The door boys are usually younger and smaller than the driver boys, and though their duty is not so laborious as that of the latter class, it is far more monotonous and tiresome. The door boy must be at his post when the first trip goes in in the morning, and must remain there till the last one comes out at night. He is alone all day, save when other boys and men pass back and forth through his door, and he has but little opportunity for companionship. He fashions for himself a rude bench to sit on; sometimes he has a rope or other contrivance attached to his door by which he can open it without rising; but usually he is glad to move about a little to break the monotony of his task. There is little he can do to entertain himself, except perhaps to whittle. He seldom tries to read; indeed, the light given forth by a miner’s lamp is too feeble to read by. In rare cases the door boy extinguishes his light, on the score of economy, and sits in darkness, performing his duties by the light of the lamps of those who pass. But there are few who can endure this. It is hard enough to bear the oppressive silence that settles down on the neighborhood when no cars are passing; if darkness be added to this the strain becomes too great, the effect too depressing, a child cannot bear it. The wages of the door boy are about sixty-five cents per day. Although the duties of the breaker boy or slate picker are more laborious and more monotonous than those of either driver boy or door tender, he does not receive so high a rate of wages as either of them. His daily compensation is only from fifty to sixty-five cents, and he works ten hours a day. At seven o’clock in the morning he must have climbed the dark and dusty stairway to the screen room, and taken his place on the little bench across the long shute. The whistle screams, the ponderous machinery is set in motion, the iron-teethed rollers begin to revolve heavily, crunching the big lumps of coal as they turn, the deafening noise breaks forth, and then the black, shallow streams of broken coal start on their journey down the iron-sheathed shutes, to be screened and cleaned, and picked and loaded.