These will surely tell you where the breaker stood. They are proud to have labored there in other years. They will speak to you of that time with pleasant memories. It was thought to be a stroke of fortune to obtain work at Burnham Breaker. It was just beyond the suburbs of the city as they then were, and near to the homes of all the workmen. The vein of coal at this point was of more than ordinary thickness, and of excellent quality, and these were matters of much moment to the miners who worked there. Then, the wages were always paid according to the highest rate, promptly and in full. But there was something more, and more important than all this, to be considered. Robert Burnham, the chief power in the company, and the manager of its interests, was a man whose energetic business qualities and methods did not interfere with his concern for the welfare of his employees. He was not only just, but liberal and kind. He held not only the confidence but the good-will, even the affection, of those who labored under him. There were never any strikes at the Burnham mines. The men would have considered it high treason in any one to advocate a strike against the interests of Robert Burnham. Yet it was no place for idling. There were, no laggards there. Men had to work, and work hard too, for the wages that bought their daily bread. Even the boys in the screen-room were held as closely to their tasks as care and vigilance could hold them. Theirs were no light tasks, either. They sat all day on their little benches, high up in the great black building, with their eyes fixed always on the shallow streams of broken coal passing down the iron-sheathed chutes, and falling out of sight below them; and it was their duty to pick the particles of slate and stone from out these moving masses, bending constantly above them as they worked. It was not the physical exertion that made their task a hard one; there was not much straining of the joints or muscles, not even in the constant bending of the body to that one position. Neither was it that their tender hands were often cut and bruised by the sharp pieces of the coal or the heavy ones of slate. But it was hard because they were boys; young boys, with bounding pulses, chafing at restraint, full to the brim with life and spirit, longing for the fresh air, the bright sunlight, the fields, the woods, the waters, the birds, the flowers, all things beautiful and wonderful that nature spreads upon the earth to make of it a paradise for boys. To think of all these things, to catch brief glimpses of the happiness of children who were not born to toil, and then to sit, from dawn to mid-day and from mid-day till the sun went down, and listen to the ceaseless thunder of moving wheels and the constant sliding of the streams of coal across their iron beds,--it was this that wearied them.