After a few minutes on the little mine steamer, I saw Bell Island loom up out of the fog. Its precipitous shore rose up as high and steep as the side of a skyscraper, but black and forbidding through the gray mist. I was wondering how I could ever reach the top of the island when I saw a tiny box car resting on tracks laid against the cliff side, steeper than the most thrilling roller coaster. The car is hauled up the incline by a cable operated by an electric hoist at the top of the hill. I stepped inside, and by holding on to a rail overhead was able to keep my feet all the way up. Nearly everybody and everything coming to Bell Island is carried up and down in this cable car. From the top of the cliff, I drove across the island toward the mines, and had all the way a fine view of the property. The mine workings are spread out over an area about five miles long and two miles in width. The houses of the miners are little box-like affairs, with tiny yards. Those owned by the company are alike, but those built by the miners themselves are in varying patterns. The miners are nearly all native Newfoundlanders. They are paid a minimum wage, with a bonus for production over a given amount, so that the average earnings at present are about three dollars and fifty cents a day. When the mines are working at capacity, about eighteen hundred men are employed. The offices of the company occupy a large frame structure. In one side of the manager’s room is a great window that commands a view of the works. Looking out, my eye was caught first by a storage pile of red ore higher than a six- or seven-story building. No ore is shipped during the winter because of the ice in the Bay, and the heavy snows that block the narrow gauge cable railway from the mines to the pier. Also, since the ore is wet as it comes out of the mine, it freezes during the three-mile trip across the island. This makes it hard to dump and load. Another difficulty about winter operations above ground comes from the high winds that sweep over the island, sometimes with a velocity of eighty miles an hour. With the manager I walked through the village, passing several ore piles, to one of the shaft houses. Trains of cars are hauled by cable from the depths of the mine to the top of the shaft house, where their contents are dumped into the crusher. From the crusher the broken rock is loaded by gravity into other cars and run off to the storage piles or down to the pier. The cable railways and crushers are operated by electricity, generated with coal from the company’s mines at Sydney, Nova Scotia. The same power is used to operate the fans that drive streams of fresh air into the mines and to work the pumps that lift the water out of the tunnels.