CHAPTER VIII

CONCERNING LUCIA.

Time must be filled in somehow till five this afternoon, when

Superintendent Lamb will reveal more horrors. Why not, the trams aiding,

go to the Old Park Street Cemetery?

"You want go Park Street? No trams going Park Street. You get out

_here_." Calcutta tram conductors are not polite. The car shuffles

unsympathetically down the street, and the evicted is stranded in

Dhurrumtollah, which may be the Hammersmith Highway of Calcutta.

Providence arranged this mistake, and paved the way to a Great Discovery

now published for the first time. Dhurrumtollah is full of the People of

India, walking in family parties and groups and confidential couples.

And the people of India are neither Hindu nor Mussulman--Jew, Ethiop,

Gueber, or expatriated British. They are the Eurasians, and there are

hundreds and hundreds of them in Dhurrumtollah now. There is Papa with a

shining black hat fit for a counsellor of the Queen, and Mamma, whose

silken dress is tight upon her portly figure, and The Brood made up of

straw-hatted, olive-cheeked, sharp-eyed little boys, and leggy maidens

wearing white, open-work stockings calculated to show dust. There are

the young men who smoke bad cigars and carry themselves lordily--such

as have incomes. There are also the young women with the beautiful eyes

and the wonderful dresses which always fit so badly across the

shoulders. And they carry prayer-books or baskets, because they are

either going to mass or the market. Without doubt, these are the People

of India. They were born in it, bred in it, and will die in it. The

Englishman only comes to the country, and the natives of course were

there from the first, but these people have been made here, and no one

has done anything for them except talk and write about them. Yet they

belong, some of them, to old and honourable families, hold houses in

Sealdah, and are rich, a few of them. They all look prosperous and

contented, and they chatter eternally in that curious dialect that no

one has yet reduced to print. Beyond what little they please to reveal

now and again in the newspapers, we know nothing about their life which

touches so intimately the White on the one hand and the Black on the

other. It must be interesting--more interesting than the colourless

Anglo-Indian article; but who has treated of it? There was one novel

once in which the second heroine was an Eurasienne. She was a strictly

subordinate character, and came to a sad end. The poet of the race,

Henry Derozio,--he of whom Mr. Thomas Edwards wrote a history,--was

bitten with Keats and Scott and Shelley, and overlooked in his search

for material things that lay nearest to him. All this mass of humanity

in Dhurrumtollah is unexploited and almost unknown. Wanted, therefore, a

writer from among the Eurasians, who shall write so that men shall be

pleased to read a story of Eurasian life; then outsiders will be

interested in the People of India, and will admit that the race has

possibilities.

A futile attempt to get to Park Street from Dhurrumtollah ends in the

market--the Hogg Market men call it. Perhaps a knight of that name built

it. It is not one-half as pretty as the Crawford Market, in Bombay, but

... it appears to be the trysting place of Young Calcutta. The natural

inclination of youth is to lie abed late, and to let the seniors do all

the hard work. Why, therefore, should Pyramus, who has to be ruling

account forms at ten, and Thisbe, who _cannot_ be interested in the

price of second-quality beef, wander, in studiously correct raiment,

round and about the stalls before the sun is well clear of the earth?

Pyramus carries a walking stick with imitation silver straps upon it,

and there are cloth tops to his boots; but his collar has been two days

worn. Thisbe crowns her dark head with a blue velvet Tam-o'-Shanter; but

one of her boots lacks a button, and there is a tear in the left-hand

glove. Mamma, who despises gloves, is rapidly filling a shallow basket,

that the coolie-boy carries, with vegetables, potatoes, purple brinjals,

and--Oh, Pyramus! Do you ever kiss Thisbe when Mamma is not

by?--garlic--yea, _lusson_ of the bazaar! Mamma is generous in her views

on garlic. Pyramus comes round the corner of the stall looking for

nobody in particular--not he--and is elaborately polite to Mamma.

Somehow, he and Thisbe drift off together, and Mamma, very portly and

very voluble, is left to chaffer and sort and select alone. In the name

of the Sacred Unities do not, young people, retire to the meat-stalls to

exchange confidences! Come up to this end, where the roses are arriving

in great flat baskets, where the air is heavy with the fragrance of

flowers, and the young buds and greenery are littering all the floor.

They won't--they prefer talking by the dead, unromantic muttons, where

there are not so many buyers. There must have been a quarrel to make up.

Thisbe shakes the blue velvet Tam-o'-Shanter and says, "Oah yess!"

scornfully. Pyramus answers: "No-a, no-a. Do-ant say thatt." Mamma's

basket is full and she picks up Thisbe hastily. Pyramus departs. _He_

never came here to do any marketing. He came to meet Thisbe, who in ten

years will own a figure very much like Mamma's. May their ways be smooth

before them, and after honest service of the Government, may Pyramus

retire on 250 rupees per mensem, into a nice little house somewhere in

Monghyr or Chunar!

From love by natural sequence to death. Where _is_ the Park Street

Cemetery? A hundred hack-drivers leap from their boxes and invade the

market, and after a short struggle one of them uncarts his capture in a

burial-ground--a ghastly new place, close to a tramway. This is not what

is wanted. The living dead are here--the people whose names are not yet

altogether perished and whose tombstones are tended. "Where are the

_old_ dead?" "Nobody goes there," says the driver. "It is up that road."

He points up a long and utterly deserted thoroughfare, running between

high walls. This is the place, and the entrance to it, with its gardener

waiting with one brown, battered rose for the visitor, its grilled door

and its professional notices, bears a hideous likeness to the entrance

of Simla churchyard. But, once inside, the sightseer stands in the heart

of utter desolation--all the more forlorn for being swept up. Lower

Park Street cuts a great graveyard in two. The guide-books will tell you

when the place was opened and when it was closed. The eye is ready to

swear that it is as old as Herculaneum and Pompeii. The tombs are small

houses. It is as though we walked down the streets of a town, so tall

are they and so closely do they stand--a town shrivelled by fire, and

scarred by frost and siege. Men must have been afraid of their friends

rising up before the due time that they weighted them with such cruel

mounds of masonry. Strong man, weak woman, or somebody's "infant son

aged fifteen months," for each the squat obelisk, the defaced classic

temple, the cellaret of chunam, or the candlestick of brickwork--the

heavy slab, the rust-eaten railings, the whopper-jawed cherubs, and the

apoplectic angels. Men were rich in those days and could afford to put a

hundred cubic feet of masonry into the grave of even so humble a person

as "Jno. Clements, Captain of the Country Service, 1820." When the

"dearly beloved" had held rank answering to that of Commissioner, the

efforts are still more sumptuous and the verse.... Well, the following

speaks for itself:--

"Soft on thy tomb shall fond Remembrance shed

The warm yet unavailing tear,

And purple flowers that deck the honoured dead

Shall strew the loved and honoured bier."

Failure to comply with the contract does not, let us hope, entail

forfeiture of the earnest-money; or the honoured dead might be grieved.

The slab is out of his tomb, and leans foolishly against it; the

railings are rotted, and there are no more lasting ornaments than

blisters and stains, which are the work of the weather, and not the

result of the "warm yet unavailing tear."

Let us go about and moralise cheaply on the tombstones, trailing the

robe of pious reflection up and down the pathways of the grave. Here is

a big and stately tomb sacred to "Lucia," who died in 1776 A.D., aged

23. Here also be lichened verses which an irreverent thumb can bring to

light. Thus they wrote, when their hearts were heavy in them, one

hundred and sixteen years ago:--

"What needs the emblem, what the plaintive strain,

What all the arts that sculpture e'er expressed,

To tell the treasure that these walls contain?

Let those declare it most who knew her best.

"The tender pity she would oft display

Shall be with interest at her shrine returned,

Connubial love, connubial tears repay,

And Lucia loved shall still be Lucia mourned.

"Though closed the lips, though stopped the tuneful breath,

The silent, clay-cold monitress shall teach--

In all the alarming eloquence of death

With double pathos to the heart shall preach.

"Shall teach the virtuous maid, the faithful wife,

If young and fair, that young and fair was she,

Then close the useful lesson of her life,

And tell them what she is, they soon must be."

That goes well, even after all these years, does it not? and seems to

bring Lucia very near, in spite of what the later generation is pleased

to call the stiltedness of the old-time verse.

Who will declare the merits of Lucia--dead in her spring before there

was even a _Hickey's Gazette_ to chronicle the amusements of Calcutta,

and publish, with scurrilous asterisks, the _liaisons_ of heads of

departments? What pot-bellied East Indiaman brought the "virtuous maid"

up the river, and did Lucia "make her bargain" as the cant of those

times went, on the first, second, or third day after her arrival? Or did

she, with the others of the batch, give a spinsters' ball as a last

trial--following the custom of the country? No. She was a fair Kentish

maiden, sent out, at a cost of five hundred pounds, English money, under

the captain's charge, to wed the man of her choice, and _he_ knew Clive

well, had had dealings with Omichand, and talked to men who had lived

through the terrible night in the Black Hole. He was a rich man, Lucia's

battered tomb proves it, and he gave Lucia all that her heart could

wish: a green-painted boat to take the air in on the river of evenings.

