Excerpt from The Wonderland of Work Old King Coal At Home And Abroad. If you would visit the domains of King Coal you had better first slip on one of those loose grey flannel suits over your own, and hide your hair under a t particularly becoming leather head-dress; for we shall most likely get very dingy ere we return from the underground journey I propose taking you before beginning any explanation. This journey is down - down - down into one of the dark pits so numerous in the Black Country, which is rich also in iron ore, and the limestones that help to purify it when they are melted together in any of those tall and smoke-dried blast-furnaces which, for ecomy and convenience' sake, cluster as nearly as possible about the pits' brows. The huge circular mouth of a pit-shaft is but a dismal and melancholy-looking place, t at all tempting to a looker-on. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art techlogy to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.