tunnel, and every recorded hole: for something urged within me, saying:
'You must be sure first, or you can never be--yourself.'

* * * * *

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 _débris_ 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. My only way of going down, therefore, was by
the pit-mouth, and as this was an important place, after some hesitation
I decided, very rashly. First I provided for my coming up again by
getting a great coil of half-inch rope, which I found in the bailiff's
office, probably 130 fathoms long, rope at most mines being so
plentiful, that it almost seemed as if each fugitive had provided
himself in that way. This length of rope I threw over the beam of the