Coffree slave-boys who could play on the French horn, and even a very

elegant, neat coach with a genteel rutlan roof ornamented with flowers

very highly finished, ten best polished plate glasses, ornamented with a

few elegant medallions enriched with mother-o'-pearl, that she might

take her drive on the course as befitted a factor's wife. All these

things he gave her. And when the convoys came up the river, and the guns

thundered, and the servants of the Honourable the East India Company

drank to the king's health, be sure that Lucia before all the other

ladies in the Fort had her choice of the new stuffs from England and was

cordially hated in consequence. Tilly Kettle painted her picture a

little before she died, and the hot-blooded young writers did duel with

small swords in the fort ditch for the honour of piloting her through a

minuet at the Calcutta theatre or the Punch House. But Warren Hastings

danced with her instead, and the writers were confounded--every man of

them. She was a toast far up the river. And she walked in the evening on

the bastions of Fort William, and said, "La! I protest!" It was there

that she exchanged congratulations with all her friends on the 20th of

October, when those who were alive gathered together to felicitate

themselves on having come through another hot season; and the men--even

the sober factor saw no wrong here--got most royally and Britishly drunk

on Madeira that had twice rounded the Cape. But Lucia fell sick, and the

doctor--he who went home after seven years with five lakhs and a half,

and a corner of this vast graveyard to his account--said that it was a

pukka or putrid fever, and the system required strengthening. So they

fed Lucia on hot curries, and mulled wine worked up with spirits and

fortified with spices, for nearly a week; at the end of which time she

closed her eyes on the weary river and the Fort for ever, and a gallant,

with a turn for _belles-lettres_, wept openly as men did then and had no

shame of it, and composed the verses above set, and thought himself a

neat hand at the pen--stap his vitals! But the factor was so grieved

that he could write nothing at all--could only spend his money--and he

counted his wealth by lakhs--on a sumptuous grave. A little later on he

took comfort, and when the next batch came out--

But this has nothing whatever to do with the story of Lucia, the

virtuous maid, the faithful wife. Her ghost went to a big Calcutta

Powder Ball that very night, and looked very beautiful. I met her.

AMONG THE RAILWAY FOLK

CHAPTER I

MAR., 1888

A RAILWAY SETTLEMENT.

Jamalpur is the headquarters of the East India Railway. This in itself

is not a startling statement. The wonder begins with the exploration of

Jamalpur, which is a station entirely made by, and devoted to, the use

of those untiring servants of the public, the railway folk. They have

towns of their own at Toondla and Assensole; a sun-dried sanitarium at

Bandikui; and Howrah, Ajmir, Allahabad, Lahore, and Pindi know their

colonies. But Jamalpur is unadulteratedly "Railway," and he who has

nothing to do with the E. I. Railway in some shape or another feels a

stranger and an interloper. Running always east and southerly, the train

carries him from the torments of the northwest into the wet, woolly

warmth of Bengal, where may be found the hothouse heat that has ruined

the temper of the good people of Calcutta. The land is fat and greasy

with good living, and the wealth of the bodies of innumerable dead

things; and here--just above Mokameh--may be seen fields stretching,

without stick, stone, or bush to break the view, from the railway line

to the horizon.

Up-country innocents must look at the map to learn that Jamalpur is near

the top left-hand corner of the big loop that the E. I. R. throws out

round Bhagalpur and part of the Bara-Banki districts. Northward of

Jamalpur, as near as may be, lies the Ganges and Tirhoot, and eastward

an offshoot of the volcanic Rajmehal range blocks the view.

A station which has neither Judge, Commissioner, Deputy, or 'Stunt,

which is devoid of law courts, _ticca-gharies_, District Superintendents

of Police, and many other evidences of an over-cultured civilisation, is

a curiosity. "We administer ourselves," says Jamalpur, proudly, "or we

did--till we had local self-government in--and now the racket-marker

administers us." This is a solemn fact. The station, which had its

beginnings thirty odd years ago, used, till comparatively recent times,

to control its own roads, sewage, conservancy, and the like. But, with

the introduction of local self-government, it was ordained that the

"inestimable boon" should be extended to a place made by, and maintained

for, Europeans, and a brand-new municipality was created and nominated

according to the many rules of the game. In the skirmish that ensued,

the Club racket-marker fought his way to the front, secured a place on a

board largely composed of Babus, and since that day Jamalpur's views on

government have not been fit for publication. To understand the

magnitude of the insult, one must study the city--for station, in the

strict sense of the word, it is not. Crotons, palms, mangoes,

_mellingtonias_, teak, and bamboos adorn it, and the _poinsettia_ and

_bougainvillea_, the railway creeper and the _bignonia venusta_, make it

gay with many colours. It is laid out with military precision to each

house its just share of garden, its red brick path, its growth of

trees, and its neat little wicket gate. Its general aspect, in spite of

the Dutch formality, is that of an English village, such a thing as

enterprising stage-managers put on the theatres at home. The hills have

thrown a protecting arm round nearly three sides of it, and on the

fourth it is bounded by what are locally known as the "sheds"; in other

words, the station, offices, and workshops of the company. The E. I. R.

only exists for outsiders. Its servants speak of it reverently, angrily,

despitefully, or enthusiastically as "The Company"; and they never omit

the big, big C. Men must have treated the Honourable the East India

Company in something the same fashion ages ago. "The Company" in

Jamalpur is Lord Dufferin, all the Members of Council, the Body-Guard,

Sir Frederick Roberts, Mr. Westland, whose name is at the bottom of the

currency notes, the Oriental Life Assurance Company, and the Bengal

Government all rolled into one. At first, when a stranger enters this

life, he is inclined to scoff and ask, in his ignorance, "_What_ is this

Company that you talk so much about?" Later on, he ceases to scoff; for

the Company is a "big" thing--almost big enough to satisfy an American.

Ere beginning to describe its doings, let it be written, and repeated

several times hereafter, that the E. I. R. passenger carriages, and

especially the second-class, are just now horrid--being filthy and

unwashen, dirty to look at, and dirty to live in. Having cast this small

stone, we will examine Jamalpur. When it was laid out, in or before the

Mutiny year, its designers allowed room for growth, and made the houses

of one general design--some of brick, some of stone, some three, four,

and six roomed, some single men's barracks and some two-storied--all for

the use of the employes. King's Road, Prince's Road, Queen's Road, and

Victoria Road--Jamalpur is loyal--cut the breadth of the station; and

Albert Road, Church Street, and Steam Road the length of it. Neither on

these roads or on any of the cool-shaded smaller ones is anything

unclean or unsightly to be found. There is a dreary village in the

neighbourhood which is said to make the most of any cholera that may be

going, but Jamalpur itself is specklessly and spotlessly neat. From St.

Mary's Church to the railway station, and from the buildings where they

print daily about half a lakh of tickets, to the ringing, roaring,

rattling workshops, everything has the air of having been cleaned up at

ten that very morning and put under a glass case. There is a holy calm

about the roads--totally unlike anything in an English manufacturing

town. Wheeled conveyances are few, because every man's bungalow is close

to his work, and when the day has begun and the offices of the "Loco."

and "Traffic" have soaked up their thousands of natives and hundreds of

Europeans, you shall pass under the dappled shadows of the trees,

hearing nothing louder than the croon of some bearer playing with a

child in the verandah or the faint tinkle of a piano. This is pleasant,

and produces an impression of Watteau-like refinement tempered with

Arcadian simplicity. The dry, anguished howl of the "buzzer," the big

steam-whistle, breaks the hush, and all Jamalpur is alive with the

tramping of tiffin-seeking feet. The Company gives one hour for meals

between eleven and twelve. On the stroke of noon there is another rush

back to the works or the offices, and Jamalpur sleeps through the

afternoon till four or half-past, and then rouses for tennis at the

institute.

In the hot weather it splashes in the swimming bath, or reads, for it

has a library of several thousand books. One of the most nourishing

lodges in the Bengal jurisdiction--"St. George in the East"--lives at

Jamalpur, and meets twice a month. Its members point out with

justifiable pride that all the fittings were made by their own hands;

and the lodge in its accoutrements and the energy of the craftsmen can

compare with any in India. But the institute is the central gathering

place, and its half-dozen tennis-courts and neatly-laid-out grounds seem

to be always full. Here, if a stranger could judge, the greater part of

the flirtation of Jamalpur is carried out, and here the dashing

apprentice--the apprentices are the liveliest of all--learns that there

are problems harder than any he studies at the night school, and that

the heart of a maiden is more inscrutable than the mechanism of a

locomotive. On Tuesdays and Fridays, the volunteers parade. A and B

Companies, 150 strong in all, of the E. I. R. Volunteers, are stationed

here with the band. Their uniform, grey with red facings, is not lovely,

but they know how to shoot and drill. They have to. The "Company" makes

it a condition of service that a man must be a volunteer; and volunteer

in something more than name he must be, or some one will ask the reason

why. Seeing that there are no regulars between Howrah and Dinapore, the

"Company" does well in exacting this toll. Some of the old soldiers are

wearied of drill, some of the youngsters don't like it, but--the way

they entrain and detrain is worth seeing. They are as mobile a corps as

can be desired, and perhaps ten or twelve years hence the Government may

possibly be led to take a real interest in them and spend a few thousand

rupees in providing them with real soldiers' kits--not uniform and rifle

merely. Their ranks include all sorts and conditions of men--heads of

the "Loco." and "Traffic," the "Company" is no respecter of rank--clerks

in the "audit," boys from mercantile firms at home, fighting with the

intricacies of time, fare, and freight tables; guards who have grown

grey in the service of the Company; mail and passenger drivers with

nerves of cast-iron, who can shoot through a long afternoon without

losing temper or flurrying; light-blue East Indians; Tyne-side men, slow

of speech and uncommonly strong in the arm; lathy apprentices who have

not yet "filled out"; fitters, turners, foremen, full, assistant, and

sub-assistant station-masters, and a host of others. In the hands of the

younger men the regulation Martini-Henri naturally goes off the line

occasionally on hunting expeditions.

