credited with being smarter and more obedient. It was common to find children of both sexes not more than six years old working underground; and girls of five years were employed at the same tasks as boys of six or eight. They took the coal from the working faces in the thin mines to the foot of the pit. Sometimes they carried it, sometimes they drew it in little carts. The older children and young women had a sort of sledge, called a “corve,” on which they dragged the coal, but sometimes they preferred to carry it in baskets on their backs. They were called “pannier women.” The girls tucked their hair up under their caps, dressed like their brothers, and in the darkness of the mine could scarcely be distinguished from boys. And the girls and boys not only dressed alike, but worked alike, lived alike, and were treated alike at their tasks, and that treatment was rough and harsh at the very best. As the girls grew they were given harder work to do. On one occasion Mr. William Hunter, the mine foreman at Ormiston Colliery said that in the mines women always did the lifting or heavy part of the work, and that neither they nor the children were treated like human beings. “Females,” he said, “submit to work in places in which no man nor lad could be got to labor. They work on bad roads, up to their knees in water, and bent nearly double. The consequence of this is that they are attacked with disease, drag out a miserable existence, or are brought prematurely to the grave.” Says Robert Bold, the eminent miner: “In surveying the workings of an extensive colliery underground a married woman came forward, groaning under an excessive weight of coals, trembling in every nerve, and almost unable to keep her knees from sinking under her. On coming up she said in a plaintive, melancholy voice: ‘Oh, sir! this is sore, sore, sore work. I would to God that the first woman who tried to bear coals had broken her back and none ever tried it again.’” One cannot read of such things as these, of a slavery that condemned even the babes to a life of wretched toil in the blackness of the mines, and then wonder that the great heart of Mrs. Browning should have been wrenched by the contemplation of such sorrow until she gave voice to her feeling in that most pathetic and wonderful of all her poems, “The Cry of the Children.” “Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers! Ere the sorrow comes with years? They are leaning their young heads against their mothers, And _that_ cannot stop their tears. The young lambs are bleating in the meadows, The young birds are chirping in their nest, The young fawns are playing with the shadows, The young flowers are blooming toward the west. But the young, young children, O my brothers! They are weeping bitterly; They are weeping in the playtime of the others, In the country of the free.