Page:The English Peasant.djvu/108

 In Reeth and its neighbourhood I conversed with some of the miners. When the veins are exhausted, the mining companies offer them a large percentage to search out fresh veins; but when they are found, they reduce the amount rapidly, as they know that labourers will then come flocking in. This makes the work very precarious. One man told me that he had earned by a single job as much as £60 or £70, while at another time he had not earned more than eighteenpence in eighteen weeks When in regular work they average nine or ten shillings a week, taking the whole year round. Owing, however, to the unhealthy nature of the employment, they are unable to work more than six hours a day. They begin at ten years of age; their lungs gradually get stuffed up with the fine lead-dust, so that as men they look very thin and sickly, and can scarcely live to be old.

In a walk in the neighbourhood of Reeth I met one—a gentle, intelligent man. His complexion was pale and yellow, but through it shone a genial, shrewd, and far from melancholy expression. He was returning home from the mine. He had to walk two hours to his work, and two hours back—a distance of five or six miles each way. He worked in the mine his own time, and spoke w^ell of the masters. Sometimes the miners descend shafts twenty-four fathoms deep; these shafts are supported by woodwork, and the men have to climb up and down them. In the levels they work by candle-light, and go in by a very narrow tunnel on a tramway. They never have explosions, as in coal-mines, but the air is close, and when they come out they feel dizzy for a bit.

In addition to his earnings at the mine, he farmed three acres, on which he kept a cow—selling the milk for a penny a pint, and sometimes "kearning a bit." He had had eight children, but they were all dead but two; one, a girl of seven, had died in a fortnight from the effects of a burn. The last who died was a young man of eight-and-twenty, who, it seemed, had taken- much to learning. "I schuled him te fourteen, and he went on te mensuration and algebra. Ah, edication's a light harrow, ye may carry it anywhere. I sent him down here te schule at Low Row, and paid sixpence a week. The price was tenpence, but the committee said, 'If ye charge him that much,