See too these emerge from the bowels of the earth! Infants of
four and five years of age, many of them girls, pretty and
still soft and timid; entrusted with the fulfilment of most
responsible duties, and the nature of which entails on them
the necessity of being the earliest to enter the mine and the
latest to leave it. Their labour indeed is not severe, for
that would be impossible, but it is passed in darkness and in
solitude. They endure that punishment which philosophical
philanthropy has invented for the direst criminals, and which
those criminals deem more terrible than the death for which it
is substituted. Hour after hour elapses, and all that reminds
the infant Trappers of the world they have quitted and that
which they have joined, is the passage of the coal-waggons for
which they open the air-doors of the galleries, and on keeping
which doors constantly closed, except at this moment of
passage, the safety of the mine and the lives of the persons
employed in it entirely depend.
Sir Joshua, a man of genius and a courtly artist, struck by
the seraphic countenance of Lady Alice Gordon, when a child of
very tender years, painted the celestial visage in various
attitudes on the same canvass, and styled the group of
heavenly faces--guardian angels!
We would say to some great master of the pencil, Mr Landseer
or Mr Etty, go thou to the little trappers and do likewise!
A small party of miners approached a house of more pretension
than the generality of the dwellings, and announcing its
character by a very flagrant sign of the Rising Sun.
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