“It’s seven miles to Portsannet, with High Lee village half way, and after that the Heights, seven hundred feet of them. I came on to shovel with the second shift. You can dig till you can’t straighten your back. I thought myself strong, but--well, a grammar-school was what I was really working for in those days. You may be strong, but you can’t pitch stuff behind you at three times the ordinary rate with men who are always forking hay, or hoeing turnips, or loading peats; and by the time my turn came round to dig for the second time and the third, I wasn’t the only one who was fagging. Then you can go on digging till you don’t mind so much; you’re getting stupid then--what employers of bodily labour call a ‘good man’; and I began to be a good man--except that a good man shouldn’t quarrel with his tools, and at the last change I’d got hold of a garden spade instead of a flanged shovel--a thing that carried about half a pound--and a self-emptier, like the new boat. I became so good a man that when a fellow took that spade from me I asked him what an odd hum of vibrating iron was that I’d heard for some time past; and he pointed to Rhodes’s mill not a dozen yards away. It was the pin-shaft that hummed. I can’t tell you how it had managed to stop up there while the rest of the top storey lay a heap of wreckage below; I suppose things don’t smash quite as you expect ’em to.... During my rest I’d been hanging on to one of the flapping life-lines of the boat. Another man had now got it, and I felt irritated, as if he might have found one of his own; but I clutched the next one, and by and by noticed that the moon was rising. And somewhere about that time we struck the ridge to High Lee. “The moon showed a grotesque procession. She rose, a bloated disc of dull orange, over the steaming horses and labouring figures, over the big boat squatted among the drifted hills.... The wind wasn’t blowing quite in such gusts neither, and I remember thinking that if it would only stop for an hour the snow might pack. We had eased on the digging with the beginning of the ridge, and with the help of the men at the wheels were going at a good three miles an hour. Soon I let go my life-line: I hadn’t come as a passenger. There was digging--always more or less digging; a ridge of land isn’t the same thing as a ridge on a second-form school-map. And there were walls too, and cross-walls, and drifts at each. But it only took a minute or two to uncape and break the walls. As I say, we were going nicely; and as the moon mounted and the wind dropped more and more, we could hear the coughing of the horses and the creaking and straining of the tackle on the spar.... And now let me see; let me see....