There is a twelve-hundred yards' range running down one side of the

station, and the condition of the grass by the firing butts tells its

own tale. Scattered in the ranks of the volunteers are a fair number of

old soldiers, for the Company has a weakness for recruiting from the

Army for its guards who may, in time, become station-masters. A good man

from the Army, with his papers all correct and certificates from his

commanding officer, can, after depositing twenty pounds to pay his home

passage, in the event of his services being dispensed with, enter the

Company's service on something less than one hundred rupees a month and

rise in time to four hundred as a station-master. A railway

bungalow--and they are as substantially built as the engines--will cost

him more than one-ninth of the pay of his grade, and the Provident Fund

provides for his latter end.

Think for a moment of the number of men that a line running from Howrah

to Delhi must use, and you will realise what an enormous amount of

patronage the Company holds in its hands. Naturally a father who has

worked for the line expects the line to do something for the son; and

the line is not backward in meeting his wishes where possible. The sons

of old servants may be taken on at fifteen years of age, or thereabouts,

as apprentices in the "shops," receiving twenty rupees in the first and

fifty in the last year, of their indentures. Then they come on the books

as full "men" on perhaps Rs. 65 a month, and the road is open to them in

many ways. They may become foremen of departments on Rs. 500 a month, or

drivers earning with overtime Rs. 370; or if they have been brought into

the audit or the traffic, they may control innumerable Babus and draw

several hundreds of rupees monthly; or, at eighteen or nineteen, they

may be ticket-collectors, working up to the grade of guard, etc. Every

rank of the huge, human hive has a desire to see its sons placed

properly, and the native workmen, about three thousand, in the

locomotive department only, are, said one man, "making a family affair

of it altogether. You see all those men turning brass and looking after

the machinery? They've all got relatives, and a lot of 'em own land out

Monghyr-way close to us. They bring on their sons as soon as they are

old enough to do anything, and the Company rather encourages it. You see

the father is in a way responsible for his son, and he'll teach him all

he knows, and in that way the Company has a hold on them all. You've no

notion how sharp a native is when he's working on his own hook. All the

district round here, right up to Monghyr, is more or less dependent on

the railway."

The Babus in the traffic department, in the stores, issue department, in

all the departments where men sit through the long, long Indian day

among ledgers, and check and pencil and deal in figures and items and

rupees, may be counted by hundreds. Imagine the struggle among them to

locate their sons in comfortable cane-bottomed chairs, in front of a big

pewter inkstand and stacks of paper! The Babus make beautiful

accountants, and if we could only see it, a merciful Providence has made

the Babu for figures and detail. Without him, the dividends of any

company would be eaten up by the expenses of English or city-bred

clerks. The Babu is a great man, and, to respect him, you must see five

score or so of him in a room a hundred yards long, bending over ledgers,

ledgers, and yet more ledgers--silent as the Sphinx and busy as a bee.

He is the lubricant of the great machinery of the Company whose ways and

works cannot be dealt with in a single scrawl.

CHAPTER II

THE SHOPS.

The railway folk, like the army and civilian castes, have their own

language and life, which an outsider cannot hope to understand. For

instance, when Jamalpur refers to itself as being "on the Long Siding,"

a lengthy explanation is necessary before the visitor grasps the fact

that the whole of the two hundred and thirty odd miles of the loop from

Luckeeserai to Kanu-Junction _via_ Bhagalpur is thus contemptuously

treated. Jamalpur insists that it is out of the world, and makes this an

excuse for being proud of itself and all its institutions. But in one

thing it is badly, disgracefully provided. At a moderate estimate there

must be about two hundred Europeans with their families in this place.

They can, and do, get their small supplies from Calcutta, but they are

dependent on the tender mercies of the bazaar for their meat, which

seems to be hawked from door to door. There is a Raja who owns or has an

interest in the land on which the station stands, and he is averse to

cow-killing. For these reasons, Jamalpur is not too well supplied with

good meat, and what it wants is a decent meat-market with cleanly

controlled slaughtering arrangements. The "Company," who gives grants to

the schools and builds the institute and throws the shadow of its

protection all over the place, might help this scheme forward.

The heart of Jamalpur is the "shops," and here a visitor will see more

things in an hour than he can understand in a year. Steam Street very

appropriately leads to the forty or fifty acres that the "shops" cover,

and to the busy silence of the loco. superintendent's office, where, a

man must put down his name and his business on a slip of paper before he

can penetrate into the Temple of Vulcan. About three thousand five

hundred men are in the "shops," and, ten minutes after the day's work

has begun, the assistant superintendent knows exactly how many are "in."

The heads of departments--silent, heavy-handed men, captains of five

hundred or more--have their names fairly printed on a board which is

exactly like a pool-marker. They "star a life" when they come in, and

their few names alone represent salaries to the extent of six thousand a

month. They are men worth hearing deferentially. They hail from

Manchester and the Clyde, and the great ironworks of the North: pleasant

as cold water in a thirsty land is it to hear again the full

Northumbrian burr or the long-drawn Yorkshire "aye." Under their great

gravity of demeanour--a man who is in charge of a few lakhs' worth of

plant cannot afford to be riotously mirthful--lurks melody and humour.

They can sing like north-countrymen, and in their hours of ease go back

to the speech of the Iron countries they have left behind, when "Ab o'

th' yate" and all "Ben Briarly's" shrewd wit shakes the warm air of

Bengal with deep-chested laughter. Hear "Ruglan' Toon," with a chorus as

true as the fall of trip-hammers, and fancy that you are back again in

the smoky, rattling, ringing North!

But this is the "unofficial" side. Go forward through the gates under

the mango trees, and set foot at once in sheds which have as little to

do with mangoes as a locomotive with Lakshmi. The "buzzer" howls, for it

is nearly tiffin time. There is a rush from every quarter of the shops,

a cloud of flying natives, and a procession of more sedately pacing

Englishmen, and in three short minutes you are left absolutely alone

among arrested wheels and belts, pulleys, cranks, and cranes--in a

silence only broken by the soft sigh of a far-away steam-valve or the

cooing of pigeons. You are, by favour freely granted, at liberty to

wander anywhere you please through the deserted works. Walk into a huge,

brick-built, tin-roofed stable, capable of holding twenty-four

locomotives under treatment, and see what must be done to the Iron Horse

once in every three years if he is to do his work well. On reflection,

Iron Horse is wrong. An engine is a she--as distinctly feminine as a

ship or a mine. Here stands the _Echo_, her wheels off, resting on

blocks, her underside machinery taken out, and her side scrawled with

mysterious hieroglyphics in chalk. An enormous green-painted iron

harness-rack bears her piston and eccentric rods, and a neatly painted

board shows that such and such Englishmen are the fitter, assistant, and

apprentice engaged in editing that _Echo_. An engine seen from the

platform and an engine viewed from underneath are two very different

things. The one is as unimpressive as a cart; the other as imposing as a

man-of-war in the yard.

In this manner is an engine treated for navicular, laminitis,

back-sinew, or whatever it is that engines most suffer from. No. 607, we

will say, goes wrong at Dinapore, Assensole, Buxar, or wherever it may

be, after three years' work. The place she came from is stencilled on

the boiler, and the foreman examines her. Then he fills in a hospital

sheet, which bears one hundred and eighty printed heads under which an

engine can come into the shops. No. 607 needs repair in only one hundred

and eighteen particulars, ranging from mud-hole-flanges and blower-cocks

to lead-plugs, and platform brackets which have shaken loose. This

certificate the foreman signs, and it is framed near the engine for the

benefit of the three Europeans and the eight or nine natives who have to

mend No. 607. To the ignorant the superhuman wisdom of the examiner

seems only equalled by the audacity of the two men and the boy who are

to undertake what is frivolously called the "job." No. 607 is in a

sorely mangled condition, but 403 is much worse. She is reduced to a

shell--is a very elle-woman of an engine, bearing only her funnel, the

iron frame and the saddle that supports the boiler.

Four-and-twenty engines in every stage of decomposition stand in one

huge shop. A travelling crane runs overhead, and the men have hauled up

one end of a bright vermilion loco. The effect is the silence of a

scornful stare--just such a look as a colonel's portly wife gives

through her _pince-nez_ at the audacious subaltern. Engines are the

"livest" things that man ever made. They glare through their

spectacle-plates, they tilt their noses contemptuously, and when their

insides are gone they adorn themselves with red lead, and leer like

decayed beauties; and in the Jamalpur works there is no escape from

them. The shops can hold fifty without pressure, and on occasion as many

again. Everywhere there are engines, and everywhere brass domes lie

about on the ground like huge helmets in a pantomime. The silence is the

weirdest touch of all. Some sprightly soul--an apprentice be sure--has

daubed in red lead on the end of an iron tool-box a caricature of some

friend who is evidently a riveter. The picture has all the interest of

an Egyptian cartouche, for it shows that men have been here, and that

the engines do not have it all their own way.

And so, out in the open, away from the three great sheds, between and

under more engines, till we strike a wilderness of lines all converging

to one turn-table. Here be elephant-stalls ranged round a half-circle,

and in each stall stands one engine, and each engine stares at the

turn-table. A stolid and disconcerting company is this ring-of-eyes

monsters; 324, 432, and 8 are shining like toys. They are ready for

their turn of duty, and are as spruce as hansoms. Lacquered chocolate,

picked out with black, red, and white, is their dress and delicate lemon

graces the ceilings of the cabs. The driver should be a gentleman in

evening dress with white kid gloves, and there should be gold-headed

champagne bottles in the spick and span tenders. Huckleberry Finn says

of a timber raft, "It amounted to something being captain of that raft."

