“What can you do against ten thousand?  No; go you at once to the Secretary of the Edge-Tool Grinders, and get your trade into his Union.  You will have to pay; but don’t mind that.  Cheetham will go halves.”

“I’ll go at dinner-time.”

“And why not now?”

“Because,” said Henry, with a candor all his own, “I’m getting over my fright a bit, and my blood is beginning to boil at being threatened by a sneak, who wouldn’t stand before me one moment in that yard, knife or no knife.”

Bayne smiled a friendly but faint smile, and shook his head with grave disapprobation, and said, with wonder, “Fancy postponing Peace!”

Henry went to his forge and worked till dinner-time.  Nay, more, was a beautiful whistler, and always whistled a little at his work:  so to-day he whistled a great deal:  in fact, he over-whistled.

At dinner-time he washed his face and hands and put on his coat to go out.

But he had soon some reason to regret that he had not acted on Bayne’s advice to the letter.  There had been a large trade’s meeting overnight, and the hostility to the London craftsman had spread more widely, in consequence of remarks that had been there made.  This emboldened the lower class of workmen, who already disliked him out of pure envy, and had often scowled at him in silence; and, now, as he passed them, they spoke at him, in their peculiar language, which the great friend and supporter of mechanics in general, The Hillsborough Liberal, subsequently christened “The dash dialect.”

“We want no ——­ cockneys here, to steal our work.”

“Did ever a ——­ anvil-man handle his own blades in Hillsborough?”

“Not till this ——­ knobstick came,” said another.

Henry turned sharp round upon them haughtily, and such was the power of his prompt defiant attitude, and his eye, which flashed black lightning, that there was a slight movement of recoil among the actual speakers.  They recovered it immediately, strong in numbers; but in that same moment Little also recovered his discretion, and he had the address to step briskly toward the gate and call out the porter; he said to him in rather a loud voice, for all to hear, “if anybody asks for Henry Little, say he has gone to the Secretary of the Edge-Tool Forgers’ Union.”  He then went out of the works; but, as he went, he heard some respectable workman say to the scum, “Come, shut up now.  It is in better hands than yours.”

Mr. Jobson, the Secretary of the Edge-Tool Forgers, was not at home, but his servant-girl advised Little to try the “Rising Sun;” and in the parlor of that orb he found Mr. Jobson, in company with other magnates of the same class, discussing a powerful leader of The Hillsborough Liberal, in which was advocated the extension of the franchise, a measure calculated to throw prodigious power into the hands of Hillsborough operatives, because of their great number, and their habit of living each workman in a tenement of his own, however small.