Burnham Breaker

by Homer Greene

These will surely tell you where the breaker stood. They are proud to have labored there in other years. They will speak to you of that time with pleasant memories. It was thought to be a stroke of fortune to obtain work at Burnham Breaker. It was just beyond the suburbs of the city as they then were, and near to the homes of all the workmen. The vein of coal at this point was of more than ordinary thickness, and of excellent quality, and these were matters of much moment to the miners who worked there. Then, the wages were always paid according to the highest rate, promptly and in full.

But there was something more, and more important than all this, to be considered. Robert Burnham, the chief power in the company, and the manager of its interests, was a man whose energetic business qualities and methods did not interfere with his concern for the welfare of his employees. He was not only just, but liberal and kind. He held not only the confidence but the good-will, even the affection, of those who labored under him. There were never any strikes at the Burnham mines. The men would have considered it high treason in any one to advocate a strike against the interests of Robert Burnham.

Yet it was no place for idling. There were, no laggards there. Men had to work, and work hard too, for the wages that bought their daily bread. Even the boys in the screen-room were held as closely to their tasks as care and vigilance could hold them. Theirs were no light tasks, either. They sat all day on their little benches, high up in the great black building, with their eyes fixed always on the shallow streams of broken coal passing down the iron-sheathed chutes, and falling out of sight below them; and it was their duty to pick the particles of slate and stone from out these moving masses, bending constantly above them as they worked. It was not the physical exertion that made their task a hard one; there was not much straining of the joints or muscles, not even in the constant bending of the body to that one position.

Neither was it that their tender hands were often cut and bruised by the sharp pieces of the coal or the heavy ones of slate. But it was hard because they were boys; young boys, with bounding pulses, chafing at restraint, full to the brim with life and spirit, longing for the fresh air, the bright sunlight, the fields, the woods, the waters, the birds, the flowers, all things beautiful and wonderful that nature spreads upon the earth to make of it a paradise for boys. To think of all these things, to catch brief glimpses of the happiness of children who were not born to toil, and then to sit, from dawn to mid-day and from mid-day till the sun went down, and listen to the ceaseless thunder of moving wheels and the constant sliding of the streams of coal across their iron beds,—it was this that wearied them.

To know that in the woods the brooks were singing over pebbly bottoms, that in the fields the air was filled with the fragrance of blossoming flowers, that everywhere the free wind rioted at will, and then to sit in such a prison-house as this all day, and breathe an atmosphere so thick with dust that even the bits of blue sky framed in by the open windows in the summer time were like strips of some dark thunder-cloud,—it was this, this dull monotony of dizzy sight and doleful sound and changeless post of duty, that made their task a hard one.

There came a certain summer day at Burnham Breaker when the labor and confinement fell with double weight upon the slate-pickers in the screen-room. It was circus day. The dead-walls and bill-boards of the city had been gorgeous for weeks and weeks with pictures heralding the wonders of the coming show. By the turnpike road, not forty rods from where the breaker stood, there was a wide barn the whole side of which had been covered with brightly colored prints of beasts and birds, of long processions, of men turning marvellous somersaults, of ladies riding, poised on one foot, on the backs of flying horses, of a hundred other things to charm the eyes and rouse anticipation in the breasts of boys.

Every day, when the whistle blew at noon, the boys ran, shouting, from the breaker, and hurried, with their dinner-pails, to the roadside barn, to eat and gaze alternately, and discuss the pictured wonders.

And now it was all here; beasts, birds, vaulting men, flying women, racing horses and all. They had seen the great white tents gleaming in the sunlight up in the open fields, a mile away, and had heard the distant music of the band and caught glimpses of the long procession as it wound through the city streets below them. This was at the noon hour, while they were waiting for the signal that should call them back into the dust and din of the screen-room, where they might dream, indeed, of circus joys while bending to their tasks, but that was all. There was much wishing and longing. There was some murmuring. There was even a rash suggestion from one boy that they should go, in spite of the breaker and the bosses, and revel for a good half-day in the pleasures of the show. But this treasonable proposition was frowned down without delay. These boys had caught the spirit of loyalty from the men who worked at Burnham Breaker, and not even so great a temptation as this could keep them from the path of duty.

When the bell rang for them to return to work, not one was missing, each bench had its accustomed occupant, and the coal that was poured into the cars at the loading-place was never more free from slate and stone than it was that afternoon.

But it was hot up in the screen-room. The air was close and stifling, and heavy with the choking dust. The noise of the iron-teethed rollers crunching the lumps of coal, and the bang and rattle of ponderous machinery were never before so loud and discordant, and the black streams moving down their narrow channels never passed beneath these dizzy boys in monotony quite so dull and ceaseless as they were passing this day.