Thrice enviable is the man who, drawing Rs. 220 a month, is allowed to

make Rs. 150 overtime out of locos Nos. 324, 432, or 8. Fifty yards

beyond this gorgeous trinity are ten to twelve engines who have put in

to Jamalpur to bait. They are alive, their fires are lighted, and they

are swearing and purring and growling one at another as they stand

alone. Here is evidently one of the newest type--No. 25, a giant who has

just brought the mail in and waits to be cleaned up preparatory to

going out afresh.

The tiffin hour has ended. The buzzer blows, and with a roar, a rattle,

and a clang the shops take up their toil. The hubbub that followed on

the Prince's kiss to the sleeping beauty was not so loud or sudden.

Experience, with a foot-rule in his pocket, authority in his port, and a

merry twinkle in his eye, comes up and catches Ignorance walking

gingerly round No. 25. "That's one of the best we have," says

Experience, "a four-wheeled coupled bogie they call her. She's by Dobbs.

She's done her hundred and fifty miles to-day; and she'll run in to

Rampore Haut this afternoon; then she'll rest a day and be cleaned up.

Roughly, she does her three hundred miles in the four-and-twenty hours.

She's a beauty. She's out from home, but we can build our own

engines--all except the wheels. We're building ten locos. now, and we've

got a dozen boilers ready if you care to look at them. How long does a

loco. last? That's just as may be. She will do as much as her driver

lets her. Some men play the mischief with a loco. and some handle 'em

properly. Our drivers prefer Hawthorne's old four-wheeled coupled

engines because they give the least bother. There is one in that shed,

and it's a good 'un to travel. But eighty thousand miles generally sees

the gloss off an engine, and she goes into the shops to be overhauled

and refitted and replaned, and a lot of things that you wouldn't

understand if I told you about them. No. 1, the first loco. on the line,

is running still, but very little of the original engine must be left by

this time. That one there, came out in the Mutiny year. She's by

Slaughter and Grunning, and she's built for speed in front of a light

load. French-looking sort of thing, isn't she? That's because her

cylinders are on a tilt. We used her for the Mail once, but the Mail has

grown heavier and heavier, and now we use six-wheeled coupled

eighteen-inch, inside cylinder, 45-ton locos. to shift thousand-ton

trains. _No!_ All locos. aren't alike. It isn't merely pulling a lever.

The Company likes its drivers to know their locos., and a man will keep

his Hawthorne for two or three years. The more mileage he gets out of

her before she has to be overhauled the better man he is. It pays to let

a man have his fancy engine. A man must take an interest in his loco.,

and that means she must belong to him. Some locos. won't do anything,

even if you coax and humour them. I don't think there are any unlucky

ones now, but some years ago No. 31 wasn't popular. The drivers went

sick or took leave when they were told off for her. She killed her

driver on the Jubbulpore line, she left the rails at Kajra, she did

something or other at Rampur Haut, and Lord knows what she didn't do or

try to do in other places! All the drivers fought shy of her, and in the

end she disappeared. They said she was condemned, but I shouldn't wonder

if the Company changed her number quietly, and changed the luck at the

same time. You see, the Government Inspector comes and looks at our

stock now and again, and when an engine's condemned he puts his

dhobi-mark on her, and she's broken up. Well, No. 31 was condemned, but

there was a whisper that they only shifted her number, and ran her out

again. When the drivers didn't know, there were no accidents. I don't

think we've got an unlucky one running now. Some are different from

others, but there are no man-eaters. Yes, a driver of the mail _is_

somebody. He can make Rs. 370 a month if he's a covenanted man. We get a

lot of our drivers in the country, and we don't import from England as

much as we did. 'Stands to reason that, now there's more competition

both among lines and in the labour market, the Company can't afford to

be as generous as it used to be. It doesn't cheat a man though. It's

this way with the drivers. A native driver gets about Rs. 20 a month,

and in his way he's supposed to be good enough for branch work and

shunting and such. Well, an English driver'll get from Rs. 80 to Rs.

220, and overtime. The English driver knows what the native gets, and in

time they tell the driver that the native'll improve. The driver has

that to think of. You see? That's competition!"

Experience returns to the engine-sheds, now full of clamour, and

enlarges on the beauties of sick locomotives. The fitters and the

assistants and the apprentices are hammering and punching and gauging,

and otherwise technically disporting themselves round their enormous

patients, and their language, as caught in snatches, is beautifully

unintelligible.

But one flying sentence goes straight to the heart. It is the cry of

Humanity over the task of Life, done into unrefined English. An

apprentice, grimed to his eyebrows, his cloth cap well on the back of

his curly head and his hands deep in his pockets, is sitting on the edge

of a tool-box ruefully regarding the very much disorganised engine whose

slave is he. A handsome boy, this apprentice, and well made. He whistles

softly between his teeth, and his brow puckers. Then he addresses the

engine, half in expostulation and half in despair, "Oh, you condemned

old female dog!" He puts the sentence more crisply--much more

crisply--and Ignorance chuckles sympathetically.

Ignorance also is puzzled over these engines.

CHAPTER III

VULCAN'S FORGE.

In the wilderness of the railway shops--and machinery that planes and

shaves, and bevels and stamps, and punches and hoists and nips--the

first idea that occurs to an outsider, when he has seen the men who

people the place, is that it must be the birthplace of inventions--a

pasture-ground of fat patents. If a writing-man, who plays with shadows

and dresses dolls that others may laugh at their antics, draws help and

comfort and new methods of working old ideas from the stored shelves of

a library, how, in the name of Commonsense, his god, can a doing-man,

whose mind is set upon things that snatch a few moments from flying Time

or put power into weak hands, refrain from going forward and adding new

inventions to the hundreds among which he daily moves?

Appealed to on this subject, Experience, who had served the E. I. R.

loyally for many years, held his peace. "We don't go in much for

patents; but," he added, with a praiseworthy attempt to turn the

conversation, "we can build you any mortal thing you like. We've got the

_Bradford Leslie_ steamer for the Sahibgunge ferry. Come and see the

brass-work for her bows. It's in the casting-shed."

It would have been cruel to have pressed Experience further, and

Ignorance, to foredate matters a little, went about to discover why

Experience shied off this question, and why the men of Jamalpur had not

each and all invented and patented something. He won his information in

the end, but did not come from Jamalpur. _That_ must be clearly

understood. It was found anywhere you please between Howrah and Hoti

Mardan; and here it is that all the world may admire a prudent and

far-sighted Board of Directors. Once upon a time, as every one in the

profession knows, two men invented the D. and O. sleeper--cast iron, of

five pieces, very serviceable. The men were in the Company's employ, and

their masters said: "Your brains are ours. Hand us over those sleepers."

Being of pay and position, D. and O. made some sort of resistance and

got a royalty or a bonus. At any rate, the Company had to pay for its

sleepers. But thereafter, and the condition exists to this day, they

caused it to be written in each servant's covenant, that if by chance he

invented aught, his invention was to belong to the Company. Providence

has mercifully arranged that no man or syndicate of men can buy the

"holy spirit of man" outright without suffering in some way or another

just as much as the purchase. America fully, and Germany in part,

recognises this law. The E. I. Railway's breach of it is thoroughly

English. They say, or it is said of them that they say, "We are afraid

of our men, who belong to us, wasting their time on trying to invent."

Is it wholly impossible, then, for men of mechanical experience and

large sympathies to check the mere patent-hunter and bring forward the

man with an idea? Is there no supervision in the "shops," or have the

men who play tennis and billiards at the institute not a minute which

they can rightly call their very own? Would it ruin the richest Company

in India to lend their model-shop and their lathes to half a dozen, or,

for the matter of that, half a hundred, abortive experiments? A

Massachusetts organ factory, a Racine buggy shop, an Oregon lumber-yard,

would laugh at the notion. An American toy-maker might swindle an

employe after the invention, but he would in his own interests help the

man to "see what comes of the thing." Surely a wealthy, a powerful and,

as all Jamalpur bears witness, a considerate Company might cut that

clause out of the covenant and await the issue. There would be quite

enough jealousy between man and man, grade and grade, to keep down all

but the keenest souls; and, with due respect to the steam-hammer and the

rolling-mill, we have not yet made machinery perfect. The "shops" are

not likely to spawn unmanageable Stephensons or grasping Brunels; but in

the minor turns of mechanical thought that find concrete expressions in

links, axle-boxes, joint packings, valves, and spring-stirrups something

might--something would--be done were the practical prohibition removed.

Will a North countryman give you anything but warm hospitality for

nothing? Or if you claim from him overtime service as a right, will he

work zealously? "Onything but t' brass," is his motto, and his ideas are

his "brass."

Gentlemen in authority, if this should meet your august eyes, spare it a

minute's thought, and, clearing away the floridity, get to the heart of

the mistake and see if it cannot be rationally put right. Above all,

remember that Jamalpur supplied no information. It was as mute as an

oyster. There is no one within your jurisdiction to--ahem--"drop upon."

Let us, after this excursion into the offices, return to the shops and

only ask Experience such questions as he can without disloyalty answer.

"We used once," says he, leading to the foundry, "to sell our old rails

and import new ones. Even when we used 'em for roof beams and so on, we

had more than we knew what to do with. Now we have got rolling-mills,

and we use the rails to make tie-bars for the D. and O. sleepers and all

sorts of things. We turn out five hundred D. and O. sleepers a day.

Altogether, we use about seventy-five tons of our own iron a month here.

Iron in Calcutta costs about five-eight a hundredweight; ours costs

between three-four and three-eight, and on that item alone we save three

thousand a month. Don't ask me how many miles of rails we own. There are

fifteen hundred miles of line, and you can make your own calculation.

All those things like babies' graves, down in that shed, are the moulds

for the D. and O. sleepers. We test them by dropping three hundredweight

and three hundred quarters of iron on top of them from a height of seven

feet, or eleven sometimes. They don't often smash. We have a notion here

that our iron is as good as the Home stuff."

