There were, no laggards there. Men
had to work, and work hard too, for the wages that bought their daily
bread. Even the boys in the screen-room were held as closely to their
tasks as care and vigilance could hold them. Theirs were no light
tasks, either. They sat all day on their little benches, high up in
the great black building, with their eyes fixed always on the shallow
streams of broken coal passing down the iron-sheathed chutes, and
falling out of sight below them; and it was their duty to pick the
particles of slate and stone from out these moving masses, bending
constantly above them as they worked. It was not the physical exertion
that made their task a hard one; there was not much straining of the
joints or muscles, not even in the constant bending of the body to
that one position.
Neither was it that their tender hands were often cut and bruised by
the sharp pieces of the coal or the heavy ones of slate. But it was
hard because they were boys; young boys, with bounding pulses, chafing
at restraint, full to the brim with life and spirit, longing for the
fresh air, the bright sunlight, the fields, the woods, the waters, the
birds, the flowers, all things beautiful and wonderful that nature
spreads upon the earth to make of it a paradise for boys. To think of
all these things, to catch brief glimpses of the happiness of children
who were not born to toil, and then to sit, from dawn to mid-day and
from mid-day till the sun went down, and listen to the ceaseless
thunder of moving wheels and the constant sliding of the streams of
coal across their iron beds,--it was this that wearied them.
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