And yet I have Franklin and Bert to witness we paid ten cents each for two of the best melons we ever tasted.
At Paxton and at Carlisle again we came upon coal mines—that vein of soft coal which seems to underlie this whole region. Miners in droves were to be seen walking along the roads as at Wilkes-Barré, their faces smudgy, their little lamps standing up from their caps, their big tin buckets hanging on or tucked under their arms. We stopped at one town and examined the exterior of a mine because it was so near the road. Every few seconds out of its subterranean depths (three hundred and fifty feet, the man told me) up a deep, dripping shaft would come a small platform carrying several small cars of coal, which would be shunted onto a runway and “empties” pushed in to take their places. I asked the man who ran the engine in the nearby shed how many tons of coal they would take out in a day. “Oh, about four hundred,” he said.
“Any men ever killed here?”
“Yes, occasionally.”
“Recently?”
“Well, there was an explosion two years ago.”
“Many men killed?”
“Eight.”
“Were there any before that?”
“Two, about three years before.”