‘But it’s out of doors,’ said Bessy.  ’And away from the endless, endless noise, and sickening heat.’

’It’s sometimes in heavy rain, and sometimes in bitter cold.  A young person can stand it; but an old man gets racked with rheumatism, and bent and withered before his time; yet he must just work on the same, or else go to the workhouse.’

‘I thought yo’ were so taken wi’ the ways of the South country.’

‘So I am,’ said Margaret, smiling a little, as she found herself thus caught.  ’I only mean, Bessy, there’s good and bad in everything in this world; and as you felt the bad up here, I thought it was but fair you should know the bad down there.’

‘And yo’ say they never strike down there?’ asked Nicholas, abruptly.

‘No!’ said Margaret; ‘I think they have too much sense.’

‘An’ I think,’ replied he, dashing the ashes out of his pipe with so much vehemence that it broke, ’it’s not that they’ve too much sense, but that they’ve too little spirit.’

‘O, father!’ said Bessy, ’what have ye gained by striking?  Think of that first strike when mother died—­how we all had to clem—­you the worst of all; and yet many a one went in every week at the same wage, till all were gone in that there was work for; and some went beggars all their lives at after.’

‘Ay,’ said he.  ’That there strike was badly managed.  Folk got into th’ management of it, as were either fools or not true men.  Yo’ll see, it’ll be different this time.’

‘But all this time you’ve not told me what you’re striking for,’ said Margaret, again.

‘Why, yo’ see, there’s five or six masters who have set themselves again paying the wages they’ve been paying these two years past, and flourishing upon, and getting richer upon.  And now they come to us, and say we’re to take less.  And we won’t.  We’ll just clem them to death first; and see who’ll work for ’em then.  They’ll have killed the goose that laid ’em the golden eggs, I reckon.’

‘And so you plan dying, in order to be revenged upon them!’

‘No,’ said he, ’I dunnot.  I just look forward to the chance of dying at my post sooner than yield.  That’s what folk call fine and honourable in a soldier, and why not in a poor weaver-chap?’

‘But,’ said Margaret, ’a soldier dies in the cause of the Nation—­in the cause of others.’

He laughed grimly.  ‘My lass,’ said he, ’yo’re but a young wench, but don’t yo’ think I can keep three people—­that’s Bessy, and Mary, and me—­on sixteen shilling a week?  Dun yo’ think it’s for mysel’ I’m striking work at this time?  It’s just as much in the cause of others as yon soldier—­only m’appen, the cause he dies for is just that of somebody he never clapt eyes on, nor heerd on all his born days, while I take up John Boucher’s cause, as lives next door but one, wi’ a sickly wife, and eight childer, none on ’em factory age; and I don’t take up his cause only, though he’s a poor good-for-nought, as can only manage two looms at a time, but I take up th’ cause o’ justice.  Why are we to have less wage now, I ask, than two year ago?’