Burnham Breaker | Page 2

care and vigilance could hold them. Theirs were no light tasks, either.
They sat all day on their little benches, high up in the great black
building, with their eyes fixed always on the shallow streams of broken
coal passing down the iron-sheathed chutes, and falling out of sight
below them; and it was their duty to pick the particles of slate and stone
from out these moving masses, bending constantly above them as they
worked. It was not the physical exertion that made their task a hard one;
there was not much straining of the joints or muscles, not even in the
constant bending of the body to that one position.
Neither was it that their tender hands were often cut and bruised by the
sharp pieces of the coal or the heavy ones of slate. But it was hard
because they were boys; young boys, with bounding pulses, chafing at
restraint, full to the brim with life and spirit, longing for the fresh air,
the bright sunlight, the fields, the woods, the waters, the birds, the
flowers, all things beautiful and wonderful that nature spreads upon the
earth to make of it a paradise for boys. To think of all these things, to
catch brief glimpses of the happiness of children who were not born to
toil, and then to sit, from dawn to mid-day and from mid-day till the
sun went down, and listen to the ceaseless thunder of moving wheels
and the constant sliding of the streams of coal across their iron beds,--it
was this that wearied them.
To know that in the woods the brooks were singing over pebbly
bottoms, that in the fields the air was filled with the fragrance of
blossoming flowers, that everywhere the free wind rioted at will, and
then to sit in such a prison-house as this all day, and breathe an
atmosphere so thick with dust that even the bits of blue sky framed in
by the open windows in the summer time were like strips of some dark

thunder-cloud,--it was this, this dull monotony of dizzy sight and
doleful sound and changeless post of duty, that made their task a hard
one.
There came a certain summer day at Burnham Breaker when the labor
and confinement fell with double weight upon the slate-pickers in the
screen-room. It was circus day. The dead-walls and bill-boards of the
city had been gorgeous for weeks and weeks with pictures heralding the
wonders of the coming show. By the turnpike road, not forty rods from
where the breaker stood, there was a wide barn the whole side of which
had been covered with brightly colored prints of beasts and birds, of
long processions, of men turning marvellous somersaults, of ladies
riding, poised on one foot, on the backs of flying horses, of a hundred
other things to charm the eyes and rouse anticipation in the breasts of
boys.
Every day, when the whistle blew at noon, the boys ran, shouting, from
the breaker, and hurried, with their dinner-pails, to the roadside barn, to
eat and gaze alternately, and discuss the pictured wonders.
And now it was all here; beasts, birds, vaulting men, flying women,
racing horses and all. They had seen the great white tents gleaming in
the sunlight up in the open fields, a mile away, and had heard the
distant music of the band and caught glimpses of the long procession as
it wound through the city streets below them. This was at the noon hour,
while they were waiting for the signal that should call them back into
the dust and din of the screen-room, where they might dream, indeed,
of circus joys while bending to their tasks, but that was all. There was
much wishing and longing. There was some murmuring. There was
even a rash suggestion from one boy that they should go, in spite of the
breaker and the bosses, and revel for a good half-day in the pleasures of
the show. But this treasonable proposition was frowned down without
delay. These boys had caught the spirit of loyalty from the men who
worked at Burnham Breaker, and not even so great a temptation as this
could keep them from the path of duty.
When the bell rang for them to return to work, not one was missing,
each bench had its accustomed occupant, and the coal that was poured

into the cars at the loading-place was never more free from slate and
stone than it was that afternoon.
But it was hot up in the screen-room. The air was close and stifling, and
heavy with the choking dust. The noise of the iron-teethed rollers
crunching the lumps of coal, and the bang and rattle of ponderous
machinery were never before so loud and discordant, and the black