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working. By the side of this trap-door was another tiny one through which the ladder was reached; this had to be closed after him by anyone going down or coming up.

There was about twenty feet of water in the shaft, the still surface looking, by the steady, sullen light of the candle which the manager deftly stuck in a lump of clay he took from his pocket, as if it were a surface of some smooth black unknown softness in which the falling drops knocked little holes that filled up mockingly.

"Here you are; you can sit on this piece of 3 x 2," he said, taking a small piece of wood from the scaffolding of the runners. "Put it across from a rung of the ladder to that niche in the wall." He pulled a piece of wire that ran all down the shaft, and presently a far off rumbling grew and grew; the bucket came noisily down, and, smashing into the water, rolled to one side.

"Catch it by the handle-that's right -steer it on to the runners-they'll only allow you a few seconds-now she's moving"; and ghostlike the bucket arose from the blackness and glided up and up till it was out of sight. "Got another candle in case that one goes out or falls into the water?" "Yes."

Then the manager climbed up and disappeared as the bucket came careering down again.

He was alone in the bowels of the earth. Looking around he saw that the walls were of a yellowish brown color. They did not look hard, yet there was no timber anywhere supporting them. He rapped the wall near him with his knuckles, and felt more satisfied-it was hard enough to the touch. Still, a roof always has more the appearance of a likelihood of falling down than a wall has of falling in, and what is called the hanging wall looked, to the lonely young worker,

like a roof of very doubtful security; it looked flaky, chunky, disconnected, not solid. He became aware, now that he was alone, that drips of water were quickly permeating his thin coat, and making little scarce-heard noises on his cap. Down came the bucket. As he leaned over the water to drag it into its place, he saw what would happen if he did not get it there in time. The edge of the bucket would catch in the stout cross-piece of the scaffolding, and the horse would tug, and jerk, and strain until-the rope would break, wherever it happened to be weakestthe bucket would sink like lightning to the bottom of the shaft, and the thick wire rope would come from the break, twisting and coiling like an angry python. He would be utterly defenceless, and without escape; perhaps he would raise an impotent arm, and give one cry; perhaps he would be able to sit still and take his death or mangling as he believed some men did.

For an hour or more all went well. He gathered confidence from his repeated success in handling the bucket. He was soaked to the skin, but the water was not very cold. He began to sing, and found that his voice took unto itself a glory that it had never possessed before: he even seemed to himself to be singing in tune, a thing which he knew he had never accomplished previously. Presently there came a voice from the 100 feet level. "Below there!"

"Hullo!" said the singer. "We're going to fire. I've stopped your bucket with the communicator here must shut you in for a bit. You seem pretty jolly down there?"

"Oh, I'm all right, thank you."

"Well, there'll be five shots, and then I'll come and open the door again— you're all right, eh?"

"Go ahead!" and clank fell the trapdoor. Then came the cry "Fire! Fire!" in long drawn-out, warning shouts, and

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two, three pairs of feet rattled, running over the iron door. What was coming? And how would it affect him, shut in his sloping tunnel? He turned to the candle for consolation: it was burning sulkily, and spluttering a little, for a tiny drop of water had fallen on the edge of it. He stretched out his hand to reach it, and look for a fresh place to put it in. As he did so there was a hiss, and a palpable black softness clung to his face and blinded him. It was the darkness. He heard the candle flop maliciously with a single chuckle into the water. A large drip had changed its startingpoint, and had not only extinguished the candle but knocked it off its balance into the water.

For a moment, age-long, he did not dare to stir; it was as if he were buried alive in some soft black soil, and movement would let in the whole horror of it. Then his senses returned; he put out his hand, and touched the wall close to him. It was as though he had pressed the electric button for his own execution. The jeer of the diving candle, and the terrible darkness, had banished from his mind the closing of the trap-door, and the warning cry of fire.

As he touched the wall the shaft was filled with a smothered but tremendous roar; the vibration quivered through his body, and the darkness crinkled up and down his face. The invisible walls of his prison must be shaking; if only he could see how much! The almost two hundred feet of rock between him and the glorious sunlight that he had been so eager to get away from must surely fall, and crush him flatter than a sheet of notepaper.

Would he feel it? Yes! There must be a moment of feeling as the life was ground out of him. He put his hands up to shelter his head. It was the same impotent movement that he had imagined himself making when he

had pictured the breaking of the wire rope. His half delirious laugh at this recollection was choked to soundlessness by the concussion of the second blast. He cowered lower, and stopped his ears with his fingers, as his head quivered to the third and fourth blasts that came almost together.