A sleek, white, and brindled pariah thrusts himself into the

conversation. His house appears to be on the warm ashes of the

bolt-maker. This is a horrible machine, which chews red-hot iron bars

and spits them out perfect bolts. Its manners are disgusting, and it

gobbles over its food.

"Hi, Jack!" says Experience, stroking the interloper, "you've been

trying to break your leg again. That's the dog of the works. At least he

makes believe that the works belong to him. He'll follow any one of us

about the shops as far as the gate, but never a step further. You can

see he's in first-class condition. The boys give him his ticket, and,

one of these days, he'll try to get on to the Company's books as a

regular worker. He's too clever to live." Jack heads the procession as

far as the walls of the rolling-shed and then returns to his machinery

room. He waddles with fatness and despises strangers.

"How would you like to be hot-potted there?" says Experience, who has

read and who is enthusiastic over _She_, as he points to the great

furnaces whence the slag is being dragged out by hooks. "Here is the old

material going into the furnace in that big iron bucket. Look at the

scraps of iron. There's an old D. and O. sleeper, there's a lot of clips

from a cylinder, there's a lot of snipped-up rails, there's a

driving-wheel block, there's an old hook, and a sprinkling of

boiler-plates and rivets."

The bucket is tipped into the furnace with a thunderous roar and the

slag below pours forth more quickly. "An engine," says Experience,

reflectively, "can run over herself so to say. After she's broken up she

is made into sleepers for the line. You'll see how she's broken up

later." A few paces further on, semi-nude demons are capering over

strips of glowing hot iron which are put into a mill as rails and emerge

as thin, shapely tie-bars. The natives wear rough sandals and some

pretence of aprons, but the greater part of them is "all face." "As I

said before," says Experience, "a native's cuteness when he's working

on ticket is something startling. Beyond occasionally hanging on to a

red-hot bar too long and so letting their pincers be drawn through the

mills, these men take precious good care not to go wrong. Our machinery

is fenced and guard-railed as much as possible, and these men don't get

caught up by the belting. In the first place, they're careful--the

father warns the son and so on--and in the second, there's nothing about

'em for the belting to catch on unless the man shoves his hand in. Oh, a

native's no fool! He knows that it doesn't do to be foolish when he's

dealing with a crane or a driving-wheel. You're looking at all those

chopped rails? We make our iron as they blend baccy. We mix up all sorts

to get the required quality. Those rails have just been chopped by this

tobacco-cutter thing." Experience bends down and sets a vicious-looking,

parrot-headed beam to work. There is a quiver--a snap--and a dull smash

and a heavy rail is nipped in two like a stick of barley-sugar.

Elsewhere, a bull-nosed hydraulic cutter is rail-cutting as if it

enjoyed the fun. In another shed stand the steam-hammers; the unemployed

ones murmuring and muttering to themselves, as is the uncanny custom of

all steam-souled machinery. Experience, with his hand on a long lever,

makes one of the monsters perform: and though Ignorance knows that a man

designed and men do continually build steam-hammers, the effect is as

though Experience were maddening a chained beast. The massive block

slides down the guides, only to pause hungrily an inch above the anvil,

or restlessly throb through a foot and a half of space, each motion

being controlled by an almost imperceptible handling of the levers.

"When these things are newly overhauled, you can regulate your blow to

within an eighth of an inch," says Experience. "We had a foreman here

once who could work 'em beautifully. He had the touch. One day a

visitor, no end of a swell in a tall, white hat, came round the works,

and our foreman borrowed the hat and brought the hammer down just enough

to press the nap and no more. 'How wonderful!' said the visitor, putting

his hand carelessly upon this lever rod here." Experience suits the

action to the word and the hammer thunders on the anvil. "Well, you can

guess for yourself. Next minute there wasn't enough left of that tall,

white hat to make a postage-stamp of. Steam-hammers aren't things to

play with. Now we'll go over to the stores ..."

Whatever apparent disorder there might have been in the works, the store

department is as clean as a new pin, and stupefying in its naval order.

Copper plates, bar, angle, and rod iron, duplicate cranks and slide

bars, the piston rods of the _Bradford Leslie_ steamer, engine grease,

files, and hammer-heads--every conceivable article, from leather laces

of beltings to head-lamps, necessary for the due and proper working of a

long line, is stocked, stacked, piled, and put away in appropriate

compartments. In the midst of it all, neck deep in ledgers and indent

forms, stands the many-handed Babu, the steam of the engine whose power

extends from Howrah to Ghaziabad.

The Company does everything, and knows everything. The gallant

apprentice may be a wild youth with an earnest desire to go occasionally

"upon the bend." But three times a week, between 7 and 8 P.M., he must

attend the night-school and sit at the feet of M. Bonnaud, who teaches

him mechanics and statics so thoroughly that even the awful Government

Inspector is pleased. And when there is no night-school the Company will

by no means wash its hands of its men out of working-hours. No man can

be violently restrained from going to the bad if he insists upon it, but

in the service of the Company a man has every warning; his escapades are

known, and a judiciously arranged transfer sometimes keeps a good fellow

clear of the down-grade. No one can flatter himself that in the

multitude he is overlooked, or believe that between 4 P.M. and 9 A.M. he

is at liberty to misdemean himself. Sooner or later, but generally

sooner, his goings-on are known, and he is reminded that "Britons never

shall be slaves"--to things that destroy good work as well as souls.

Maybe the Company acts only in its own interest, but the result is good.

Best and prettiest of the many good and pretty things in Jamalpur is the

institute of a Saturday when the Volunteer Band is playing and the

tennis courts are full and the babydom of Jamalpur--fat, sturdy

children--frolic round the band-stand. The people dance--but big as the

institute is, it is getting too small for their dances--they act, they

play billiards, they study their newspapers, they play cards and

everything else, and they flirt in a sumptuous building, and in the hot

weather the gallant apprentice ducks his friend in the big

swimming-bath. Decidedly the railway folk make their lives pleasant.

Let us go down southward to the big Giridih collieries and see the coal

that feeds the furnace that smelts the iron that makes the sleeper that

bears the loco. that pulls the carriage that holds the freight that

comes from the country that is made richer by the Great Company Badahur,

the East Indian Railway.

THE GIRIDIH COAL-FIELDS

CHAPTER I

ON THE SURFACE.

Southward, always southward and easterly, runs the Calcutta Mail from

Luckeeserai, till she reaches Madapur in the Sonthal Parganas. From

Madapur a train, largely made up of coal-trucks, heads westward into the

Hazaribagh district and toward Giridih. A week would not have exhausted

"Jamalpur and its environs," as the guide-books say. But since time

drives and man must e'en be driven, the weird, echoing bund in the hills

above Jamalpur, where the owls hoot at night and hyenas come down to

laugh over the grave of "Quilem Roberts, who died from the effects of an

encounter with a tiger near this place, A.D. 1864," goes undescribed.

Nor is it possible to deal with Monghyr, the headquarters of the

district, where one sees for the first time the age of Old Bengal in the

sleepy, creepy station, built in a time-eaten fort, which runs out into

the Ganges, and is full of quaint houses, with fat-legged balustrades on

the roofs. Pensioners certainly, and probably a score of ghosts, live in

Monghyr. All the country seems haunted. Is there not at Pir Bahar a

lonely house on a bluff, the grave of a young lady, who, thirty years

ago, rode her horse down the cliff and perished? Has not Monghyr a

haunted house in which tradition says sceptics have seen much more than

they could account for? And is it not notorious throughout the

countryside that the seven miles of road between Jamalpur and Monghyr

are nightly paraded by tramping battalions of spectres, phantoms of an

old-time army massacred, who knows how long ago? The common voice

attests all these things, and an eerie cemetery packed with blackened,

lichened, candle-extinguisher tomb-stones persuades the listener to

believe all that he hears. Bengal is second--or third is it?--in order

of seniority among the Provinces, and like an old nurse, she tells many

witch-tales.

But ghosts have nothing to do with collieries, and that ever-present

"Company," the E. I. R., has more or less made Giridih--principally

more. "Before the E. I. R. came," say the people, "we had one meal a

day. Now we have two." Stomachs do not tell fibs, whatever mouths may

say. That "Company," in the course of business, throws about five lakhs

a year into the Hazaribagh district in the form of wages alone, and

Giridih Bazaar has to supply the wants of twelve thousand men, women,

and children. But we have now the authority of a number of high-souled

and intelligent native prints that the Sahib of all grades spends his

time in "sucking the blood out of the country," and "flying to England

to spend his ill-gotten gains."

Giridih is perfectly mad--quite insane! Geologically, "the country is in

the metamorphic higher grounds that rise out of the alluvial flats of

Lower Bengal between the Osri and the Barakar rivers." Translated, this

sentence means that you can twist your ankle on pieces of pure white,

pinky, and yellowish granite, slip over weather-worn sandstone,

grievously cut your boots over flakes of trap, and throw hornblende

pebbles at the dogs. Never was such a place for stone-throwing as

Giridih. The general aspect of the country is falsely park-like, because

it swells and sinks in a score of grass-covered undulations, and is

adorned with plantation-like jungle. There are low hills on every side,

and twelve miles away bearing south the blue bulk of the holy hill of

Parasnath, greatest of the Jain Tirthankars, overlooks the world. In

Bengal they consider four thousand five hundred feet good enough for a

Dagshai or Kasauli, and once upon a time they tried to put troops on

Parasnath. There was a scarcity of water, and Thomas of those days found

the silence and seclusion prey upon his spirits. Since twenty years,

therefore, Parasnath has been abandoned by Her Majesty's Army.

