pages he added, "This is the one I read. I'd like to read some more if you happen to have another of them books handy.'

Too amazed for speech, afraid, indeed, of scaring away the shy bird by questions, I handed him the August Atlantic.

The next morning when I presented him with two old books, Snowbound and the Courtship of Miles Standish, his face beamed even more radiantly than when I had given him a ticket to the circus, and a few days later he said, 'I'm learnin' some o' them books by heart. I like 'em better even than the po'try in the yellow-backs.'

Now, how will you explain the love of poetry in this ignorant boy? Is it merely an accident? Is Charlie a freak, a reversion to an extinct type? Or is the explanation to be found partly in environment?

That question brought to light a few facts about the boy's home. The

fourth in a family of eight children, Charlie has had considerable experience in caring for the babies, especially in putting them to bed. He confided to me that 'the quickest way to put a real little baby to sleep is to jog her while you sing.'

'What do you sing?' I inquired.

'Oh, hymns or 'most anything 'll do. I know a lot of baby-songs I've heard my mother sing.'

Charlie's father is a milkman, a reformed drunkard, who beats the drum and relates his experience in the Salvation-Army meetings on the streetcorner. His mother, a little slip of a woman, leads the singing. Brought up on baby-songs and Salvation-Army hymns, Charlie has developed a love for po'try in any form, hot or cold, even the conventional sonnet.

Dare I hazard a generalization from one instance? If all babies were hushed to sleep with song, might not the next generation be musical and poetic?

TEN days after my graduation from Harvard I took my place as an unskilled workman in one of the largest of the great soft-coal mines that lie in the Middle West. It was with no thought of writing my experiences that I chose my occupation, but with the intention of learning by actual work the 'operating end' of the great industry, in the hope that such practical knowledge as I should acquire would fit me to follow the business successfully. That this mine was operated in direct opposition to the local organization of union labor and had won considerable notoriety by successfully mining coal in spite of the most active hostility, gave an added interest to the work. The physical conditions of the mine were the most perfect that modern engineering has devised: the 'workings' were entirely electrified; the latest inventions in coalmining machinery were everywhere employed, and every precaution for the safety of the men was followed beyond the letter of the law.

I

It was half-past six on a July morning when the day-shift began streaming out of the wash-house: some four hundred men,-white, black, and of perhaps

VOL. 106 NO.5

twenty-eight nationalities, -dressed in their tattered, black, and greasy mineclothes. The long stream wound out of the wash-house door, past the powerhouse where the two big generators that feed the arteries of the great mine all day long with its motive power were screaming in a high, shrill rhythm of sound, -past the tall skeleton structure of the tipple-tower, from which the light morning breeze blew black clouds of coal-dust as it eddied around the skeleton of structural iron-work, — to a small house at the mine-mouth, sheathed in corrugated iron, where the broken line formed a column, and the men, one by one, passed through a gate by a small window and gave their numbers to a red-faced man who checked down in a great book the men who were entering the mine.

From the window we passed along to a little inclosure directly above the mouth of the main hoisting-shaft. Sheer above it the black tower of the tipple pointed up into the hot, blue morning sky; and the dull, dry heat of the flat Illinois country seemed to sink down around it. But from the square, black mouth of the shaft a strong, steady blast of cool air struck the faces of the men who stood at the head of the little column waiting for the next hoist.

On the one side of the shaft-mouth, long lines of empty railroad cars stretched out beyond into the flat country, each waiting its turn to be filled some time during the day with coal that would come pouring down over the great screens in the tipple; and on the other side of the shaft-mouth, under the seamed roof of the building where the checker wrote down the numbers of the day-shift, sat the hoisting engineer - a scrawny, hard-faced man with a minecap pushed back from his forehead.

Beside him was the great drum on which the long steel cables that lifted and lowered the hoisting-cage were rapidly unwinding, and in his hand he held a lever by which he controlled the ascent or descent of the 'cage.' The first cage had been lowered, and as I watched him and the dial before him, I saw his hand follow his eye, and as the white arrow passed the 300-foot level, the hand drew back a notch and the long, lithe wire began to uncoil more slowly. Three hundred and fifty feet and another notch and as the arrow reached near the 400-foot mark, his foot came down hard on the brake, and a minute later a bell at his elbow sounded the signal of the safe arrival of the hoist. A minute, and another signal; and then, releasing his foot from the brake, and pulling another lever toward him, the drums, reversed, began to re-wind; and as the arrow flew backwards, I realized that the cage was nearing the top, the cage on which a minute later I was to make my descent as a 'loader' into one of the largest, and perhaps most famous, of the vast soft-coal mines that lie in our Middle States.

As the thin cables streamed upward and over the sheave-wheels above the shaft and down to the reeling-drums, I looked at the men about me and felt a sudden mortification at the clean blue of my overalls, and the bright polish on my pick and shovel. A roar at the

shaft-mouth, the grind of the drums as the brakes shot in, and the cage lifted itself suddenly from the shaft.

The cage, or elevator, on which the men were lowered into the mine, was a great steel box divided into four superimposed compartments, each holding ten men, and I stood, with nine others, crowded on the first or lowest deck. As the last man pushed into his place and we stood shoulder to shoulder, the hoisting engineer slowly slipped his lever again toward him, and as slowly the cage sank. Then, in an instant, the white-blue of the sky was gone, except for a thin crack below the deck above us, through which a sheet of white light sliced in and hung heavily in the dusty air of our compartment. The high song of the generators in the power-house, the choking puffs of the switch-engine in the yards, and the noise of men and work which I had not noticed before, I now suddenly missed in the absence of sound. There was a shuffling of feet on the deck above, and again we sank, and this time all was darkness, while we paused for the third deck to fill. Once more and again for the fourth. Then, as the cage started and the roar of the shoes on the guide-rails struck my ears, I looked at the men about me. They were talking in a whirr of foreign words; and in the greasy yellow light of their pit-lamps, which hung like miniature coffee-pots in the brims of their caps, the strong, hard lines of their faces deepened. The working day was begun.

As the cage shot down, the wall of the shaft seemed to slip up, and from its wet, slimy surface an occasional spatter of mud shot in on the faces of the miners. Strong smells of garlic, of sweat, and of burning oil filled the compartment, and the air, which sucked up through the cracks beneath our feet as though under the force of a piston, fanned and pulled the yellow flames in the men's caps into smoking streaks.

Then I felt the speed of the 'hoist' diminish. A pressure came in my ears and I swallowed hard; and a second later, a soft yet abrupt pause in our descent brought me down on my heels. The black wall of the shaft before me suddenly gave away and we came to a stop on the bottom of the mine.

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 me, 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, halfdazed 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 signallight 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 a roar it passed by. The locomotive, a great iron box, was built like a battering-ram, the headlight set in its armorplated 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 though 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 hopperbottoms of the cars. Heavy clouds of