When night comes no laborer is more rejoiced at leaving his task than is the breaker boy. One can see his eyes shine and his white teeth gleam as he starts out into the open air, while all else, hands, face, clothing, are thickly covered with coal dust, are black and unrecognizable. But he is happy because his day’s work is done and he is free, for a few hours at least, from the tyranny of the “cracker boss.” For, in the estimation of the picker boys, the cracker boss is indeed the most tyrannical of masters. How else could they regard a man whose sole duty it is to be constantly in their midst, to keep them at their tasks, to urge them to greater zeal and care, to repress all boyish freaks, to rule over them almost literally with a rod of iron? But, alas! the best commentary on the severity of his government is that it is necessary. As has already been said, the day is evidently not far distant when the work which the breaker boy now does will be performed almost wholly by machinery. And this will be not alone because the machine does its work better, more surely, more economically, than the breaker boy has done his, but it will be also because the requisite number of boys for breaker work will not be obtainable. Even now it is more than difficult to keep the ranks of the slate pickers full. Parents in the coal regions of to-day have too much regard for the health, the comfort, the future welfare of their children, to send them generally to such grinding tasks as these. This is one of the signs of that advancing civilization which has already lifted girls and women from this, for them, exhausting and degrading labor at the collieries; which is lessening, one by one, the hardships of the boys who still toil there; which, it is fondly hoped, will in the course of time give to all children the quiet of the school-room, the freedom of the play-ground, and the task that love sets, in place of that irksome toil that stunts the body and dwarfs the soul. It is now mainly from the homes of the very poor that the child-workers at the collieries are recruited, and the scant wages that they earn may serve to keep bread in the mouths of the younger children of their households and clothing on their own backs.