It was cool, and after the heat of a July morning, the damp freshness of the air chilled me. With dinner-pails banging against our knees, we pushed out of the hoist; and as the men crowded past, I stood with my back against a great timber and looked around me. Behind, the hoist had already sunk into the 'sump' or pit, at the bottom of the shaft, in order that the men on the second compartment might pass out into the mine; and a second later they swarmed by me—and still I stood, half-dazed by the roar of unknown sounds, my eyes blanketed by the absence of light, and my whole mind smothered and crushed.

I was standing just off the main entry or tunnel of the mine, which began on my left hand out of blackness and passed again, on my right, into a seeming wall of darkness. The low, black roof, closely beamed with great timbers, was held by long lines of great whitewashed tree-trunks. A few electric lights shone dimly through their dust-coated globes, and the yellow flames from the men’s pit-lamps, which had flared so bright in the compartment of the hoisting-cage, seemed now but thin tongues of flame that marked rather than disclosed the men.

Out of the blackness on the left, two tracks passed over a great pit and stretched on into the blackness on the right, as though into the wall of the coal itself. Then, far off, a red signal-light winked out and made distance visible; and beyond it came the sound of grinding wheels; there was the gleam of a headlight on the steel rails. The ray grew larger and two yellow sparks above it flamed out into pit-lights. A train was coming out of the entry and I waited until it should pass. With a grind of brakes it suddenly loomed out of the blackness and into the dull haze of light at the shaft-bottom. With a roar it passed by. The locomotive, a great iron box, was built like a battering-ram, the headlight set in its armor-plated bow, and behind, on two low seats, as in a racing automobile, sat the motorman and the 'trip-rider' or helper, the motorman with one hand on the great iron brake-wheel, the other on his controller, and the trip-rider swinging on his low seat, half on the motor and half over the coupling of the rocking car behind, clinging to the pole of the trolley. Their faces were black with the coal-dust,—black as the motor and their clothing,—and from their pit-lamps the flames bent back in the wind and streamed out straight along their cap-tops.

Low above the head of the trip-rider, the wheel on the trolley streaked out sudden bursts of greenish-white sparks along the wire; and as the train passed by, the roar of the locomotive gave place to the clattering of the couplings of the long string of stocky cars, each heaped high with its black load of coal. Some one seized me by the elbow.

'What’s yer number?' he asked.

'419.'

'Loader? New man?'

I nodded.

'Then come along with me.'

He was a tall, thin man, who walked with his head thrown forward and his chin against his chest as if in constant fear of striking the low beams overhead. I followed him, stumbling rather clumsily over the broken coal beside the track. The train had come to a stop over the pit between the rails, and men with iron bars were beating loose the frogs and releasing the hopper-bottoms of the cars. Heavy clouds of fine coal-dust poured up from the cars as the coal roared down into the bins; and the clanking of metal, the crash of falling coal, and the unintelligible shouting of the foreigners, filled the entry with a dull tumult of sounds.