“Wait a minute till I can tell you!  You don’t give a body time to begin before you worry them with questions about things you’d hear all about it if you’d just hold your tongues a minute.  You’re like two blessed babies!  It was this way, Mrs. Phillips, as sure as I’m standing here.  Tom got trying to persuade the other men in the yard—­poor sticks of men they are!—­to have a union.  I’ve been goading him to it, may the Lord forgive me, ever since Miss Nellie there came round one night and persuaded my Tessie to join.  ‘Tom,’ says I to him that very night, ’I’ll have to be lending you one of my old petticoats, the way the poor weak girls are beginning to stand up for their rights, and you not even daring to be a union man.  I never thought I’d live to be ashamed of the father of my children!’ says I. And yesterday noon Tom came home with a face on him as long as my arm, and told me that he’d been sacked for talking union to the men.

“‘It’s a man you are again, Tom,’ says I.  ’We’ve lived short before and we can live it again, please God, and it’s myself would starve with you a hundred times over rather than be ashamed of you,’ says I.  ’Who was it that sacked you?’ I asked him.

“‘The foreman,’ says Tom.  ’He told me they didn’t want any agitators about.’

“‘May he live to suffer for it,’ says I.  ’I’ll go down and see the boss himself.’

“So down I went, and as luck would have it the boy in the front office wasn’t educated enough to say I was an old image, I suppose, for would you believe it I actually heard him say that there was a lady, if you please, wanting to see Mister Paritt very particularly on personal business, as I’d told him.  So of course I was shown in directly, the very minute, and the door was closed on me before the old villain, who’s a great man at church on Sundays, saw that he’d made a little mistake.

“‘What do you want, my good woman?’ says he, snappish like.  ‘Very sorry,’ says he, when I’d told him that I’d eleven children and that Tom had worked for him for four years and worked well, too.  ‘Very sorry,’ says he, my good woman, ’but your husband should have thought of that before.  It’s against my principles,’ says he, ’to have any unionists about the place.  I’m told he’s been making the other men discontented.  I can’t take him back.  You must blame him, not me,’ says he.

“I could feel the temper in me, just as though he’d given me a couple of stiff nobblers of real old whisky.  ‘So you won’t take Tom back,’ says I, ’not for the sake of his eleven children when it’s their poor heart-broken mother that asks you?’

“‘No,’ says he, short, getting up from his chair.  ’I can’t.  You’ve bothered me long enough,’ says he.