A first visit to a coal mine will be prolific of strange sights and sounds and of novel sensations. If one enters the mine by a shaft, the first noteworthy experience will be the descent on the cage or carriage. The visitor will probably be under the care of one of the mine foremen, without whose presence or authority he would not be allowed to descend, and indeed would not wish to. From the head to the foot of every shaft a speaking tube extends, and signaling apparatus, which is continued to the engine-room. These appliances are required by law. In these days the signals are often operated by electricity. At the head of the shaft is stationed a headman and at the foot of the shaft a footman, whose assistants aid in pushing cars on and off the carriages. The footman is notified of your coming, and you take your place on the empty safety carriage. It swings slightly as you step on to it, just enough to make you realize that you have passed from the stable to the unstable, and that besides the few inches of planking under your feet, there is nothing between you and the floor of the mine, five hundred feet or more below you. When all is ready the foreman cries: “Slack off!” the signal to the engineer is given, the carriage is slightly raised, the wings are withdrawn, and the descent begins. If the carriage goes down as rapidly as it ordinarily does your first sensation will be that of falling. It will seem as though that on which you were standing has been suddenly removed from beneath your feet, and your impulse will be to grasp for something above you. You will hardly have recovered from this sensation when it will seem to you that the motion of the carriage has been reversed, and that you are now going up more rapidly than you were at first descending. There will be an alternation of these sensations during the minute or two occupied in the descent, until finally the motion of the carriage becomes suddenly slower, and you feel it strike gently at the bottom of the shaft. As you step out into the darkness nothing is visible to you except the shifting flames of the workmen’s lamps; you cannot even see distinctly the men who carry them. You are given a seat on the footman’s bench near by until your eyes have accommodated themselves to the situation. After a few minutes you are able to distinguish objects that are ten or fifteen feet away. You can see through the murky atmosphere the rough walls of solid coal about you, the flat, black, moist roof overhead, the mine car tracks at your feet. The carriages appear and disappear, and are loaded and unloaded at the foot of the shaft, while the passage, at one side of which you sit, is filled with mine cars, mules, and driver boys in apparently inextricable confusion. The body of a mule looms up suddenly in front of you; you catch a glimpse of a boy hurrying by; a swarthy face, lighted up by the flame of a lamp gleams out of the darkness, but the body that belongs to it