they take them from their masters and their
overlookers. Masters continue year after year
to build cottages without due attention to
the wants of health; they know moreover
that arms and legs are broken by the accidental
fall of stones while men descend the
shaft; nevertheless, they do not properly face
and protect the pit mouth. They know that men
are burnt in the pit, and are generous to them,
feel a true compassion for them in their
suffering; but they do not exert themselves
sufficiently to strike at the root of all such
accidents: because, as the working of pits has
been, so it shall be. The men who talk about
improvements are mere innovators, meaning
well and knowing little; persons to be looked
upon as the heretics used to be looked upon
by orthodox believers who had on their side,
as they believed, all the traditions of the
church. We must be chary of blaming men
for this. Orthodoxy belongs not only to
divinity, but to law, to physic, to all callings
and all trades. If it makes improvement
slow, it perhaps makes degeneration slower.
To all obstinacies of custom we are willing
to give due respect. All that we care to
assert, is, that the miners themselves are not
the men to whom we must look for an abatement
of the frequency of accidents in mines.
Nothing can be done with the miner except
through the master. If the master come to
the opinion that all his men ought, for their
own safety and for the credit of his mine, to
work with safety-lamps—any practical
improvement  necessary to the lamps being first
duly made—he has only to say so to his
manager, explaining clearly why he is of that
opinion, and that he has firmly made up his
own mind upon it, and such lamps will
be used. A master resident on the spot
has so much influence that, if he be in
earnest, he will himself speak to the charter-
masters who are in authority over working
companies; or, better still, to all the men in
public, and in private to those whom he
knows to be more obstinate than their
neighbours or more influential. The men
thus prompted would not be slow to see their
own advantage; and, in a very short time, they
themselves would extinguish any naked candle
employed by a refractory companion. It is
not by the great accidents that get into the
newspapers that a collier is admonished of
the risks he is encountering. Every week
has its mishap—the peril of the way of life is
manifest—is almost daily in some form stated
and accepted. It is accepted as a supposed
necessity not, of course, as a welcome incident
of labour. When the accident is death by
the breaking of a chain or rope, the master
or the manager is censured by the colliers
often enough for having mended an old coil
when he should have furnished a new one.
When the accident is death by burns from a
stray firing of foul air, no one is blamed; but,
let the men once get an efficient safety-lamp
fairly among them, and there will be found
none readier than they to exclaim against the
wrong done to themselves in any accident
caused by the use of candles.

HOW THE AVALANCHE COMES
DOWN AT BARÈGES.

IN a long, narrow, bleak Pyrenean valley,
and at a height of four thousand feet above
the level of the sea, there springs from the
rock hot, sulphurous water, reputed to be
the most efficacious of the many mineral
springs of the Pyrenees. There is, naturally,
an établissement des bains; and, in spite of
the cold, inhospitable site, a long irregular
street, which is called Barèges.

The avalanche does not fall from the
mountains which tower above the village,
but down an ominous cleft in the rocks on
its right bank, and on the opposite side of the
valley. And the inconvenience is, that not
content with rushing from the snowy summits
and sweeping bare the face of the rocks,
and marking its desolate track with the
scattered pines which it has uprooted, and
choking the noisy river, it rushes up the opposite
bank, and so through the very centre of
Barèges. Of course the inhabitants of Barèges
know this, expect it, and are prepared for
it. In winter there is a great gap in the
one long street—no house, nor shed, nor tree,
nor bush being visible. This is the road left
clear for the avalanche, which sometimes
travels that way five or six times in the
course of the winter. In the spring, when
his visits are supposed to be at an end, the
disjointed street is united by wooden houses,
or baraques, in which the various merchants
from neighbouring towns display their wares.
There is something to an Englishman almost
incredible, and quite incomprehensible, in
erecting a village in the very teeth of an
avalanche. Why not put the houses lower
down the valley in safety? the walk or ride,
in summer, to the établissement being so
easy. Why not convey the water in pipes?
Why not—in fact—fifty other things? But
no—the Béarnais of the mountains is familiar
with the danger, he does not despise it, but
he considers the being buried under an
avalanche as one of the necessary conditions
of life, and at all times the possible termination
of it. Even in Barèges, where, as Pierre
Palassou, the guide, will tell you, they take
such good precaution, it is not always found
a sufficient one; and the avalanche will
swerve to the right or left, and cover part of
the village; or it will exceed the dimensions
deemed desirable, and overwhelm the houses
on both sides of it.

In May of last year the winter, which had
been an unusually fine one, was supposed to
be at an end, and many of the marchands
began to erect their baraques. Thirteen
were completed, and others begun, when the
weather changed, and a snow-storm came on.
All that day it snowed, and in the evening