Light! Light! He must have light, or something in his brain would burst, and he felt that to prevent this meant clinging to life. He groped frantically in his pockets and found the spare candle; he felt the ends, and put the butt into his mouth, for he wanted both hands-then the matches-as he opened the box a huge drip of water fell upon it. He struck wildly at several; there came no answering light. There was another chuckling plash in the water, and a tiny end of the candle fell back from between his teeth into his mouth. He hurled the useless matches from him, and furiously spat out the fragment of candle. Then came the fifth and loudest report. The blackness in which he was buried seemed to jam together round him in palpable spasms-a tiny flake of rock fell upon his foot. Good God! was it all coming? With a mighty effort he commanded his brain, which had begun a series of biographic views of childhood and youth, to tell upon which side of him was the ladder. He forced his right arm through the blackness, and clutched a rung. The piece of wood he had been sitting on fell into the water, and he dangled by one arm -an invisible fly clinging to an invisible wall, half submerged in invisible water. Then his feet found a rung, and he began with infinite care to feel his way up the ladder; up, and up, until his head bumped against the little trap-door, and he heard the dull tramp of returning feet. The large door opened.

"Below there?" "I'm up here."

The

"What's the matter? Oh! I see; candle gone out, matches wet, eh?" "Yes," said the young man. "Bit nasty down there in the dark, isn't it? Been there myself." miner had opened the little trap-door, and by the light of his candle gathered from the face below him that which suggested his words.

"The old man's nowhere about; you go on down, I'll follow you and fix up a regular bloomin' illumination, and give you a fresh start." He lit three pieces of candle; showed the young one how to keep an eye on the drips of water moving, guided a few buckets for him, and talked about the exceeding solidity of the walls of the shaft; then he left him with a cheery word or so. The young man sang steadily till they called to him that it was time to come up. On one of the stages of the ladder he met a man coming down to take his place, who asked him how he liked it down there? Far above him he could see a speck of sunlight, and he answered, "Oh, not so bad!"

The next morning he came early to the mouth of the shaft. He could not go down till the whistle blew, so he walked along the whip-horse track, and looked at the wire rope lying idle along the ground. There were places where it had been mended, and there were two places where it looked to him as if it wanted mending. He wished he had not come to look at it, and as he climbed laboriously down with unnecessary clutching of the rungs, the weak places of the rope were all the time before his eyes; twice he almost dropped his candle. The bucket began to work, and the weak places on the rope stayed always in his mind, and gradually they explained themselves. He had for hours deliberately imperilled the lives of two men; knowing himself unfit for the task, he had continued to land the bucket at the whim shaft. The weak places in

the rope would get weaker and weaker till one of them would break, and his life also would be placed in deadly peril.

Only the chances of his escape were infinitely less than had been those of the men below him when he was on the surface, which was quite right; quite just; the punishment for his abject moral cowardice was to be death; he was sure that the judgment had been fixed. Somebody in some faraway court of justice passed sentence upon him. "To be killed as you might have killed"-that was how it ran, and that was all of it, no time was specified. It might be to-day, to-morrow, perhaps not for a week, but it would surely be.

Meanwhile, his imagination played weird jokes upon him. The runners and cross-pieces assumed the likeness of a scaffold, and the bucket became the inevitable knife of the guillotine, which, though it passed him by as yet, was only waiting for the order to lead him out through some unknown exit to the place where the dead myriads waited. At night, in his sleep, the bucket-with long arms, squat little legs and a black bulgy face that filled in the space between the handle and the mouth-would waddle to his bunkside, and touch him on the shoulder with an iron forefinger, clanking out, "Come! follow me! follow me!" As he sprang upright in bed it would fall back into space with a frantic beckoning.

It never entered his head to try and escape, for he looked upon his doom as just, and waited for it with what calmness he could; and, indeed, there were times when the hidden terror in him gave place to an astonishing apathy; at other times a derisive mockery beset him, and again he was bolstered up with belief in his own bravery. His creed had been knocked to pieces at the top of the whim-shaft; he

was building it up again at the bottom of the whip-shaft.

As he came up the ladder at five o'clock in the evening he always met the other man going down to take his place till one o'clock in the morning. He seemed a cheerful sort of chap, and generally gave the usual miner's greeting-"Got another shift in, mate?" and the man coming up from his condemned cell for yet another look at the blue sky would answer simply, "Yes," and hurry up the remainder of his climb. There was no third shift from one o'clock on to daylight. The boy who drove the whip-horse at night slept in his hut, but always crawled into bed so quietly that he had never yet heard him come in.

