“Very well, sir,” said Bayne, obsequiously; “and I respectfully solicit the honor of conducting our esteemed visitor.”

A young man’s ill-humor could not stand against this.  “Come along, old fellow,” said Henry.  “I’m a bear, with a sore heart; but who could be such a brute as quarrel with you?  Let us begin with the chaps who drove me out—­the grinders.  I’m hired to philanthropize ’em—­d—­n ’em.”

They went among the dry-grinders first; and Henry made the following observations.  The workman’s hair and clothes were powdered with grit and dust from the grindstones.  The very air was impregnated with it, and soon irritated his own lungs perceptibly.  Here was early death, by bronchitis and lung diseases, reduced to a certainty.  But he also learned from the men that the quantity of metal ground off was prodigious, and entered their bodies they scarce knew how.  A razor-grinder showed him his shirt:  it was a deep buff-color.  “There, sir,” said he, “that was clean on yesterday.  All the washerwomen in Hillsbro’ can’t make a shirt of mine any other color but that.”  The effect on life, health, and happiness was visible; a single glance revealed rounded shoulders and narrow chests, caused partly by the grinder’s position on his horsing, a position very injurious to the organs of breathing, and partly by the two devil’s dusts that filled the air; cadaverous faces, the muscles of which betrayed habitual suffering, coughs short and dry, or with a frothy expectoration peculiar to the trade.  In answer to questions, many complained of a fearful tightness across the chest, of inability to eat or to digest.  One said it took him five minutes to get up the factory stairs, and he had to lean against the wall several times.

A razor-grinder of twenty-two, with death in his face, told Henry he had come into that room when he was eleven.  “It soon takes hold of boys,” said he.  “I’ve got what I shall never get shut on.”

Another, who looked ill, but not dying, received Henry’s sympathy with a terrible apathy.  “I’m twenty-eight,” said he; “and a fork-grinder is an old cock at thirty.  I must look to drop off my perch in a year or two, like the rest.”

Only one, of all these victims, seemed to trouble his head about whether death and disease could be averted.  This one complained that some employers provided fans to drive the dust from the grinder, but Cheetham would not go to the expense.

The rest that Henry spoke to accepted their fate doggedly.  They were ready to complain, but not to move a finger in self-defense.  Their fathers had been ground out young, and why not they?

Indifferent to life, health, and happiness, they could nevertheless be inflamed about sixpence a week.  In other words, the money-price of their labor was every thing to them, the blood-price nothing.

Henry found this out, and it gave him a glimpse into the mind of Amboyne.

He felt quite confused, and began to waver between hate, contempt, and pity.  Was it really these poor doomed wretches who had robbed him of his livelihood?  Could men so miscalculate the size of things, as to strike because an inoffensive individual was making complete caring-tools all by himself, and yet not strike, nor even stipulate for fans, to carry disease and death away from their own vitals?  Why it seemed wasting hate, to bestow it on these blind idiots.