As to Giridih itself, the last few miles of train bring up the reek of

the "Black Country." Memory depends on smell. A noseless man is devoid

of sentiment, just as a noseless woman, in this country, must be devoid

of honour. That first breath of the coal should be the breath of the

murky, clouded tract between Yeadon and Dale--or Barnsley, rough and

hospitable Barnsley--or Dewsbury and Batley and the Derby Canal on a

Sunday afternoon when the wheels are still and the young men and maidens

walk stolidly in pairs. Unfortunately, it is nothing more than

Giridih--seven thousand miles away from Home and blessed with a warm and

genial sunshine, soon to turn into something very much worse. The

insanity of the place is visible at the station door. A G. B. T. cart

once married a bathing-machine, and they called the child _tum-tum_. You

who in flannel and Cawnpore harness drive bamboo-carts about up-country

roads, remember that a Giridih _tum-tum_ is painfully pushed by four

men, and must be entered crawling on all-fours, head first. So strange

are the ways of Bengal!

They drive mad horses in Giridih--animals that become hysterical as soon

as the dusk falls and the countryside blazes with the fires of the great

coke ovens. If you expostulate tearfully, they produce another horse, a

raw, red fiend whose ear has to be screwed round and round, and round

and round, before she will by any manner of means consent to start. The

roads carry neat little eighteen-inch trenches at their sides, admirably

adapted to hold the flying wheel. Skirling about this savage land in the

dark, the white population beguile the time by rapturously recounting

past accidents, insisting throughout on the super-equine "steadiness" of

their cattle. Deep and broad and wide is their jovial hospitality; but

somebody--the Tirhoot planters for choice--ought to start a mission to

teach the men of Giridih what to drive. They know _how_, or they would

be severally and separately and many times dead, but they do not, they

do not indeed, know that animals who stand on one hind leg and beckon

with all the rest, or try to pigstick in harness, are not trap-horses

worthy of endearing names, but things to be pole-axed. Their feelings

are hurt when you say this. "Sit tight," say the men of Giridih; "we're

insured! We can't be hurt."

And now with grey hairs, dry mouth, and chattering teeth to the

collieries. The E. I. R. estate, bought or leased in perpetuity from the

Serampore Raja, may be about four miles long and between one and two

miles across. It is in two pieces, the Serampore field being separated

from the Karharbari (or Kurhurballi or Kabarbari) field by the property

of the Bengal Coal Company. The Raneegunge Coal Association lies to the

east of all other workings. So we have three companies at work on about

eleven square miles of land.

There is no such thing as getting a full view of the whole place. A

short walk over a grassy down gives on to an outcrop of very dirty

sandstone, which in the excessive innocence of his heart the visitor

naturally takes to be the coal lying neatly on the surface. Up to this

sandstone the path seems to be made of crushed sugar, so white and shiny

is the quartz. Over the brow of the down comes in sight the old familiar

pit-head wheel, spinning for the dear life, and the eye loses itself in

a maze of pumping sheds, red-tiled, mud-walled miners' huts, dotted all

over the landscape, and railway lines that run on every kind of

gradient. There are lines that dip into valleys and disappear round the

shoulders of slopes, and lines that career on the tops of rises and

disappear over the brow of the slopes. Along these lines whistle and

pant metre-gauge engines, some with trucks at their tail, and others

rattling back to the pit-bank with the absurd air of a boy late for

school that an unemployed engine always assumes. There are six engines

in all, and as it is easiest to walk along the lines one sees a good

deal of them. They bear not altogether unfamiliar names. Here, for

instance, passes the "Cockburn" whistling down a grade with thirty tons

of coal at her heels; while the "Whitly" and the "Olpherts" are waiting

for their complement of trucks. Now a Mr. T. F. Cockburn was

superintendent of these mines nearly thirty years ago, in the days

before the chord-lines from Kanu to Luckeeserai were built, and all the

coal was carted to the latter place; and surely Mr. Olpherts was an

engineer who helped to think out a new sleeper. What may these things

mean?

"Apotheosis of the Manager," is the reply. "Christen the engines after

the managers. You'll find Cockburn, Dunn, Whitly, Abbott, Olpherts, and

Saise, knocking about the place. Sounds funny, doesn't it? Doesn't sound

so funny, when one of these idiots does his best to derail Saise,

though, by putting a line down anyhow. Look at that line! Laid out in

knots--by Jove!" To the unprofessional eye the rails seem all correct;

but there must be something wrong, because "one of those idiots" is

asked why in the name of all he considers sacred he does not ram the

ballast properly.

"What would happen if you threw an engine off the line?" "Can't say that

I know exactly. You see, our business is to keep them _on_, and we do

that. Here's rather a curiosity. You see that pointsman! They say he's

an old mutineer, and when he relaxes he boasts of the Sahibs he has

killed. He's glad enough to eat the Company's salt now." Such a withered

old face was the face of the pointsman at No. 11 point! The information

suggested a host of questions, and the answers were these: "You won't be

able to understand till you've been down into a mine. We work our men in

two ways: some by direct payment--under our own hand, and some by

contractors. The contractor undertakes to deliver us the coal, supplying

his own men, tools, and props. He's responsible for the safety of his

men, and of course the Company knows and sees his work. Just fancy,

among these five thousand people, what sort of effect the news of an

accident would produce! It would go all through the Sonthal Parganas. We

have any amount of Sonthals besides Mahometans and Hindus of every

possible caste, down to those Musahers who eat pig. They don't require

much administering in the civilian sense of the word. On Sundays, as a

rule, if any man has had his daughter eloped with, or anything of that

kind, he generally comes up to the manager's bungalow to get the matter

put straight. If a man is disabled through accident he knows that as

long as he's in the hospital he gets full wages, and the Company pays

for the food of any of his women-folk who come to look after him. _One_,

of course; not the whole clan. That makes our service popular with the

people. Don't you believe that a native is a fool. You can train him to

everything except responsibility. There's a rule in the workings that if

there is any dangerous work--we haven't choke-damp; I will show you when

we get down--no gang must work without an Englishman to look after them.

A native wouldn't be wise enough to understand what the danger was, or

where it came in. Even if he did, he'd shirk the responsibility. We

can't afford to risk a single life. All our output is just as much as

the Company want--about a thousand tons per working day. Three hundred

thousand in the year. We could turn out more? Yes--a little. Well, yes,

twice as much. I won't go on, because you wouldn't believe me. There's

the coal under us, and we work it at any depth from following up an

outcrop down to six hundred feet. That is our deepest shaft. We have no

necessity to go deeper. At home the mines are sometimes fifteen hundred

feet down. Well, the thickness of this coal here varies from anything

you please to anything you please. There's enough of it to last your

time and one or two hundred years longer. Perhaps even longer than that.

Look at that stuff. That's big coal from the pit."

It was aristocratic-looking coal, just like the picked lumps that are

stacked in baskets of coal agencies at home with the printed legend atop

"only 23_s_ a ton." But there was no picking in this case. The great

piled banks were all "equal to sample," and beyond them lay piles of

small, broken, "smithy" coal. "The Company doesn't sell to the public.

This small, broken coal is an exception. That is sold, but the big stuff

is for the engines and the shops. It doesn't cost much to get out, as

you say; but our men can earn as much as twelve rupees a month. Very

often when they've earned enough to go on with they retire from the

concern till they've spent their money and then come on again. It's

piece-work and they are improvident. If some of them only lived like

other natives they would have enough to buy land and cows with. When

there's a press of work they make a good deal by overtime, but they

don't seem to keep it. You should see Giridih Bazaar on a Sunday if you

want to know where the money goes. About ten thousand rupees change

hands once a week there. If you want to get at the number of people who

are indirectly dependent or profit by the E. I. R. you'll have to

conduct a census of your own. After Sunday is over the men generally lie

off on Monday and take it easy on Tuesday. Then they work hard for the

next four days and make it up. Of course there's nothing in the wide

world to prevent a man from resigning and going away to wherever he came

from--behind those hills if he's a Sonthal. He loses his employment,

that's all. But they have their own point of honour. A man hates to be

told by his friends that he has been guilty of shirking. And now we'll

go to breakfast. You shall be 'pitted' to-morrow to any depth you

like."

CHAPTER II

IN THE DEPTHS.

"Pitted to any extent you please." The only difficulty was for Joseph to

choose his pit. Giridih was full of them. There was an arch in the side

of a little hill, a blackened brick arch leading into thick night. A

stationary engine was hauling a procession of coal-laden trucks--"tubs"

is the technical word--out of its depths. The tubs were neither pretty

nor clean. "We are going down in those when they are emptied. Put on

your helmet and _keep_ it on, and keep your head down."

There is nothing mirth-provoking in going down a coal-mine--even though

it be only a shallow incline running to one hundred and forty feet

vertical below the earth. "Get into the tub and lie down. Hang it, no!

This is not a railway carriage: you can't see the country out of the

windows. Lie _down_ in the dust and don't lift your head. Let her go!"

The tubs strain on the wire rope and slide down fourteen hundred feet of

incline, at first through a chastened gloom, and then through darkness.

An absurd sentence from a trial report rings in the head: "About this

time prisoner expressed a desire for the consolations of religion." A

hand with a reeking flare-lamp hangs over the edge of the tub, and there

is a glimpse of a blackened hat near it, for those accustomed to the

pits have a merry trick of going down sitting or crouching on the

coupling of the rear tub. The noise is deafening, and the roof is very

close indeed. The tubs bump, and the occupant crouches lovingly in the

coal dust. What would happen if the train went off the line? The desire

for the "consolations of religion" grows keener and keener as the air

grows closer and closer. The tubs stop in darkness spangled by the light

of the flare-lamps which many black devils carry. Underneath and on both

sides is the greasy blackness of the coal, and, above, a roof of grey

sandstone, smooth as the flow of a river at evening. "Now, remember that

if you don't keep your hat on, you'll get your head broken, because you

will forget to stoop. If you hear any tubs coming up behind you step off

to one side. There's a tramway under your feet: be careful not to trip

over it."

