Chambers's Elementary Science Readers Part 18

'Does it? Do you dig for it?'

'I don't. But I know somebody who does.'

5. 'If I were to dig for it, should I find any, Jim?'

'Not you! Why, you have to go down ever such a long way before you can even begin to dig.'

6. 'How do you get down?'

'You go down in a thing they call a cage. You can't walk down, you know.

It is like going down a deep pit. They call it a mine.'

7. 'Oh, I have heard of coal-mines!'

Dora was taking up one little lump of coal after another, and wondering why it was so shiny if it had really come out of the earth.

8. Harry went on. 'How do they let the cage down? Have you ever been down?'

[Ill.u.s.tration: Coal-miners going down to work.]

'I have been down once,' said Jim, stopping in his work and stretching himself. 'This is the way. There is an engine at the top of the shaft'----

'What is the shaft?'

9. 'The pit I told you about. The engine is fixed there and it lets down the cage and pulls it up again. Half-a-dozen men or so can go in it at a time.'

'It must be very strong.'

10. 'Yes, it is, and it has strong chains to hold it. It goes up and down all day long, bringing up the coal.'

COAL.

PART 2.

re'-al-ly eas'-i-ly slic'-es straight knife be-tween'

met'-al fetched pic'-tures an'-i-mal whole for'-ests thou'-sands piec'-es to-geth'-er puz'-zles

1. Next day the children asked their mother to tell them what coal really was. Harry did not think it was a stone, because he had broken two or three lumps with a hammer. He found that it broke much more easily than stone.

2. Besides, it did not fly all into sharp bits, but came off in slices; and he saw that it had straight lines along it. When he poked his knife in between these lines, he could take off a slice of coal at once!

3. Dora did not think it was a metal, because she had learnt that iron would melt in a fire and flow like water. 'Coal does not melt,' she said, 'every one knows that!'

4. She took a small lump out of the coal-box, and Harry did the same.

Mother then fetched some pictures, and one or two other things, and the talk began.

5. 'It is no wonder that you can't guess what coal is! It does not look at all like what it was at first. It was not always in the ground; it used to live on the top and get the air and sunshine.'

6. 'It must have been alive,' said Harry. 'Was it an animal?'

'No.'

'Then it was a plant!' cried Dora.

7. 'Well, it is all that is left of many plants and trees, whole forests of plants and trees, that grew long, long ago.'

'Before you were born, mother?'

8. 'Yes, long before that! It was hundreds and thousands of years ago.

It was so far back that the trees were not like the trees we have now.

Many of them were big ferns. Think of a fern grown up to be a tree! And many were great horse-tails. You know what a horse-tail is?'

9. 'Oh yes,' said Dora, 'we find them in the ditch down the lane. It is such fun pulling them to pieces and putting them together again--like puzzles!'

[Ill.u.s.tration: Horse-tail.]

10. 'Those trees must have been very strange,' said Harry. 'They would not be nice to climb. But there were no boys in those days, so it did not matter.'

[Ill.u.s.tration]

FIRE.

min'-er-al coal fen'-der prop'-er walk'-ing laugh'-ing grate cru'-el Lon'-don smoke al-read'-y flame blaze beast cage pic'-tures

1. 'Don't you think,' said Harry, 'that a bit of coal would be a good thing for our mineral box?'

2. 'I do,' said his father. 'Get a little lump, and put it in. And, by the way, we want more coal on the fire. I must get some.'

3. 'How nice a fire is on a cold day!' said Dora, sitting down on the fender, to be as near to it as she could.

'Very nice,' said her mother, 'in its proper place--in the grate.'

4. 'Ah, we should not like it to come walking about the room!' said Harry, laughing. 'There would soon be no room'----

'And no house!' said Dora, shaking her head. 'And then what should we do?'

5. Father came back with the coal, and put some into the grate, saying:

'Fire is a good servant but a bad master. If it gets its own way it is a cruel thing. It would burn a town down. It once burned big London.'

6. Harry was looking at one of the lumps that had been put on the fire.