Yet it was no place for idling.  There were, no laggards there.  Men had to work, and work hard too, for the wages that bought their daily bread.  Even the boys in the screen-room were held as closely to their tasks as care and vigilance could hold them.  Theirs were no light tasks, either.  They sat all day on their little benches, high up in the great black building, with their eyes fixed always on the shallow streams of broken coal passing down the iron-sheathed chutes, and falling out of sight below them; and it was their duty to pick the particles of slate and stone from out these moving masses, bending constantly above them as they worked.  It was not the physical exertion that made their task a hard one; there was not much straining of the joints or muscles, not even in the constant bending of the body to that one position.

Neither was it that their tender hands were often cut and bruised by the sharp pieces of the coal or the heavy ones of slate.  But it was hard because they were boys; young boys, with bounding pulses, chafing at restraint, full to the brim with life and spirit, longing for the fresh air, the bright sunlight, the fields, the woods, the waters, the birds, the flowers, all things beautiful and wonderful that nature spreads upon the earth to make of it a paradise for boys.  To think of all these things, to catch brief glimpses of the happiness of children who were not born to toil, and then to sit, from dawn to mid-day and from mid-day till the sun went down, and listen to the ceaseless thunder of moving wheels and the constant sliding of the streams of coal across their iron beds,—­it was this that wearied them.

To know that in the woods the brooks were singing over pebbly bottoms, that in the fields the air was filled with the fragrance of blossoming flowers, that everywhere the free wind rioted at will, and then to sit in such a prison-house as this all day, and breathe an atmosphere so thick with dust that even the bits of blue sky framed in by the open windows in the summer time were like strips of some dark thunder-cloud,—­it was this, this dull monotony of dizzy sight and doleful sound and changeless post of duty, that made their task a hard one.

There came a certain summer day at Burnham Breaker when the labor and confinement fell with double weight upon the slate-pickers in the screen-room.  It was circus day.  The dead-walls and bill-boards of the city had been gorgeous for weeks and weeks with pictures heralding the wonders of the coming show.  By the turnpike road, not forty rods from where the breaker stood, there was a wide barn the whole side of which had been covered with brightly colored prints of beasts and birds, of long processions, of men turning marvellous somersaults, of ladies riding, poised on one foot, on the backs of flying horses, of a hundred other things to charm the eyes and rouse anticipation in the breasts of boys.

Every day, when the whistle blew at noon, the boys ran, shouting, from the breaker, and hurried, with their dinner-pails, to the roadside barn, to eat and gaze alternately, and discuss the pictured wonders.