to trouble its inhabitants.

At this period, Simon Ford, the former overman of the Dochart pit,
bore the weight of sixty-five years well. Tall, robust,
well-built, he would have been regarded as one of the most
conspicuous men in the district which supplies so many fine
fellows to the Highland regiments.

Simon Ford was descended from an old mining family, and his
ancestors had worked the very first carboniferous seams opened
in Scotland. Without discussing whether or not the Greeks
and Romans made use of coal, whether the Chinese worked coal
mines before the Christian era, whether the French word for coal
(HOUILLE) is really derived from the farrier Houillos, who lived
in Belgium in the twelfth century, we may affirm that the beds
in Great Britain were the first ever regularly worked.
So early as the eleventh century, William the Conqueror divided
the produce of the Newcastle bed among his companions-in-arms.
At the end of the thirteenth century, a license for the mining
of "sea coal" was granted by Henry III. Lastly, towards the end
of the same century, mention is made of the Scotch and Welsh beds.

It was about this time that Simon Ford's ancestors penetrated
into the bowels of Caledonian earth, and lived there ever after,
from father to son. They were but plain miners. They labored
like convicts at the work of extracting the precious combustible.
It is even believed that the coal miners, like the salt-makers
of that period, were actual slaves.

However that might have been, Simon Ford was proud