The roof's dropped in, and only a boy could creep along.

But who's to tell Stevie?
Oh, Miss Anne, couldn't you go down with me, and tell him gently your own self ?' 'Yes, I will go,' said Miss Anne, weeping.
Underground, in those low, dark, pent-up galleries, lighted only here and there by a glimmering lamp, the colliers were busy at their labours, unconscious of all that was happening overhead.

Stephen was at work at some distance from the others, loading a train of small square waggons with the blocks of coal which he and Black Thompson had picked out of the earth.

He was singing softly to himself the hymns that he and little Nan had been learning during the summer in the Red Gravel Pit; and he smiled as he fancied that little Nan was perhaps singing them over as well by the cabin fire.

He did not know, poor boy, that at that moment Tim was creeping through the winding, blocked-up passages, so long untrodden, to the bottom of the old shaft; and that when he returned he would be bearing in his arms a sad, sad burden, upon which his tears would fall unavailingly.
Stephen's comrades were all of a sudden very quiet, and their pickaxes no longer gave dull muffled thumps upon the seam of coal; but he was too busy to notice how idle and still they were.