If it had been one or both of these two who had gone away instead of
Harlow, just the same things would have been said about them by the
others who remained--it was merely their usual way of speaking about
each other behind each other's backs.

It was always the same: if any one of them made a mistake or had an
accident or got into any trouble he seldom or never got any sympathy
from his fellow workmen. On the contrary, most of them at such times
seemed rather pleased than otherwise.

There was a poor devil--a stranger in the town; he came from
London--who got the sack for breaking some glass. He had been sent to
'burn off' some old paint of the woodwork of a window. He was not very
skilful in the use of the burning-off lamp, because on the firm when he
had been working in London it was a job that the ordinary hands were
seldom or never called upon to do. There were one or two men who did
it all. For that matter, not many of Rushton's men were very skilful
at it either. It was a job everybody tried to get out of, because
nearly always the lamp went wrong and there was a row about the time
the work took. So they worked this job on to the stranger.

This man had been out of work for a long time before he got a start at
Rushton's, and he was very anxious not to lose the job, because he had
a wife and family in London. When the 'coddy' told him to go and burn
off this window he did not like to say that he was not used to the
work: he hoped to be able to do it. But he was very nervous, and the
end was that although he managed to do the burning off all right, just
as he was finishing he accidentally allowed the flame of the lamp to
come into contact with a large pane of glass and broke it.

They sent to the shop for a new pane of glass, and the man stayed late
that night and put it in in his own time, thus bearing half the cost of
repairing it.

Things were not very busy just then, and on the following Saturday two
of the hands were 'stood off'. The stranger was one of them, and
nearly everybody was very pleased. At mealtimes the story of the
broken window was repeatedly told amid jeering laughter. It really
seemed as if a certain amount of indignation was felt that a
stranger--especially such an inferior person as this chap who did not
know how to use a lamp--should have had the cheek to try to earn his
living at all! One thing was very certain--they said, gleefully--he
would never get another job at Rusht