aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing.

The setting is a gloomy mining town, with nature being taken over and corrupted by the mine and industrialization.

The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon’s stagnant light.

As the community’s main economic and power source, the mine dominates not only the physical environment but also the people. It dictates the end of a workday by allowing its workers to emerge from its dark underground caves.

Just beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black head-stocks of Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the sky, and the winding-engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners were being turned up.

These men straggle home “like shadows.” The sound of the winding engine bringing men back to the earth’s surface signals to Elizabeth that Walter should soon be home; that is, if he comes directly home and does not stop at a bar to drink. She waits and watches as other

miners, in grey sombre groups, were still passing home. The winding-engine pulsed hurriedly, with brief pauses. Elizabeth Bates looked at the dreary flow of men, then she went indoors. Her husband did not come.

The mine even infiltrates their home. The kitchen is warm and cozy only because of

red coals piled glowing up the chimney mouth. All the life of the room seemed in the white, warm hearth and the steel fender reflecting the red fire.

The glowing coals, flames, and even steel piece all evoke the mine and its dominating presence in domestic life. After Elizabeth calls her kids to eat dinner, she checks to see if her husband is returning:

She opened the door once more and looked out across the darkness of the lines. All was deserted: she could not hear the winding-engines.

The fact that no one is around and the winding engines are quiet means that everyone has left the mine. Suspecting that Walter went to a bar instead, Elizabeth is exasperated but with an undercurrent of worry because the mine is now silent. She waits for Walter with “a tension of expectancy,” and “her anger was tinged with fear.”

Later when she goes out in search of Walter and asks a neighbor and fellow miner if he has seen her husband, she witnesses how the mine leaves its malevolent mark. Although at home, the neighbor cannot escape from the mine.

Across his temple was a blue scar, caused by a wound got in the pit, a wound in which the coal-dust remained blue like tattooing.

Adding insult to injury, the mine—where the man was wounded—leaves coal dust in the wound like a tattoo that cannot be washed away. After Elizabeth returns home, she suddenly hears the sound of the mine:

She was startled by the rapid chuff of the winding-engine at the pit, and the sharp whirr of the brakes on the rope as it descended. Again she felt the painful sweep of her blood, and she put her hand to her side, saying aloud, “Good gracious!—it’s only the nine o’clock deputy going down,” rebuking herself.

Unbeknownst to Elizabeth, this sound portends the discovery of Walter’s dead boy in the mine, where a ceiling collapsed on him. As her mother-in-law and she await the dreaded news, Elizabeth

startled once, when she heard the winding- engine chuff quickly, and the brakes skirr with a shriek. Then she heard the engine more slowly, and the brakes made no sound.

This sound from the mine signals that Walter’s corpse has been brought up. His death is confirmed by another miner, a “man in pit-clothes.”

From this point in the story forward, the mine is a character that reminds all living characters and the reader of death. The men bearing Walter’s body are miners. The first glimpse of Walters’s dead body is of his “nailed pit-boots.” His body is “half naked, all grimed with coal-dust.” The mine itself killed Walter by collapsing on and suffocating him. When Elizabeth and his mother prepare his body for burial, Elizabeth touches him to discover that

he was still warm, for the mine was hot where he had died.

Although the alcoholic Walter is often viewed as the story’s antagonist, the mine can be seen as the story’s antagonist; after all, it ruined the life of Elizabeth, the protagonist, by killing her and her family’s means of support. While alcohol may have been Walter’s mistress who kept him at bars and away from home, ultimately the mine is Walter’s murderous mistress. He may not have loved working in the mine—more likely he disliked it—but it was a mistress whom he served in order to make money for his family. The mine permanently took Walter away from his family.