X

Darius, Big James and Edwin stared in the morning sunshine at the aperture of the window, and listened.

"Nay!" said Big James after an eternity. "He's saved it! He's saved th' old shop! But by gum-by gum!"

Darius turned to Edwin, and tried to say something; and then Edwin saw his father's face working into monstrous angular shapes, and saw the tears spurt out of his eyes; and was clutched convulsively in his father's shirt-sleeved arms. He was very proud, very pleased; but he did not like this embrace; it made him feel ashamed. And although he had incontestably done something which was very wonderful and very heroic, and which proved in him the most extraordinary presence of mind, he could not honestly glorify himself in his own heart, because it appeared to him that he had acted exactly like an automaton. He blankly marveled, and thought the situation agreeably thrilling, if somewhat awkward. His father let him go. Then all Edwin's feelings gave place to an immense stupefaction at his father's truly remarkable behavior. What! His father emotional! He had to begin to revise again his settled views.

IN THE QUARRIES

BY EDEN PHILLPOTTS

DELABOLE is a hamlet created by one industry, whose men and boys to the number of five hundred work in the slate quarries, as their forefathers have done and their children's children will do. Since Tudor times the slate of Delabole has come to market, for men worked here before Shakespeare wrote.

But the theatre of their toil is not immediately visible.

Beneath Delabole an artificial mountain of shining stone rolls out upon the slope of the meadows, and creates a landmark to be seen for many miles. Behind these mounds the earth vanishes suddenly, and there yawns an immense crater. It sinks below the surface of the land, and the mouth of it is more than a quarter of a mile across. Round about the pit stand offices, shops, and enginehouses. An iron structure ascends upon the landing-stage, or pappothead, above a stark precipice of six hundred feet, and every way at the surface there threads and twists a network of little rails. They run round about to the shops, to the larger gauge of the main line, to the forehead of the mountains of waste stuff, whose feet are in the green fields far beneath. Here open the quarries of Delabole, and though they have been yielding slate for some hundred years, the supply continues to meet all demand. Of old a dozen separate workings stood in proximity; now they have run together, and their circumference is a mile.

It is an oval cup with surfaces that slope outward from the bottom. The sides are precipices, some abrupt and beetling with sheer falls of many hundred feet, while others reveal a gentler declivity, and their sides are broken by giant steps. Here and there the overburden has fallen in, and moraines of rubbish tower cone-shaped against the quarry sides. They spread from a point high up on the cliff face and ooze out in great wedges of waste, whose worthless masses smother good slate. The sides of the crater are chased with galleries, and burnished with bright colors spread and splashed over the planes of the cliffs. Some of these rock-cut galleries are now disused, others are bare and raw, with the bright thread of tram

lines glittering along them; but in the neglected regions Nature has returned to weather the stone with wonderful color and trace rich harmonies of russet and amber upon it. Here, too, growing things have found foothold, and bird-borne, air-borne, water-borne seeds have germinated in the high crags and lonely workings. Saplings of ash, beech, and willow make shift to grow, and the rust of deserted tramways or obsolete machinery is hidden under ferns and grasses and wild blossoms. To the east, where falling waters sheet a great red rock-surface, wakens the monkey-flower in springtime to fling a flash of gold amid the blues and grays, while elsewhere iron percolations and the drippings from superincumbent earth stain the sides of this great embouchure to a medley and mosaic of rich color. Evening fills the quarry with wine-purple that mounts to the brim as night falls upon it; dawn chases its sides with silver, and sunrise often floods it with red-gold. Sometimes, at seasons of autumnal rain, the cliffs spout white waterfalls that thread the declivities with foam and swell the tarn at the bottom; while in summer the sea mists find it, fill it, conceal the whole wonder of it, and muffle the Idin of the workers at the bottom.

The active galleries wind away to present centers of attack, and terminate at the new-wrought and naked faces of the slate. These spots glitter steel-bright in contrast with the older workings. They open gray and blue where man's labor is fretting the face of the quarries at a dozen different points. Chief activity was now concentrated upon the great "Grey Abbey" seam, under the northern precipice, and there labored two hundred men to blast the rock and fill the tumbrils that came and went.

