That evening, mother and son sat silent by the fire:  Henry had his own sad and bitter thoughts; and Mrs. Little was now brooding over the words Henry had spoken in the afternoon; and presently her maternal anxieties found a copious vent.  She related to him, one after another, all the outrages that had been perpetrated in Hillsborough, while he was a child, and had been, each in its turn, the town talk.

It was a subject on which, if her son had been older, and more experienced in her sex, he would have closed her mouth promptly, she being a woman whose own nerves had received so frightful a shock by the manner of her husband’s death.  But, inadvertently, he let her run on, till she told him how a poor grinder had been carried home to his wife, blinded and scorched with gunpowder, and another had been taken home, all bleeding, to his mother, so beaten and bruised with life-preservers, that he had laid between life and death for nine days, and never uttered one word all that time, in reply to all her prayers and tears.

Now Mrs. Little began these horrible narratives with a forced and unnatural calmness; but, by the time she got to the last; she had worked herself up to a paroxysm of sympathy with other wretched women in Hillsborough, and trembled all over, like one in an ague, for herself:  and at last stretched out her shaking hands, and screamed to him, “Oh, Harry, Harry, have pity on your miserable mother!  Think what these eyes of mine have seen—­bleeding at my feet—­there—­there—­I see it now”—­(her eyes dilated terribly at the word)—­“oh, promise me, for pity’s sake, that these—­same—­eyes—­shall never see you brought and laid down bleeding like him!” With this she went into violent hysterics, and frightened her son more than all the ruffians in the town had ever frightened him.

She was a long time in this pitiable condition, and he nursed her:  but at last her convulsion ceased, and her head rested on her son’s shoulder in a pitiable languor.

Henry was always a good son:  but he never loved his mother so tenderly as he did this night.  His heart yearned over this poor panting soul, so stately in form, yet so weak, so womanly, and lovable; his playmate in childhood; his sweet preceptor in boyhood; the best friend and most unselfish lover he had, or could ever hope to have, on earth; dear to him by her long life of loving sacrifice, and sacred by that their great calamity, which had fallen so much heavier on her than on him.

He soothed her, he fondled her, he kneeled at her feet, and promised her most faithfully he would never be brought home to her bruised or bleeding.  No; if the Unions rejected his offer he would go back to London with her at once.

And so, thrust from Hillsborough by the trades, and by his fears for Miss Carden, and also drawn from it by his mother’s terrors, he felt himself a feather on the stream of Destiny; and left off struggling:  beaten, heart-sick, and benumbed, he let the current carry him like any other dead thing that drifts.