“So I am, in this instance; but the question has two sides.  Every man has the right to set a price on his own labor, and to refuse to work for less; the wisdom of it is another matter.  He puts himself in the wrong only when he menaces the person or the property of the man who has an equal right not to employ him.  That is the blunder strikers usually make in the end, and one by which they lose public sympathy even when they are fighting an injustice.  Now, sometimes it is an injustice that is being fought, and then it is right to fight it with the only weapon a poor man has to wield against a power which possesses a hundred weapons,—­and that’s a strike.  For example, the smelters and casters in the Miantowona Iron Works are meanly underpaid.”

“What, have they struck?”

“There’s a general strike threatened in the village; foundry-men, spinners, and all.”

“So much the worse for everybody!  I did not suppose it was as bad as that.  What has become of Torrini?”

“The day after he left us he was taken on as forgeman at Dana’s.”

“I am glad Dana has got him!”

“At the meeting, last night, Torrini gave in his resignation as secretary of the Association; being no longer a marble worker, he was not qualified to serve.”

“We unhorsed him, then?”

“Rather.  I am half sorry, too.”

“Richard,” said Mr. Slocum, halting in one of his nervous walks up and down the room, “you are the oddest composition of hardness and softness I ever saw.”

“Am I?”

“One moment you stand braced like a lion to fight the whole yard, and the next moment you are pitying a miscreant who would have laid your head open without the slightest compunction.”

“Oh, I forgive him,” said Richard.  “I was a trifle hasty myself.  Margaret thinks so too.”

“Much Margaret knows about it!”

“I was inconsiderate, to say the least.  When a man picks up a tool by the wrong end he must expect to get cut.”

“You didn’t have a choice.”

“I shouldn’t have touched Torrini.  After discharging him and finding him disposed to resist my order to leave the yard, I ought to have called in a constable.  Usually it is very hard to anger me; but three or four times in my life I have been carried away by a devil of a temper which I couldn’t control, it seized me so unawares.  That was one of the times.”

The mallets and chisels were executing a blithe staccato movement in the yard below, and making the sparks dance.  No one walking among the diligent gangs, and observing the placid faces of the men as they bent over their tasks, would have suspected that they were awaiting the word that meant bread and meat and home to them.

As Richard passed through the shops, dropping a word to a workman here and there, the man addressed looked up cheerfully and made a furtive dab at the brown paper cap, and Richard returned the salute smilingly; but he was sad within.  “The foolish fellows,” he said to himself, “they are throwing away a full loaf and are likely to get none at all.”  Giles and two or three of the ancients were squaring a block of marble under a shelter by themselves.  Richard made it a point to cross over and speak to them.  In past days he had not been exacting with these old boys, and they always had a welcome for him.