One of the men had a wheezy accordion and he relieved the monotony of the evening with some German airs.  The big shed was unlighted, save as each man was his own lamp-post.  Each made his own bed by the light of the lamp on his cap.  As he undressed, the cap was the last article to be set aside and the extinguishing of the smoky, flickering blaze the last act of the night.

As the first streak of the gray dawn came in through the bare windows, four of our gang dressed and deliberately marched out of the camp—­never to return.

The first number in the programme of a “mucker’s” toilet is to adjust his cap with his lamp in it, trimmed and burning.  The second is to light his pipe; then he dresses.

It was half-past five and still dark, when those nude, shaggy men with heads ablaze with smoky, flickering lamps, began to move around.  They looked grotesque—­unearthly—­denizens of some underground pit.  They were good-humoured and full of boisterous laughter.

A breakfast of pork, beans, potatoes, bread and coffee—­plenty of each—­and we went off with dinner pails over the hill to the valley, where five tall, smoking chimneys marked the entrances to as many mines.

Each mine has a complete outfit of men and machinery, and a certain number of chambers or pockets in which, with blast and hammer and hand, the red hills are made to disgorge their treasures of iron ore.

Three of us perched ourselves on the rear end of the “skip”—­a big iron-ore disgorger—­and began the half-mile descent.  It was a 45 per cent. grade, and the skip, at the end of a powerful wire cable, went down by jerks.  One of my companions was Franz, the Hungarian, the other was a German.  The big square mouth of the mine became smaller and smaller as we bumped into the bowels of the earth.  In a few minutes it looked like a small window-pane, and then disappeared altogether and we were left in the darkness.

Each mine is like a little town.  It has a main street and side alleys—­“pockets,” they are called.  There are “live” and “dead” pockets—­the dead are the worked out.

At the first of the live pockets the skip was stopped by some invisible hand and we clambered over the side to a platform where a foreman met and conducted us to the task of the day.

The mine was filled with red dust.  We could see but a few feet ahead of us.  The lamps on men’s brows looked like fire-flies dancing in the red mist.  There was a sound of rushing water and the chug, chug of the pumps.  As we waded ankle-deep through a water alley, we heard the warning yells of a foreman.  A charge of dynamite was about to burst and the men were flying out of danger.  We were whisked into a cleft for safety.  Half a dozen old miners were squeezed in beside us.  Our scarcely soiled caps told the story of our newness and the old hands watched us closely.

Boom!  The hills shivered like the deck of a warship as she discharges a broadside.  Franz shivered too.  His eyes bulged and he stared, loose-jawed, at the men around us, who laughed at his fright.