The company mined its own coal. Such as
it was, it cropped out of the hills right and left in narrow veins,
sometimes too shallow to work, seldom affording more space to the
digger than barely enough to permit him to stand upright. You did
not go down through a shaft, but straight in through the side of
a hill to the bowels of the mountain, following a track on which a
little donkey drew the coal to the mouth of the mine and sent it
down the incline to run up and down a hill a mile or more by its own
gravity before it reached the place of unloading. Through one of
these we marched in, Adler and I, one summer morning with new pickaxes
on our shoulders and nasty little oil lamps fixed in our hats to
light us through the darkness where every second we stumbled over
chunks of slate rock, or into pools of water that oozed through from
above. An old miner whose way lay past the fork in the tunnel where
our lead began showed us how to use our picks and the timbers to
brace the slate that roofed over the vein, and left us to ourselves
in a chamber perhaps ten feet wide and the height of a man.
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