nearly seven o'clock in the evening
From the mountains , Botfield looks rather like a great blot upon the fair landscape , with its blackened engine-house and banks of coal-dust , its long range of limekilns , sultry and quivering in the summer sunshine , and its heavy , groaning water-wheel , which pumps up the water from the pits below . But the colliers do not think it so , nor their wives in the scattered village beyond ; they do not consider the lime and coal works a blot , for their living depends upon them , and they may rightly say , ` As for the earth , out of it cometh bread : and under it is turned up as it were fire . ' Even Stephen Fern , who would a thousand times rather work out on the free hillside than in the dark passages underground , does not think it a pity that the Botfield pit has been discovered at the foot of the mountains . It is nearly seven o'clock in the evening , and he is coming over the brow of the green dell , with his long shadow stretching down it . A very long shadow it is for so small a figure to cast , for if we wait a minute or two till Stephen draws nearer , we shall see that he is no strong , large man , but a slight , thin , stooping boy , bending rather wearily under a sack of coals , which he is carrying on his shoulders , and pausing now and then to wipe his heated forehead with the sleeve of his collier 's flannel jacket . When he lifts up the latch of his home we will enter with him , and see the inside of the hut at Fern 's Hollow . Stephen stepped over the threshold into a low , dark room , which was filled with smoke , from a sudden gust of the wind as it swept over the roof of the hut .