'
* * * * *
At the Farnbrook Coal-field, in the Red Colt Pit, my inexperience nearly
ended my life: for though I had a minute theoretical knowledge of all
British workings, I was, in my practical relation to them, like a man
who has learnt seamanship on shore. At this place the dead were
accumulated, I think beyond precedent, the dark plain around for at
least three miles being as strewn as a reaped field with stacks, and,
near the bank, much more strewn than stack-fields, filling the only
house within sight of the pit-mouth--the small place provided for the
company's officials--and even lying over the great mountain-heap of
wark, composed of the shale and _debris_ of the working. Here I arrived
on the morning of the 15th December, to find that, unlike the others,
there was here no rope-ladder or other contrivance fixed by the
fugitives in the ventilating-shaft, which, usually, is not very deep,
being also the pumping-shaft, containing a plug-rod at one end of the
beam-engine which works the pumps; but looking down the shaft, I
discerned a vague mass of clothes, and afterwards a thing that could
only be a rope-ladder, which a batch of the fugitives, by hanging to it
their united weight, must have dragged down upon themselves, to prevent
the descent of yet others.
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