=The Producers of Coal.= You have no doubt seen the women and children with their baskets picking up coal along the railroad tracks on the edge of the city. That small basket of coal will probably be all the fuel that many of them have. It is a common sight to see the little foreign boys bringing home packing-boxes and the lids of boxes that they have begged from the stores to take the place of the coal they cannot get. Those among us who live in steam-heated apartments, or in communities near the coal-fields or wooded areas, do not realize what a constant struggle is required on the part of the poor people in the cities to keep coal enough in the stove to prevent the family from freezing. “The only times I was really warm enough last winter,” said a Slovenian woman in Chicago, “was when I went to church, and then I had to keep my head muffled up.” It was said of a group of Italians in Boston, “The men go to the saloon, the women to the church, both for the same purpose,--to get good and warm.” Just as we sometimes fail to realize how many people are working for us to make our clothes or to produce our food, so we forget the men who are toiling underground to dig the coal and mine the iron upon which we are so dependent for our every-day living. The city dweller especially is dependent upon the supply of coal that comes to him through retail sources, but in order to bring that coal to the city there has been a long line of workers, each one putting his hand to the task of producing the necessity. =Where the Coal Is Mined.= If you should visit the coal-mining community, you would first of all be impressed with the desolation of the place. The village is an ugly, straggling affair with nothing to add to its beauty or hide its deformities. Nearly all the houses are built alike, two and three rooms being the average size. In all probability not one painted house is to be found in the whole town, unless possibly it is the front of a saloon on the main street. In many of the old-time mining communities the fronts of the saloons were all painted blue. Whether or not this was done to match the color of the patrons’ noses, no one seems to know. The fences are of rough pickets and so broken and out of repair that, as one person visiting the coal town for the first time said, “The pickets look like broken teeth in an old, dried-up skull.” There are very few flowers or gardens, and the deep black mud of the winter-time, the black smoke, and the dust of the dry season during the summer deepen the sense of desolation one feels in the midst of these villages. The schoolhouse is a poor one-room affair; and if there is a church, it has a weak organization and is housed in a building that is little if any better than the average in the community. Very few coal-mining towns in Colorado have a church of any kind. The Home Missions Council looked into this matter some years ago and reported extensively its investigations.