A German foreman says, “I have sat and listened to the miners of different nations telling of spooks and ghosts seen in the mines and other places, but, if one questions them closely, it is a brother or an uncle who saw it, and not the man himself.”
The Welsh were formerly very superstitious, but they are not so now. Says one, “We do not believe in signs or omens, or that any flesh can see spirits.” Another tells me that the belief in hobgoblins, ghosts, witches, fairies, and all kinds of signs and omens prevailed in Wales in his childhood, until about thirty years ago a very eminent Baptist minister, Robert Ellis, brought out a work called Ofergoelion y Cymry (or Superstitions of the Welsh), which attracted a great deal of attention, and had great effect upon the minds of the people in banishing all these ideas.
In spite of the efforts of their clergy the Irish still keep up wakes at funerals, watching the body of the dead. I am told that the friends of the family do not feel like sleeping, being sorrowful. In the old country neighbors would gather whether invited or not, and games would be introduced to keep them awake, but this custom is not followed here.
A Scotchman says that he thinks the Irish attend “buryings” better than any other nationality. At Scranton they impoverish themselves by the train of carriages hired to attend funerals. “It was a funeral of fifty carriages;” thus they estimate the honor and glory of the occasion. But that number was exceeded at the funeral of a poor Irishwoman at Scranton, when there were about one hundred and forty “rigs,”—the name given here to turnouts.
The Welsh do not make such display. A prominent Welsh citizen, a man of means, apparently wishing to set an example, hired only one carriage when burying his son, and walked himself in the funeral procession.
The chief hardship of the miner is the insecurity of his life. He is liable to accidents at any moment, either in blasting the coal, or from the falling of the roof in the passages and chambers of the mine, or from the explosion of fire-damp,—carburetted hydrogen gas,—an extremely explosive substance generated in the mine.
By an awful accident which occurred in the Avondale mine, more than one hundred men were suffocated below. At Scranton are interred the remains of about sixty of these sufferers. The fatal accident is supposed to have occurred thus. Over each of the mining shafts is erected a breaker or cracker,—an immense wooden structure,—to the top of which the loaded cars are drawn up and then “dumped,” the coal in its gradual downward progress being sorted, the greater part of it broken, sifted, and delivered into the cars beneath. The mine at Avondale was ventilated by means of a furnace or great fire, causing a draught. From this it is generally supposed that the breaker took fire, and this in turn set to burning a great body of coal; and as there was at the Avondale mine only one way of egress,—that is, up the shaft,—the men perished below.
At Scranton I saw a sad though simple ballad upon this disaster:
“But all in vain. There was no hope
One single life to save,