The Interlude focuses on the Cherry Mine fire, a disaster that occurred in late 1909. The fire and its aftermath overlapped with the end of the older system of employee injury law and the new one created by compensation laws. The fire killed 259 people, making it the second worst mining disaster when it happened, and still the third worst in US history to date. The Cherry fire informed the national push for compensation laws, not least because relief workers set up a private compensation system based on recent British workers’ compensation laws. Above all by reading a diary written by a miner trapped underground during the fire, the interlude returns the concrete realities of injury and suffering to readers’ attention after Chapters 2 and 3, which get progressively more abstract because those chapters focus on the ways that social reformers abstracted away those realities. Thus, the Interlude serves to underline the importance of what fell out of compensation laws.