in coal-camps, but had seen the great world. It was pitiful, the
excitement that came into his voice; he was yearning for life, with its
joys and adventures--and it was his destiny to sit ten hours a day by
the side of a chute, with the rattle of coal in his ears and the dust of
coal in his nostrils, picking out slate with his fingers. He was one of
many scores of "breaker-boys."

"Why don't you go away?" asked Hal.

"Christ! How I get away? Got mother, two sisters."

"And your father?" So Hal made the discovery that Andy's father had been
one of those men whose bodies had had to be cut to pieces to get them
out of the shaft. Now the son was chained to the father's place, until
his time too should come!

"Don't want to be miner!" cried the boy. "Don't want to get _kil-lid_!"

He began to ask, timidly, what Hal thought he could do if he were to run
away from his family and try his luck in the world outside. Hal,
striving to remember where he had seen olive-skinned Greeks with big
black eyes in this beautiful land of the free, could hold out no better
prospect than a shoe-shining parlour, or the wiping out of wash-bowls in
a hotel-lavatory, handing over the tips to a fat padrone.

Andy had been to school, and had learned to read English, and the
teacher had loaned him books and magazines with wonderful pictures in
them; now he wanted more than pictures, he wanted the things which they
portrayed. So Hal came face to face with one of the difficulties of
mine-operators. They gathered a population of humble serfs, selected