Excerpt from The Black Diamond In later years, when the conflict with his father began, he always remembered these untroubled days with regrets: the Saturday football matches; the Sunday Whippet-racing and terrier-fighting, together with certain afternoon walks along the tow-path of the canal, where the bodies of puppies that were Old enough to be taxed floated into beds Of loose-strife and willow-weed, and jack-bannocks hung swimming in shoals through the yellow water. In all these memories John Fellows was a benignant figure; and this one would hardly have guessed, for John Fellows was not prepossessing. He was a short man with a low-set head and an immense shoulder-girdle. His eyes were small and lost in deep orbits, so that when his face was ingrained with carbon the white of the sclerotics was intensified in a way that made them seem gru g and malignant. Walking home in his pit clo es, bow-legged and with the dazed and hampered gait which is the mark Of men who labour underground, he always looked as if he had been drinking. Generally he had been drinking, but at his soberest he was an ugly customer, and the blue enamelled tin pot in which he carried his tea struck one as a dangerous weapon. 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 technology 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.