XV COAL BREAKERS, SHENANDOAH
Reading edition
One afternoon, hunting for subjects, I took the trolley from Mahanoy City in the sunset to Shenandoah, and as we breasted a hill this is what I saw: the long lines of crosses are trolley poles—the huge castle a coal breaker, the great town American, but the people, the miners who go to the churches which crown it, speak languages and worship creeds I do not know or understand. There, and not in Philadelphia, are the new Americans—but most Americans do not know it—for their ways are not Philadelphia ways, and their thoughts not those of Spruce Street. And there is not a man among them who speaks English hardly—and they are too ignorant to know that England is their "Mother Land." But there is even more ignorance in Spruce Street.
