“They threw themselves out, Mag,” said her father.

“That does not mend the matter, papa.  There will be great destitution and suffering in the village with every mill closed; and they are all going to close, Bridget says.  Thank Heaven that this did not happen in the winter!”

“They always pick their weather,” observed Mr. Slocum.

“It will not be for long,” said Richard encouragingly.  “Our own hands and the spinners, who had no ground for complaint, will return to work shortly, and the managers of the iron mills will have to yield a point or two.  In a week at the outside everything will be running smoothly, and on a sounder foundation than before.  I believe the strike will be an actual benefit to everybody in the end.”

By dint of such arguments and his own sanguine temperament, Richard succeeded in reassuring Mr. Slocum for the time being, though Richard did not hide from himself the gravity of the situation.  There was a general strike in the village.  Eight hundred men were without work.  That meant, or would mean in a few days, two or three thousand women and children without bread.  It does not take the wolf long to reach a poor man’s door when it is left ajar.

The trades-union had a fund for emergencies of this sort, and some outside aid might be looked for; but such supplies are in their nature precarious and soon exhausted.  It is a noticeable feature of strikes that the moment the workman’s pay stops his living expenses increase.  Even the more economical becomes improvident.  If he has money, the tobacco shop and the tavern are likely to get more of it than the butcher’s cart.  The prolonged strain is too great to be endured without stimulant.

XVII

During the first and second days of the strike, Stillwater presented an animated and even a festive appearance.  Throngs of operatives in their Sunday clothes strolled through the streets, or lounged at the corners chatting with other groups; some wandered into the suburbs, and lay in the long grass under the elms.  Others again, though these were few, took to the turnpike or the railroad track, and tramped across country.

It is needless to say that the bar-room of the tavern was crowded from early morning down to the hour when the law compelled Mr. Snelling to shut off his gas.  After which, John Brown’s “soul” could be heard “marching on” in the darkness, through various crooked lanes and alleys, until nearly daybreak.

Among the earliest to scent trouble in the air was Han-Lin, the Chinaman before mentioned.  He kept a small laundry in Mud Lane, where his name was painted perpendicularly on a light of glass in the basement window of a tenement house.  Han-Lin intended to be buried some day in a sky-blue coffin in his own land, and have a dozen packs of firecrackers decorously exploded over his remains.  In order to reserve himself for this and other ceremonies involving the