No one, having once seen and examined an anthracite coal breaker, could ever mistake one for a building erected for any other purpose. These breakers have a character peculiarly their own. They are the most prominent features in the landscape of every anthracite coal region, where they tower up black, majestic, many-winged, and many-windowed, in the range of almost every outlook. When the mine car full of coal is hoisted to the head of the breaker it is run by two headmen from the carriage across the scale platform to the dump shute bars on to which it is dumped. These are long, sloping, parallel iron bars, set two and one half inches apart. The dirt and all the coal that is small enough falls through these bars into a hopper, from which it is fed into a pair of screens, one on each side. These separate the dirt in the manner already described, and divide the clean coal into sizes smaller than, and including, egg. Each size as it falls through the segment of, or out at the end of, the screen, is caught in a separate shute and carried to a second set of revolving screens where it is again cleaned and separated, passing from these screens into the picking shutes. All the shutes or troughs in which the coal is carried have a sufficient inclination to make the material move by gravity, and, to decrease the amount of friction, the bottom and sides of each shute are lined with sheet iron. The large coals which passed over the dump shute bars now slide down to a second set of bars, set four and one half inches apart, called steamboat bars; all coal falling through these being separated by still a third set of bars into steamboat and egg, and eventually finding its way to the picking shutes or to the rolls which break the prepared coal. All coal which passed over the steamboat bars is lump coal, and, after having the slate and bony coal removed from it by hand as it passes, is carried into the lump-coal shute and sent down to the loading place; or else it is carried, by another shute, into the heavy rolls and crushed. As it emerges, broken, from these rolls, it passes into revolving screens, and the same process of screening and separating goes on that has been already described in the case of coal falling through the first or dump-shute bars. But all this broken, screened, and separated coal finds its way eventually into the picking shutes. These are narrow troughs down which the separate grades of coal pass slowly in shallow streams. Across the top of each trough, at two or more points in its route through the picking-room, narrow seats are placed on which boys sit facing up the shute. These boys are called slate pickers. It is their duty to pick out the pieces of slate, stone, or bone, from the stream of coal which passes under them, and throw this refuse into a trough at the side of the shute, from which point it slides rapidly away. The coal as it comes from the mine is full of waste material, so that the boy who