The city of Scranton lies in the centre of the Lackawanna coal-field,
in the State of Pennsylvania. Year by year the suburbs of the city
creep up the sides of the surrounding hills, like the waters of a
rising lake.

Standing at any point on this shore line of human habitations, you can
look out across the wide landscape and count a score of coal-breakers
within the limits of your first glance. These breakers are huge, dark
buildings that remind you of castles of the olden time. They are
many-winged and many-windowed, and their shaft-towers rise high up
toward the clouds and the stars. About the feet of those in the valley
the waves of the out-reaching city beat and break, and out on the
hill-sides they stand like mighty fortresses built to guard the lives
and fortunes of the multitudes who toil beneath them. But they are not
long-lived. Like human beings, they rise, they flourish, they die and
are forgotten. Not one in hundreds of the people who walk the streets
of Scranton to-day, or who dig the coal from its surrounding hills,
can tell you where Burnham Breaker stood a quarter of a century ago.
Yet there are men still living, and boys who have grown to manhood,
scores of them, who toiled for years in the black dust breathed out
from its throats of iron, and listened to the thunder of its grinding
jaws from dawn to dark of many and many a day.

These will surely tell you where the breaker stood. They are proud to
have labored there in other years. They will speak to you of that time
with pleasant memories. It was thought to be a stroke of fortune to
obtain work at Burnham Breaker. It was just beyond the suburbs of the
city as they then were, and near to the homes of all the workmen. The