The miner has a gait as peculiarly his own as Tommy's measured pace or

the bluejacket's roll. Big men who slouch in the light of day become

almost things of beauty underground. Their foot is on their native

heather; and the slouch is a very necessary act of homage to the great

earth, which if a man observe not, he shall without doubt have his

hat--bless the man who invented pith hats!--grievously cut.

The road turns and winds and the roof becomes lower, but those accursed

tubs still rattle by on the tramways. The roof throws back their noises,

and when all the place is full of a grumbling and a growling, how under

earth is one to know whence danger will turn up next? The air brings to

the unacclimatised a singing in the ears, a hotness of the eyeballs,

and a jumping of the heart. "That's because the pressure here is

different from the pressure up above. It'll wear off in a minute. _We_

don't notice it. Wait till you get down a four-hundred-foot pit. _Then_

your ears will begin to sing, if you like."

Most people know the One Night of each hot weather--that still, clouded

night just before the Rains break, when there seems to be no more

breathable air under the bowl of the pitiless skies, and all the weight

of the silent, dark house lies on the chest of the sleep-hunter. This is

the feeling in a coal-mine--only more so--much more so, for the darkness

is the "gross darkness of the inner sepulchre." It is hard to see which

is the black coal and which the passage driven through it. From far

away, down the side galleries, comes the regular beat of the pick--thick

and muffled as the beat of the labouring heart. "Six men to a gang, and

they aren't allowed to work alone. They make six-foot drives through the

coal--two and sometimes three men working together. The rest clear away

the stuff and load it into the tubs. We have no props in this gallery

because we have a roof as good as a ceiling. The coal lies under the

sandstone here. It's beautiful sandstone." It _was_ beautiful

sandstone--as hard as a billiard table and devoid of any nasty little

bumps and jags.

There was a roaring down one road--the roaring of infernal fires. This

is not a pleasant thing to hear in the dark. It is too suggestive.

"That's our ventilating shaft. Can't you feel the air getting brisker?

Come and look."

Imagine a great iron-bound crate of burning coal, hanging over a gulf

of darkness faintly showing the brickwork of the base of a chimney.

"We're at the bottom of the shaft. That fire makes a draught that sucks

up the foul air from the bottom of the pit. There's another down-draw

shaft in another part of the mine where the clean air comes in. We

aren't going to set the mines on fire. There's an earth and brick floor

at the bottom of the pit; the crate hangs over. It isn't so deep as you

think." Then a devil--a naked devil--came in with a pitchfork and fed

the spouting flames. This was perfectly in keeping with the landscape.

More trucks, more muffled noises, more darkness made visible, and more

devils--male and female--coming out of darkness and vanishing. Then a

picture to be remembered. A great Hall of Eblis, twenty feet from

inky-black floor to grey roof, upheld by huge pillars of shining coal,

and filled with flitting and passing devils. On a shattered pillar near

the roof stood a naked man, his flesh olive-coloured in the light of the

lamps, hewing down a mass of coal that still clove to the roof. Behind

him was the wall of darkness, and when the lamps shifted he disappeared

like a ghost. The devils were shouting directions, and the man howled in

reply, resting on his pick and wiping the sweat from his brow. When he

smote the coal crushed and slid and rumbled from the darkness into the

darkness, and the devils cried _Shabash!_ The man stood erect like a

bronze statue, he twisted and bent himself like a Japanese grotesque,

and anon threw himself on his side after the manner of the dying

gladiator. Then spoke the still small voice of fact: "A first-class

workman if he would only stick to it. But as soon as he makes a little

money he lies off and spends it. That's the last of a pillar that we've

knocked out. See here. These pillars of coal are square, about thirty

feet each way. As you can see, we make the pillar first by cutting out

all the coal between. Then we drive two square tunnels, about seven feet

wide, through and across the pillar, propping it with balks. There's one

fresh cut."

Two tunnels crossing at right angles had been driven through a pillar

which in its under-cut condition seemed like the rough draft of a statue

for an elephant. "When the pillar stands only on four legs we chip away

one leg at a time from a square to an hour-glass shape, and then either

the whole of the pillar crashes down from the roof or else a quarter or

a half. If the coal lies against the sandstones it carries away clear,

but in some places it brings down stone and rubbish with it. The

chipped-away legs of the pillars are called stooks."

"Who has to make the last cut that breaks a leg through?"

"Oh! Englishmen of sorts. We can't trust natives for the job unless it's

very easy. The natives take kindly to the pillar-work though. They are

paid just as much for their coal as though they had hewed it out of the

solid. Of course we take very good care to see that the roof doesn't

come in on us. You would never understand how and why we prop our roofs

with those piles of sleepers. Anyway, you can see that we cannot take

out a whole line of pillars. We work 'em _en echelon_, and those big

beams you see running from floor to roof are our indicators. They show

when the roof is going to give. Oh! dear no, there's no dramatic effect

about it. No splash, you know. Our roofs give plenty of warning by

cracking and then collapse slowly. The parts of the work that we have

cleared out and allowed to fall in are called goafs. You're on the edge

of a goaf now. All that darkness there marks the limit of the mine. We

have worked that out piece-meal, and the props are gone and the place is

down. The roof of any pillar-working is tested every morning by

tapping--pretty hard tapping."

"Hi yi! yi!" shout all the devils in chorus, and the Hall of Eblis is

full of rolling sound. The olive man has brought down an avalanche of

coal. "It is a sight to see the whole of one of the pillars come away.

They make an awful noise. It would startle you out of your wits. But

there's not an atom of risk."

("Not an atom of risk." Oh, genial and courteous host, when you turned

up next day blacker than any sweep that ever swept, with a neat,

half-inch gash on your forehead--won by cutting a "stook" and getting

caught by a bounding coal-knob--how long and earnestly did you endeavour

to show that "stook-cutting" was an employment as harmless and

unexciting as wool-samplering!)

"Our ways are rather primitive, but they're cheap, and safe as houses.

Doms and Bauris, Kols and Beldars, don't understand refinements in

mining. They'd startle an English pit where there was fire-damp. Do you

know it's a solemn fact that if you drop a Davy lamp or snatch it

quickly you can blow a whole English pit inside out with all the miners?

Good for us that we don't know what fire-damp is here. We can use

flare-lamps."

After the first feeling of awe and wonder is worn out, a mine becomes

monotonous. There is only the humming, palpitating darkness, the rumble

of the tubs, and the endless procession of galleries to arrest the

attention. And one pit to the uninitiated is as like to another as two

peas. Tell a miner this and he laughs--slowly and softly. To him the

pits have each distinct personalities, and each must be dealt with

differently.

CHAPTER III

THE PERILS OF THE PITS.

An engineer, who has built a bridge, can strike you nearly dead with

professional facts; the captain of a seventy-horse-power Ganges

river-steamer can, in one hour, tell legends of the Sandheads and the

James and Mary shoal sufficient to fill half a _Pioneer_, but a couple

of days spent on, above, and in a coal-mine yields more mixed

information than two engineers and three captains. It is hopeless to

pretend to understand it all.

When your host says, "Ah, such an one is a thundering good

fault-reader!" you smile hazily, and by way of keeping up the

conversation, adventure on the statement that fault-reading and

palmistry are very popular amusements. Then men explain.

Every one knows that coal-strata, in common with women, horses, and

official superiors, have "faults" caused by some colic of the earth in

the days when things were settling into their places. A coal-seam is

suddenly sliced off as a pencil is cut through with one slanting blow of

the penknife, and one-half is either pushed up or pushed down any number

of feet. The miners work the seam till they come to this break-off, and

then call for an expert to "read the fault." It is sometimes very hard

to discover whether the sliced-off seam has gone up or down.

Theoretically, the end of the broken piece should show the direction.

Practically its indications are not always clear. Then a good

"fault-reader," who must more than know geology, is a useful man, and is

much prized; for the Giridih fields are full of faults and "dykes."

Tongues of what was once molten lava thrust themselves sheer into the

coal, and the disgusted miner finds that for about twenty feet on each

side of the tongue all coal has been burnt away.

The head of the mine is supposed to foresee these things and more. He

can tell you, without looking at the map, what is the geological

formation of any thousand square miles of India; he knows as much about

brickwork and the building of houses, arches, and shafts as an average

P. W. D. man; he has not only to know the intestines of a pumping or

winding engine, but must be able to take them to pieces with his own

hands, indicate on the spot such parts as need repair, and make drawings

of anything that requires renewal; he knows how to lay out and build

railways with a grade of one in twenty-seven; he has to carry, in his

head all the signals and points between and over which his locomotive

engines work; he must be an electrician capable of controlling the

apparatus that fires the dynamite charges in the pits, and must

thoroughly understand boring operations with thousand-foot drills. He

must know by name, at least, one thousand of the men on the works, and

must fluently speak the vernaculars of the low castes. If he has

Sonthali, which is more elaborate than Greek, so much the better for

him. He must know how to handle men of all grades, and, while holding

himself aloof, must possess sufficient grip of the men's private lives

to be able to see at once the merits of a charge of attempted abduction

preferred by a clucking, croaking Kol against a fluent English-speaking

Brahmin. For he is literally the Light of Justice, and to him the

injured husband and the wrathful father look for redress. He must be on

the spot and take all responsibility when any specially risky job is

under way in the pit, and he can claim no single hour of the day or the

night for his own. From eight in the morning till one in the afternoon

he is coated with coal-dust and oil. From one till eight in the evening

he has office work. After eight o'clock he is free to attend to anything

that he may be wanted for.

