For a full week the work of re-opening the shaft went on by night and day, and there were wives and parents who during all that week hardly left the neighbourhood of the pit for a single hour. The task of re-opening the shaft was one of extreme peril. The men had to be lowered to their work at the end of a rope in which a loop had been made, which was secured round their bodies. The two chief dangers they had to face were the continual falling in of the sides of the shaft and the presence of noxious gases. They never flinched, however, and I witnessed on that dreary pit platform at Hartley that which I have always considered the bravest deed I ever saw. I and a handful of watchers were dozing round the open fire in the early hours of a bitter winter morning, just one week after the accident had happened, when we were suddenly aroused by an urgent signal from the shaft, evidently coming from the men working far below. We thought that the imprisoned miners had been reached, and eagerly we waited till the first messenger was brought to the surface. Alas! when he was raised to the mouth of the shaft we saw that he was one of the sinkers, and was unconscious--apparently, indeed, dead. Whilst the doctor in attendance was seeking to restore him, other men were brought up, nearly all in the same condition, until the whole of the sinkers who had been engaged in their perilous task of mercy were laid in a row, pallid and unconscious, at our feet. The truth was at once apparent. The obstacle which had so long blocked the shaft had at last been removed, but a deadly gas--carbon dioxide--had at once ascended from the long-sealed workings, and we knew that the men we had been trying to save must be beyond the reach of help.