If the mine in which the boy works is entered by drift or tunnel, his duties lie partly outside of it, since he must bring every trip of cars not only to the mouth of the opening but to the breaker or other dumping place, which may be located at a considerable distance from the entrance to the mine. So that for a greater or less number of times each day he has from ten minutes to half an hour in the open air. In the summer time, when the weather is pleasant, this occasional glimpse of out-of-doors is very gratifying to him. He likes to be in the sunlight, to look out over the woods and fields, to feel the fresh wind blowing in his face, and to breathe an unpolluted atmosphere. But in the winter time, when it is cold, when the storms are raging, when the snow and sleet are whirled savagely into his face, then the outside portion of his trip is not pleasant. In the mine he finds a uniform temperature of about sixty degrees Fahrenheit. To go from this, within ten minutes, without additional clothing, into an atmosphere in which the mercury stands at zero, and where the wind is blowing a hurricane, is necessarily to suffer. It cannot be otherwise. So there is no lagging outside on winter days; the driver boy delivers his loads, gets his empty cars, and hastens back to the friendly shelter of the mine. At such openings as these the mine stable is outside, and the boy must go there in the morning to get his mule, and must leave him there when he quits work at night. Sometimes, when the mining is done by shaft or slope, there is a separate entrance for men and mules, a narrow tunnel or slope, not too steep, and in this case, though his duties lie entirely in the mine, the driver boy must take the mule in from the outside stable in the morning and bring him back at night. One afternoon I chanced to be in a certain mine in the Wyoming district, in company with the fire boss. We were standing in a passage that led to one of these mule ways. In the distance we heard a clattering of hoofs, growing louder as it came nearer, and, as we stepped aside, a mule went dashing by with a boy lying close on his back, the flame from the little lamp in the boy’s cap just a tiny backward streak of blue that gave no light. They had appeared from the intense darkness and had disappeared into it again almost while one could draw a breath. I looked at the fire boss inquiringly. “Oh! that’s all right,” he said, “they’ve got through work and they’re going out, and the mule is in just as much of a hurry as the boy is.” “But the danger,” I suggested, “of racing at such speed through narrow, winding passages, in almost total darkness!” “Oh!” he replied, “that beast knows the way out just as well as I do, and he can find it as easy as if he could see every inch of it, and I don’t know but what he can. Anyway the boy ain’t afraid if the mule ain’t.”