After the songs some of the elder guests sat down to a game of whist, the younger ones danced Money Musk, Squire Beverly and Mrs. Stephen Hatton leading, while Harry played the old country dance with a snap and movement that made hearts bound and feet forget that age or rheumatism were in existence.

At eleven o’clock the party dispersed and the great dinner was over.  Harry had justified it.  His mother felt sure of that.  He had sung his way into every heart, and if John was so indifferent about political honors and office, she could think of no one better to fill Stephen Hatton’s place than his son Harry.  Her dreams were all for Harry because John formed his own plans and usually stood firmly by them, while Harry was easily persuaded and not averse to see things as others saw them.

The next day Harry wrote a very full account of the dinner and the company who attended it, describing each individual, their social rank or station, their physical and mental peculiarities, their dress and even their ornaments or jewelry.  This account was read to all the family, then dated, sealed and carefully placed among the records and heirlooms of Hatton Hall.  The receptacle containing these precious relics was a very large, heavily carved oak chest, standing in the Master’s room.  This chest was iron-bound, triple-locked, and required four strong men to lift it, and the family traditions asserted it had stood in its present place for three hundred and forty years.  It was the palladium of Hatton Hall and was regarded with great honor and affection.

After this event there were no more attempts at festivity.  The clouds gathered quickly and a silent gloom settled over all the cotton-spinning and weaving districts of England.  But I shall only touch this subject as it refers to the lives and characters of my story.  Its facts and incidents are graven on thousands of lives and chronicled in numerous authentic histories.  It is valuable here as showing how closely mankind is now related and that the cup of sorrow we have to drink may be mingled for us at the ends of the earth by people whose very names are strange on our lips.  Then

    ...  “Impute it not a crime
    To me or my swift passage, that I slide
    O’er years.”

Very sorrowful years in which the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished, unless carried in the Everlasting Arms.  Three of them had passed in want and suffering, constantly growing more acute.  Mill after mill closed, and the dark, quiet buildings stood among the starving people like monuments of despair.  No one indeed can imagine the pathos of these black deserted factories, that had once blazed with sunlight and gaslight and filled the town with the stir of their clattering looms and the traffic of their big lorries and wagons and the call and song of human voices.  In their blank, noiseless gloom, they too seemed to suffer.[1]

FOOTNOTE: