20 CHARLES HIGGINS 



miners to sink shafts through it and hollow out large cham- 

 bers without the use of any supports or props. Much of the 

 mining in these salt mines is done with no tools except pick 

 and shovel, although in nearly all the mines dynamite is used 

 to loosen great blocks of it. These blocks are afterwards 

 crushed in great breakers. 



In these salt mines children are born in the villages 

 beneath the surface and have been known in some cases to 

 grow to the age of ten or fifteen years before they ever saw 

 the surface of the earth or the mouth of the shaft of the mine 

 in which they lived. In the seclusion of the subterranean 

 fairyland the miners and their families lead lives of quiet, 

 far removed from the battle that surges above them, careless 

 of the worries of the world, protected from the elements and 

 adversity, and with a means of livelihood all around them 

 and always waiting. 



There is another side, though, to the miner's life ; a side 

 which all too often forces itself forward, and that is the side 

 that presents itself when an accident takes place in one of 

 the mines, in a level probably a thousand feet or more be- 

 neath the surface of the ground, a thousand feet from the 

 mouth of the shaft and the upper air. The blast is the thought 

 that strikes terror to the hearts of the miners when a cry of 

 alarm rings through the levels, and the same thought strikes 

 a chill to the hearts of the anxious ones above when news of 

 an accident in the mine spreads like wildfire about the shaft 

 to the houses in which the workers' wives and families live, 

 and brings them wild-eyed with fright, and with prayers on 

 their lips to the office of the company to learn of the horror 

 that may deprive them of a father or a brother or a husband. 



It is only within the last few years that anything like 

 sufficient precautions have been taken to safeguard the work- 

 ers. In the Pennsylvania coal mines, for the first fifty years 

 of working, the ventilation was always bad and there was but 

 one shaft worked to every mine. The terrible fire in the 

 Avondale mines thirty years ago, smothering and burning 

 one hundred and ten men, compelled laws that demanded 

 two distinct shafts for every mine — one for entrance and 

 the other for egress, and specifying the minimum number 



