He then gave me my first lesson in mining. I lay on my right side in obedience to his orders, stretched out at full length. The short-handled shovel was inverted and placed under my right shoulder. This lifted my shoulder up from the ground a little distance and I was thus enabled to strike with my pick. The vein of coal is about twenty-two inches in thickness. We would mine out the dirt, or fire-clay as it was called, from under the coal to the distance of two feet, or the length of a pick-handle, and to the depth of some six inches. We would then set our iron wedges in above the vein of coal, and with the sledge hammer would drive them in until the coal would drop down. Imagine my forlorn condition as I lay therein that small room. It was as dark down there as night but for the feeble light given out by the mining lamp; the room was only twenty-eight inches from the floor to the ceiling, and then above the ceiling there were eight hundred feet of mother earth. Two feet from the face of the coal, and just back of where I lay when mining, was a row of props that held up the roof and kept it from falling in upon me. The loose dirt which we picked out from under the coal vein was shoveled back behind the props. This pile of dirt, in mining language, is called the "gob." I began operations at once. I worked away with all my might for an hour or more, picking out the dirt from under the coal. Then I was tired completely out. I rolled over on my back, and, with my face looking up to the pile of dirt, eight hundred feet thick, that shut out from me the light of day, I rested for awhile. I had done no physical work for ten years. I was physically soft. To put me down in the mines and set me to digging coal was wicked. It was murder. Down in that dark pit how I suffered! There was no escape from it. There was the medicine. I had to take it. I do not know, but it seems to me that when a man is sent to that prison who has not been in the habit of performing physical labor, he should not be put to work in the mines until he becomes accustomed to manual labor. It would seem that it would be nothing more than right to give him an easier task at first and let him gradually become hardened to his work at coal digging. Nothing of this kind is done. The young, the old, the middle-aged are indiscriminately and unceremoniously thrust into the mine. Down there are nearly five hundred prisoners. Among them are boys from seventeen to twenty years of age, many of whom are in delicate health. Here are to be found old men, in some cases sixty years of age. I do not wish to be understood as casting any reflections upon the officers of this institution. They cannot help these things. If Warden Smith could avoid it there would not be a single man sent down to that region of death. The mines are there and must be worked. Let this blame fall where it belongs. I must say injustice to our common humanity, that to work these