Deep in the bowels of the earth a thick, square-set man in khaki trousers and trench boots, a ragged vest displaying a tremendous torso all glistening with sweat, was tipping clay out of a trolley, and gently chaffing in quite unprintable English of the region of Lancashire a hoarse but invisible person somewhere down the shaft. I crawled round the quizzer, slipping on the greasy planks awash with muddy water on the floor of the gallery, and found myself confronted by another of the troglodytes, a man who was so coated with clay that he appeared to be dyed khaki (like the horses of the Scots Greys) from top to toe. I asked him whence he came, so different was he, in speech and appearance, from the black-haired, low-browed Irishmen watching at the parapet of the trench far above us. “A coom fra’ Wigan!” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a grimy hand, and thus saying he turned round and made off swiftly, bent double as he was, down the low gallery. I followed, the water swishing ankle-deep round my field-boots. The air was dank and foul, the stooping position became almost unbearable after a few paces, one slipped and slithered at every step. At intervals side-galleries ran out from the main sap, unlit, dark, and forbidding--listening posts. After a hundred paces or so a trolley blocked the way. Behind it two men were working, my taciturn acquaintance and another. The latter was hacking at the virgin earth with a pick, the former was shovelling the clay into the trolley. Heavens, how these men worked! Their breath came fast and regular, they spoke not a word; one heard only the hack, hack, of the pick and the dull smack of the earth-clods as they fell into the trolley. There was no overseer there to harry them, no “speeder-up” to drive. They were alone in their sap, working as though life depended on it (as maybe it did). Good for Wigan, wasn’t it? I had not been out of that mine for more than a minute when an electric lamp flashed in my eyes, and an excitable young man, who held an automatic pistol uncomfortably near my person, accosted me thus: “I beg your pardon, sir”--it occurred to me that the pistol accorded ill with this polite form of address--“but may I ask what you were doing down _my_ mine?” My friend, the Captain, rushed forward with an explanation and an introduction, the pistol was put away, and the sapper subaltern--all credit to him for his vigilance!--was easily persuaded to come along to the dug-out and have a drop of grog before turning in.