The great slate cup is full of light; it is gemmed and adorned so that no plane or scarp lacks beauty. On a bluff westward still stand half a dozen trees that bring spring green hither in April, and make a pillar of fire at autumn-time, until the shadows swallow them, or the winds that scour the quarry find their dead leaves and send them flying. Along the galleries that circle the sides of Old Delabole are sheds and pent-roofs, where a man may shelter against the hail of the blastings; while aloft, beside the trees on the knoll, stands a whitewashed cottage, high above the bottom of the quarries, but far below their surface. Other dwellings once stood here, but they have vanished away for the sake of the good slate seams on which they stood. Now only Wilberforce Retallack's home remained, and that, too, with

the cluster of trees beside it, was doomed presently to vanish. The house and its garden of flowers and shrubs might exist for a few more years, then it would follow its neighbors that once clustered beside it, like sea-birds' nests upon an ocean-facing crag.

Beside the cottage there fell the great main entrance to the quarries a steep plane of eight hundred feet that ran straight into the lowest depths and bore four main lines of tramway to the bottom, with other shorter lines that branched upon the sides. Up and down this great artery the little tumbrils ran. Steel ropes drew and lowered them. They rushed down swiftly, and slowly toiled up again laden with treasure or rubbish.

Beneath the cottage, against a cliff that fell abruptly from the edge of the foreman's garden, stood two great water-wheels, jutting from the rock, and a steam-pump also panted beside them. These fought the green-eyed tarn beneath and sucked away its substance, that it might not increase and drown the lowermost workings. At the bottom of all things it lay and stared up, like a lidless eye, from the heart of the cup.

Besides the great plane that bore the chief business of the quarries and by which the rock-men descended and ascended from their work, there existed another means of lifting the stone and "deads" to the surface. From the pappot-head there slanted threads of steel to the "Grey Abbey" seams, and by these also the little trolleys came and went, or the great blocks swam aloft-a mass of a hundredweight flying upward, as lightly as down of thistles on a puff of air. To the earth they rose, then the flying waggons alighted upon the tram-lines, and a locomotive carried the trucks away.

Against the cliff-faces these steel ropes stretch like gossamers, and behind them, upon the rosy and gray stone, light paints as on a canvas, and makes the quarry magical with sunshine and vapor, the shadows of clouds and rainbow colors after rain. From the pappot-head the immensity of the space beneath may be observed. Like mites in a ripe cheese the men move, and among them, shrunk to the size of black spiders, stand cranes and engines, and a great steam-shovel scooping débris from a fall. From these engines come puffs of white steam, and sometimes a steam-whistle squeaks. The din of work arises thinly, like hum and stridulation of insects; but Old Delabole is never silent. By day the blast and steam-whistle echo, and the noise of men, the quarryman's chant at his work, the

chink of picks and tampers, the hiss of air-drills and chime of jackdaws cease not; while night knows an endless whispering and trickle of little sounds. Water forever tinkles through the darkness, and there is a murmur of moving earth and rustle of falling stone obeying the drag of gravitation through nocturnal silences. That iron law is written on more than senseless matter, for Delabole has its full story of human accident. You shall not walk through the streets without seeing maimed men who have lost an arm or leg in the battle, and the long years of quarry chronicle are punctuated by black-letter days of disaster and death.

The rock-men are scattered everywhere-white, gray, and black. Now they combine to heave a block on a trolley, now they hang aloft on ropes or ladders, now they push the tumbrils to and from the cranes, now they control the engines and handle the great steamshovel. Into a moraine it drives with a grinding crash, then strains upwards, and scoops a ton of rubbish at a thrust. Pick and shovel are at work everywhere. The long snakes of the air-drills twine down the quarry sides to fresh places of attack, and a distinctive, steady screech arises where their steel teeth gnaw holes into the rock, and the dust flies in little puffs.

From time to time a whistle sounds, and the midgets take cover. From a pit or ledge the last man leaps hurriedly, having lighted a fuse before departing; then a billow of smoke bursts outward, and the ignition of black blasting-powder or dynamite rends the stubborn rock-face. First comes the roar of the explosion, then the crash and clatter of the falling stone-a sound like the cry of a receding wave on some pebbly beach. The cup of the quarry catches and retains the din, reverberating its concussions round and round until they fade and die.

The immensity of the quarries might well be marked from below. Over the green pool at the bottom of the pit there passed a trestlebridge, and around it the space, that appeared shrunk to nothing when seen from above, spread out in some acres of apparent confusion and chaos. A village might have stood here. The main incline sloped upward like a mountain-side, and the whole bewildering region was scored with glittering tram-lines on different planes, that ran hither and thither, rose and fell, and ended at the various centers and galleries where work progressed. The pappot-head towered six hundred feet above on the western cliffs, and round about