Pridham

We were saying just now how dark it would be in the deep mines, far underground, where no daylight can come, if it were not for the lamp which the miner carries with him wherever he goes. You may think you would rather like to go down a mine, just for once, if you were quite sure of being drawn up safely in the miners' cage, but I think you would not go down, if you thought you would have to stay even a whole week in such a dismal place.

My story is about a boy who had never been anywhere else, for he was born in a mine, and all his childhood, while other children were running about in the fields, looking up at the sky and breathing the fresh air which makes your cheeks so rosy, this little boy might turn his bright eyes this way and that, but no trees and houses and gay gardens were to be seen, far or near; for though he was five or six years old, no one had ever taken him up to the top of the mine and let him see the sky, and pick the daisies, and feel the warm sunshine. Poor boy, he was an orphan; both his parents had died before he could remember, and he had no one to care for him in the way in which your dear father and mother have always cared for you. At last one of the miners thought what a sad life it was for a child to be always down underground, and he began to take notice of the lonely little boy, who had no father and mother to love him and be good to him, and in the evenings, when his work was done, he coaxed the child to come on his knee, and used to tell him stories about that wonderful world above ground which he had never seen.

Do you not think it must have been very difficult for the kind miner to talk about the blue sky and the birds, and the grass and trees, and all the beautiful sights which most children know so well, to a child who had never seen any of them? It was indeed a difficult task, but you know there is an old saying about difficulties which tells us that "love will find out the way" to overcome them. The miner became very fond of his pet, and he found out a way of making the things of which he spoke seem real to him.

"He could show him pictures," you will say. That was what little May thought, and it would have been a very good way; but remember that there were no beautiful picture-books such as you have, down in the mine. How then could the miner teach his little friend about things above ground?

The only way in which he could do this was by means of things in the mine which the boy knew well, and had been used to all his life. So he would take his lamp, and talk to him about it, and show him how its tiny flame lighted up the darkness, and then he would point upwards, and say that far above ground there was a great lamp burning all day long, and giving light to the people who lived in that upper world.

Now you would say that a miner's lamp was a very poor picture of the glorious sun; still, this child saw that in the under world, where he lived, it made all the difference between light and darkness whether the lamps were shining or not; so the lamp was like the sun, at least in that respect, though it was so poor and dim, and such a tiny likeness of it.

In the same way—when his kind friend made the little boy look at the pails of water which were swung down into the mine, and explained to him that above ground, in that new world which he had never seen, the water ran along quickly in great streams called rivers, and that there was a great, great world of water called the sea—though you might say that a pail of water in a mine, water which would soon be used for the miners to drink or for cooking their food, would give a very poor idea indeed of the mighty ocean with its rolling waves, where the whales spout, and the ships sail on their long voyages; still, poor as it was, that water in the pail was a likeness, a type of the rivers and seas, was it not?

The children were interested in this little boy, and they wanted to know how long he lived in the mine, and what became of him afterwards; but this I could not tell them, for I never heard any more about him.

And now I want you not only to be interested in this story, but to remember why I have told it to you. You understand now, I am sure, that a type is a figure of something not present; of course, inferior to the thing it represents, as the miner's lamp was inferior to the sun, or a man's shadow on the wall is to the man himself, but giving a true idea to a certain degree.

The light given by the miner's lamp was bright when compared with that given by one little candle in a cottage window, and yet that feeble ray, quietly shining night after night, served to guide many a fisherman safely past a dangerous rock, which juts out into the sea, on the coast of one of the Orkney Isles. It was a young girl, the daughter of a fisherman, who lighted that candle and kept it burning. Her father's boat had been wrecked one wild dark night on "Lonely Rock," and his body washed ashore near his cottage. The girl, in her grief, remembered other poor fishermen, and when night came on she set a candle in the window, and watched it as she sat at her spinning wheel. She did not do this once, or twice, but through long years that coast was never without the light of her little candle, by which the men at sea might be warned off the neighbourhood of the terrible rock.