remained working the soft, drossy coal, which they sold for
eight-and-sixpence a ton--or sixpence a hundredweight. But a mining
population scorned such dirt, as they called it.
James Houghton, however, was seized with a desire to work the
Connection Meadow seam, as he called it. He gathered two miner
partners--he trotted endlessly up to the field, he talked, as he had
never talked before, with inumerable colliers. Everybody he met he
stopped, to talk Connection Meadow.
And so at last he sank a shaft, sixty feet deep, rigged up a
corrugated-iron engine-house with a winding-engine, and lowered his
men one at a time down the shaft, in a big bucket. The whole affair
was ricketty, amateurish, and twopenny. The name Connection Meadow
was forgotten within three months. Everybody knew the place as
Throttle-Ha'penny. "What!" said a collier to his wife: "have we got
no coal? You'd better get a bit from Throttle-Ha'penny." "Nay,"
replied the wife, "I'm sure I shan't. I'm sure I shan't burn that
muck, and smother myself with white ash."
It was in the early Throttle-Ha'penny days that Mrs. Houghton died.
James Houghton cried, and put a black band on his Sunday silk hat.
But he was too feverishly busy at Throttle-Ha'penny, selling his
hundredweights of ash-pit fodder, as the natives called it, to
realize anything else.
He had three men and two boys working his pit, besides a
superannuated old man driving the winding engine. And in spite of
all jeering, he flourished. Shabby old coal-carts rambled up behind
the New Connection, and filled from the pit-bank. The coal improved
a little in quality: it was cheap and it was handy. James could sell
at last fifty or sixty tons a week: for the stuff was easy getting.
And now at last he was actually handling money. He saw millions
ahead.
This went on for more than a year. A year after the death of Mrs.
Houghton, Miss Frost became ill and suddenly died. Again James
Houghton cried and trembled. But it was Throttle-Ha'penny that made
him tremble. He trembled in all his limbs, at the touch of success.
He saw himself making noble provision for his only daughter.
But alas--it is wearying to repeat the same thing over and over.
First the Board of Trade began to make difficulties. Then there was
a fault in the seam. Then the roof of Throttle-Ha'penny was so loose
and soft, James could not afford timber to hold it up. In short,
when his daughter Alvina was about twenty-seven years old,
Throttle-Ha'penny closed down. There was a sale of poor machinery,
and James Houghton came home to the dark, gloomy house--to Miss
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