HOW MINERS CAN DIE. Calmly Writing Messages to Loved Ones while Death Creeps Upon Them.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 97, 11 April 1885, Page 5

HOW MINERS CAN DIE. Calmly Writing Messages to Loved Ones while Death Creeps Upon Them.

Scranton, January 25.— Sixteen years ago, there was a terrible colliery explosion in Saxony, by which a large number of miners loat their lives. Of that disaster, an old miner in this city has preaerved a most remarkable record in a series of manuscript copies, translated into English, of messages written to their friends by such of the doomed Saxon miners as were not] killed outright by the explosion, but were preserved cr the no less sure and more terrible death by suffocation as the poisoned gases^ slowly destroyed the pure air that remained in the mine. These messages were found in notebooks and on scraps of paper on the dead bodies of the poor men wnen they were at last recovered. The manuscript copies of these touching notes were made in Cornwall by a relative of the old minor, and were sent ttvo v him shortly after the disaster. They are interesting, outside of their pathos, as answering the frequently-asked question, How do men feel when about to die ?— not after being wasted and weakened by disease, or when the blood is heated by the strife of battle, but when they see inevitable death slowly but certainly approaching them, and know that in exactly so many minutes it will seize upon them ? Do they rage and struggle against their fate, or do they meet it with calmness and resignation? These messages show that the poor miners awaited the coming of death with singular calmness and resignation. Not one word in the whole record reveals a feeling of bitterness against the fate they could not avert. There is a curious pathos in some of the lines scrawled by these death -besiegod men in the gloom of their narrow prison. A young man, Janetz by name, had pinned to his coat a leaf from a notebook. On it were written his last words to his sweetheart : 11 Darling Rika : My last thought was of thee. Thy name will be the last word my lips shall speak. Farewell." The miner Reiche, when his body was found, clutched in his hand a scrap of paper. " Dear sister," it read, " Meyer, in the village, owes me ten thalers. It is youra. I hope my face wil 1 not be distorted when they find us. I might have been better to you. Good-bye." Reiche, according to the old Scranton miner, who seems to have the histories of all the unfortunate Saxon miners at his tongue's end, was a severe man, and though just to his sister, who was his only relative, gave her no liberties. The thought that he had not done right evidently haunted him in his death hour. The absence of all selfishness, all repinings on account of themselves, is touchingly apparent in all the messages. "My dear relations," wrote the miner Schmidt, "whileseeing death before me I remember you. Farewell until we meet again in happiness." Lying next to young Janetz, whose message to his sweetheart is quoted above, a miner named Moretz was found. On a paper in his cap was written: "Janetz has just died. Riche is dying, and says, ' Tell my family I leave them with God.' Farewell, dear wife. Farewell, dear children. May God keep you." The miners who died by suffocation had evidently been driven from one place of refuge to another, according to the following, found in the notebook of a miner named Bahr : " This is the last place where we have taken refuge. I have given up all hope, because the ventilation has been destroyed in three separate places. May God take myself and relatives and dear friends who must die with me, as well as our families, under His protection." '•Dear wife," writes Moller, "take good care of Mary. In a book in the bedroom you will find a thaler. Farewell, dear mother, till we meet again. " Mary was the miner's only child, v.ho was blind. A miner named Jahne, or Jaehn, wrote to his brother, who was a miner, but had been unable to work that day : "Thank God for his goodness, brother ! You are safe." "No more toil in darkness," wrote another. The uniform spirit of piety that marked all the messages of the dying men was explained by the custodian of these touching records. Ho said the miners of Saxony are all reared in a strict religious school, and that on entering the mines they all petition Heaven for protection through the day, and on leaving the mines return thanks to God for guarding them and bringing them safely through the dangers of their toil, •'I never read the simple messages of those poor men without moistened eyes," said the old miner, and his eyes were certainly more than moist as he spoke. "I can picture to myself the scene of the roughhanded but soft-hearted men, spending the last moments not in wild crys for mercy and screams of remorse, nor in repinings against their cruel fate, but in sending these farewell messages to their loved ones, who were even then bewailing them as dead. While my heart bleeds over the picture, I thank God that, humble miners though they were, they showed the world how bravely and nobly they could die."