This is a soberly drawn picture of a life that Sahibs on the mines

actually enjoy. They are spared all private socio-official worry, for

the Company, in its mixture of State and private interest, is as

perfectly cold-blooded and devoid of bias as any great Department of the

Empire. If certain things be done, well and good. If certain things be

not done the defaulter goes, and his place is filled by another. The

conditions of service are graven on stone. There may be generosity;

there undoubtedly is justice, but above all, there is freedom within

broad limits. No irrepressible shareholder cripples the executive arm

with suggestions and restrictions, and no private piques turn men's

blood to gall within them. They work like horses and are happy.

When he can snatch a free hour, the grimy, sweating, cardigan-jacketed,

ammunition-booted, pick-bearing ruffian turns into a well-kept English

gentleman, who plays a good game of billiards, and has a batch of new

books from England every week. The change is sudden, but in Giridih

nothing is startling. It is right and natural that a man should be

alternately Valentine and Orson, specially Orson. It is right and

natural to drive--always behind a mad horse--away and away towards the

lonely hills till the flaming coke ovens become glow-worms on the dark

horizon, and in the wilderness to find a lovely English maiden teaching

squat, filthy Sonthal girls how to become Christians. Nothing is strange

in Giridih, and the stories of the pits, the raffle of conversation that

a man picks up as he passes, are quite in keeping with the place. Thanks

to the law, which enacts that an Englishman must look after the native

miners, and if any one be killed must explain satisfactorily that the

accident was not due to preventable causes, the death-roll is kept

astoundingly low. In one "bad" half-year, six men out of the five

thousand were killed, in another four, and in another none at all. As

has been said before, a big accident would scare off the workers, for,

in spite of the age of the mines--nearly thirty years--the hereditary

pitman has not yet been evolved. But to small accidents the men are

orientally apathetic. Read of a death among the five thousand:--

A gang has been ordered to cut clay for the luting of the coke furnaces.

The clay is piled in a huge bank in the open sunlight. A coolie hacks

and hacks till he has hewn out a small cave with twenty foot of clay

above him. Why should he trouble to climb up the bank and bring down the

eave of the cave? It is easier to cut in. The Sirdar of the gang is

watching round the shoulder of the bank. The coolie cuts lazily as he

stands. Sunday is very near, and he will get gloriously drunk in Giridih

Bazaar with his week's earnings. He digs his own grave stroke by stroke,

for he has not sense enough to see that undercut clay is dangerous. He

is a Sonthal from the hills. There is a smash and a dull thud, and his

grave has shut down upon him in an avalanche of heavy-caked clay.

The Sirdar calls to the Babu of the Ovens, and with the promptitude of

his race the Babu loses his head. He runs puffily, without giving

orders, anywhere, everywhere. Finally he runs to the Sahib's house. The

Sahib is at the other end of the collieries. He runs back. The Sahib has

gone home to wash. Then his indiscretion strikes him. He should have

sent runners--fleet-footed boys from the coal-screening gangs. He sends

them and they fly. One catches the Sahib just changed after his bath.

"There is a man dead at such a place"--he gasps, omitting to say whether

it is a surface or a pit accident. On goes the grimy pit-kit, and in

three minutes the Sahib's dogcart is flying to the place indicated.

They have dug out the Sonthal. His head is smashed in, spine and

breastbone are broken, and the gang-Sirdar, bowing double, throws the

blame of the accident on the poor, shapeless, battered dead. "I had

warned him, but he would not listen! _Twice_ I warned him! These men are

witnesses."

The Babu is shaking like a jelly. "Oh, sar, I have never seen a man

killed before! Look at that eye, sar! I should have sent runners. I ran

everywhere! I ran to your house. You were not in. I was running for

hours. It was not my fault! It was the fault of the gang-Sirdar." He

wrings his hands and gurgles. The best of accountants, but the poorest

of coroners is he. No need to ask how the accident happened. No need to

listen to the Sirdar and his "witnesses." The Sonthal had been a fool,

but it was the Sirdar's business to protect him against his own folly.

"Has he any people here?"

"Yes, his _rukni_,--his kept-woman,--and his sister's brother-in-law.

His home is far-off."

The sister's brother-in-law breaks through the crowd howling for

vengeance on the Sirdar. He will send for the police, he will have the

price of his brother's blood full tale. The windmill arms and the angry

eyes fall, for the Sahib is making the report of the death.

"Will the Government give me _pensin_? I am his wife," a woman clamours,

stamping her pewter-ankleted feet. "He was killed in your service. Where

is his _pensin_? I am his wife."

"You lie! You're his _rukni_. Keep quiet! Go! The pension comes to

_us_."

The sister's brother-in-law is not a refined man, but the _rukni_ is his

match. They are silenced. The Sahib takes the report, and the body is

borne away. Before to-morrow's sun rises the gang-Sirdar may find

himself a simple "surface-coolie," earning nine _pice_ a day; and in a

week some Sonthal woman behind the hills may discover that she is

entitled to draw monthly great wealth from the coffers of the Sirkar.

But this will not happen if the sister's brother-in-law can prevent it.

He goes off swearing at the _rukni_.

In the meantime, what have the rest of the dead man's gang been doing?

They have, if you please, abating not one stroke, dug out all the clay,

and would have it verified. They have seen their comrade die. He is

dead. _Bus!_[17] Will the Sirdar take the tale of clay? And yet, were

twenty men to be crushed by their own carelessness in the pit, these

same impassive workers would scatter like panic-stricken horses.

[17] Enough.

Turning from this sketch, let us set in order a few stories of the pits.

In some of the mines the coal is blasted out by the dynamite which is

fired by electricity from a battery on the surface. Two men place the

charges, and then signal to be drawn up in the cage which hangs in the

pit-eye. Once two natives were intrusted with the job. They performed

their parts beautifully till the end, when the vaster idiot of the two

scrambled into the cage, gave signal, and was hauled up before his

friend could follow.

Thirty or forty yards up the shaft all possible danger for those in the

cage was over, and the charge was accordingly exploded. Then it occurred

to the man in the cage that his friend stood a very good chance of

being, by this time, riven to pieces and choked.

But the friend was wise in his generation. He had missed the cage, but

found a coal-tub--one of the little iron trucks--and turning this upside

down, crawled into it. When the charge went off, his shelter was

battered in so much, that men had to hack him out, for the tub had made,

as it were, a tinned, sardine of its occupant. He was absolutely unhurt,

but for his feelings. On reaching the pit-bank his first words were, "I

do not desire to go down to the pit with _that_ man any more." His wish

had been already gratified, for "that man" had fled. Later on, the story

goes, when "that man" found that the guilt of murder was not at his

door, he returned, and was made a mere surface-coolie, and his brothers

jeered at him as they passed to their better-paid occupation.

Occasionally there are mild cyclones in the pits. An old working,

perhaps a mile away, will collapse: a whole gallery sinking bodily. Then

the displaced air rushes through the inhabited mine, and, to quote their

own expression, blows the pitmen about "like dry leaves." Few things are

more amusing than the spectacle of a burly Tyneside foreman who, failing

to dodge round a corner in time, is "put down" by the wind,

sitting-fashion, on a knobby lump of coal.

But most impressive of all is a tale they tell of a fire in a pit many

years ago. The coal caught light. They had to send earth and bricks down

the shaft and build great dams across the galleries to choke the fire.

Imagine the scene, a few hundred feet underground, with the air growing

hotter and hotter each moment, and the carbonic acid gas trickling

through the dams. After a time the rough dams gaped, and the gas poured

in afresh, and the Englishmen went down and leeped the cracks between

roof and dam-sill with anything they could get. Coolies fainted, and had

to be taken away, but no one died, and behind the first dams they built

great masonry ones, and bested that fire; though for a long time

afterwards, whenever they pumped water into it, the steam would puff out

from crevices in the ground above.

It is a queer life that they lead, these men of the coal-fields, and a

"big" life to boot. To describe one-half of their labours would need a

week at the least, and would be incomplete then. "If you want to see

anything," they say, "you should go over to the Baragunda copper-mines;

you should look at the Barakar ironworks; you should see our boring

operations five miles away; you should see how we sink pits; you should,

above all, see Giridih Bazaar on a Sunday. Why, you haven't seen

anything. There's no end of a Sonthal Mission hereabouts. All the little

dev--dears have gone on a picnic. Wait till they come back, and see 'em

learning to read."

Alas! one cannot wait. At the most one can but thrust an impertinent pen

skin-deep into matters only properly understood by specialists.

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS

GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

Transcriber's Notes

Use the phase to find the text referenced.

Page 290

rate will know what I mean.

'known' changed to 'know'.

Page 353

lanquer stands

'lanquer' may be 'lacquer'. Unchanged.

Page 382

if they show the least disposition

'dispositon' changed to 'disposition'.

Page 393

door with _cloisonnee_ hinges,

cloisonnee also spelled cloissonnee in this book. No change.

Part 2

Page 74

jet of steam

'stream' changed to 'steam'.

Page 80

black-yellow, and pink pools

'link' changed to 'pink'.

Page 105

Lord forgie us

'forgie' may be a form of dialect meaning 'forgive'. Unchanged.

Page 114

the final book of Mononi

'Mononi' may be 'Moroni'. Unchanged.

Page 193

maidan also spelled maidan and maidan. No change.

Page 231

pan also spelled pan. No change.

Page 292

seam has gone up or down.

'beam' changed to 'seam'.