| Author: | Edward Dyson | ISBN: | 1230000157227 |
| Publisher: | WDS Publishing | Publication: | August 3, 2013 |
| Imprint: | Language: | English |
| Author: | Edward Dyson |
| ISBN: | 1230000157227 |
| Publisher: | WDS Publishing |
| Publication: | August 3, 2013 |
| Imprint: | |
| Language: | English |
THE Peep-o'-Day had been shut down for a long time now. The grand
machinery rusted in the imposing brick engine-house, deserted by all
saving the swallows and Dick, who could just squeeze in through the slit
in the wall where the beam rode, and who did not share the superstitious
fear inspired in his schoolmates by its dim light and silence and
loneliness. The rabbits burrowed and bred under the black boilers and
about the foundations of the towering stack, and a subduing influence
hung around the old mine and touched with reverence the stranger
loitering curiously about its many buildings and piled-up tips.
Over young Dick Haddon the mine exerted a peculiar fascination. Most of
his spare time after school hours and on Saturday afternoons he spent
running at large about the place, washing innumerable prospects in his
old fryingpan at the big dam. He found his way into the locked offices,
and rummaged the blacksmith's shop, the engine-room and boiler-houses;
climbed the lightning-rod on the dizzy, rocking smoke-stack, to the
imminent risk of his precious neck; scrambled over every part of
poppet-legs, brace, and puddling plat, doing monkey on the tie-beams,
with sheer falls of a hundred or two hundred feet inviting him to the
scattered, clean white boulders below; or taking the air up on the
poppet-heads, to the scandal of Brother Bear or Brother Petric or any
other pious brother of the little Waddytown Wesleyan chapel, for all
believed such devilment to be a certain evidence of evil possession.
The mine had always filled the greater part of the boy's life. He
remembered since memory began with him a mighty, smoking, whistling
entity, vomiting unending water, and clattering truck-loads of gravel and
slate, and curious streams of white mullock, fed with big four-horse
waggon-loads of wood that came up the muddy Springs road to the
accompaniment of volleying whip-cracks and gorgeous profanity that seemed
grand and inspiring and filled him with the same large emotions as a tale
of "Arabian Nights" read aloud by his mother before the winter evening
fires.
THE Peep-o'-Day had been shut down for a long time now. The grand
machinery rusted in the imposing brick engine-house, deserted by all
saving the swallows and Dick, who could just squeeze in through the slit
in the wall where the beam rode, and who did not share the superstitious
fear inspired in his schoolmates by its dim light and silence and
loneliness. The rabbits burrowed and bred under the black boilers and
about the foundations of the towering stack, and a subduing influence
hung around the old mine and touched with reverence the stranger
loitering curiously about its many buildings and piled-up tips.
Over young Dick Haddon the mine exerted a peculiar fascination. Most of
his spare time after school hours and on Saturday afternoons he spent
running at large about the place, washing innumerable prospects in his
old fryingpan at the big dam. He found his way into the locked offices,
and rummaged the blacksmith's shop, the engine-room and boiler-houses;
climbed the lightning-rod on the dizzy, rocking smoke-stack, to the
imminent risk of his precious neck; scrambled over every part of
poppet-legs, brace, and puddling plat, doing monkey on the tie-beams,
with sheer falls of a hundred or two hundred feet inviting him to the
scattered, clean white boulders below; or taking the air up on the
poppet-heads, to the scandal of Brother Bear or Brother Petric or any
other pious brother of the little Waddytown Wesleyan chapel, for all
believed such devilment to be a certain evidence of evil possession.
The mine had always filled the greater part of the boy's life. He
remembered since memory began with him a mighty, smoking, whistling
entity, vomiting unending water, and clattering truck-loads of gravel and
slate, and curious streams of white mullock, fed with big four-horse
waggon-loads of wood that came up the muddy Springs road to the
accompaniment of volleying whip-cracks and gorgeous profanity that seemed
grand and inspiring and filled him with the same large emotions as a tale
of "Arabian Nights" read aloud by his mother before the winter evening
fires.