On the fourth night he sat up in bed wildly and rubbed his eyes. The bucket had been pushing him, pushing him relentlessly down into the black water, and the black water was choking him. There was a light in the hut; the whip-boy, contrary to his custom, having lit a small candle-end stuck on the bottom of a jam tin. There was also a noise in the hut. It was the

whip-boy sobbing; sobbing with choking gasps, utterly beyond control. There was fright and horror too in the noise he was putting up his arm to shut off something, and saying, “Oh, oh, oh! Don't, don't let me see!" Then he would break down again, and all the time he shivered, and tried to take off his clothes with hands that shook with a pitiful palsy.

"What is it, Jimmy?" asked the man, staring wildly from the bunk. At the sound of his voice the boy looked up, and staggering across the hut, still sobbing, threw his arms around the man and clung to him.

In gasps that seemed as if they must tear open his heaving little chest, the boy told what there was to tell.

"The rope broke the bucket fell— and, oh!-smashed him-they brought him up-I saw him."

In between the boy's words the man could hear a murmuring of voices, and one or two sharp orders. The murmuring came nearer.

The other man's hut was near his.
He clung to the boy.

J. Stanley Hughes.

"LOVE AS A WANDERING MINSTREL CAME."

Love as a wandering minstrel came-
Came on a sweet September day;

Sang to my heart in words of flame,
Carolling care away.

Love as a wandering minstrel went-
Went on a dark December day;
And e'en God's sunshine seemeth spent
In Life's eternal gray.

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson.

Pall Mall Magazine.

BURNS AS AN ENGLISH POET.

It is easy to foresee one of two things for the enterprise on which I am starting at this moment. I must either establish a fact in literary criticism or I must resign myself to be regarded as an extremely ridiculous person. I accept the risk.

An English critic of influence and distinction some two or three years ago wrote an essay which received a sort of coronation and was rewarded with a prize of fifty pounds. The writer lamented that Burns had occasionally descended into English, and he labored to prove that under those conditions the poet either lost or in some measure degraded his faculty. My purpose in these pages will be to show that Burns was as indisputably a poet in one vehicle as in the other: and I shall even hope to demonstrate that he is at his best and highest in those frequent passages in which he diverges from that Ayrshire Scottish, which was his birthright, to the English tongue. It is not commonly recognized that (apart from his humorous and satirical poems) something like half of Burns's work is done in English pure and simple, nor is it apparently observed that even in some of those poems which are cited as being in the vernacular, the greater bulk of the verse is not even salted with a hint of dialect. One could readily imagine the laughter which might greet the statement that "Scots Wha Hae" is an English poem. Yet the fact remains that there are only five words in a work of twenty-four lines which are not indisputably English. They are "wha," "hae," "wham," "aften" and "fa"," and it is not necessary to point out that these also are English with a localized spelling. In the "Lines to a Mountain Daisy" there are eight Ayrshire words, and the poem contains

nine verses of six lines each. In the "Vision" there are thirty-five consecutive verses of six lines each in which there is not a solitary word of dialect or even of localized spelling. In "Mary in Heaven" we have four eight-line verses of pure English: and no intrusion of a hint of Scots. In "Man was Made to Mourn" there is no dialect. It contains eighty-eight lines. In the "Cottar's Saturday Night" there are one hundred and eighty lines, of which one hundred and thirty contain no Scottish word. It will be admitted by most whose opinion is of value that these are rather curiously chosen examples of the art of sinking. By the general consent of critical mankind "Scots Wha Hae" is the fieriest and intensest call to freedom to which the world has listened. You have but to write "o" for "a," to insert a "v" and a double "1," and, behold! a poem without a trace of local color. And it would appear to be pretended that this volcanic splendor of patriotic rage owes its virtue to a few odd forms of spelling. It is fairly clear that it owes its qualities to the fact that its author was a poet of very unusual faculty, and was, when he chose to be so, a poet in the English tongue. In the case of the cited verses of the "Vision," which are amongst the noblest lines patriot ever wrote, there is no such question offered to us, because they are English without spot or stain. The same fact is true of "Mary in Heaven," of which it may be justly said that it reaches the high-water mark of human emotion. The same fact is true of very much more than half the "Cottar's Saturday Night," which has moved its millions to tears and smiles the world over.

Merely to establish the fact that Rob

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