ask for Arminians.' Turning aside for a
moment to drive some weary operative with a word as rough as a
driver uses to his over-driven horse, he would return to the
'Everlasting Task,' and cull some choice sentence or read some
twisted text used to buttress up the Calvinistic creed. Reading
aloud to himself the words--'Real Christian charity is swallowed
up in the Will of God, nor is it in its nature to extend itself
one step beyond, nor desire one thing contrary to, the glory of
Jehovah. All the charity we possess beyond this may be properly
called fleshly charity'--he lifted his eyes to see two of his
'back-tenters' playing behind the frames, and his real Christian
charity displayed itself in pulling their ears until they tingled
and bled, and in freely using his feet in sundry kicks on their
shins. And yet, wherein was this man to blame? Was he not what
commerce and Calvinism had made him?

The finger of the clock in the factory yard was creeping towards
the hour of eleven, when a smell, ominous to every old factory
hand, was borne into the nostrils of Amos. In a moment his
'Everlasting Task' was thrust into his shirt-breast, and he ran
towards the door from which the stairway of the room descended.

No, he was not mistaken, the smell was the smell of fire, and
scarcely had he gone down a half-dozen steps before he met a man
with blanched face, who barely found breath to say:

'Th' scutchin' room's ablaze.'

Amos carried a cool head. His religion had done one thing for him:
it had made him a fatalist, and fatalists are self-contained.

In a moment he took in the whole situation. He knew that the
stairways would act as a huge draught, up which the flames from
the room below would bellow and blaze. He knew, too, that all way
of escape being cut off below, screaming women and girls, maddened
with fright, would rush to the topmost room of the mill, where
probably they would become a holocaust to commerce. He knew, too,
that those who sought the windows and let themselves down by ropes
and warps would lose their presence of mind, and probably fall
mangled and broken on the flag floor of the yard, sixty or seventy
feet below. All this passed through his mind ere the old watch in
his fob had marked the lapse of five seconds.

In a moment his resolve was taken. He went back to the roving-room
with steady step, and a face as calm as though he were standing in
the light of a summer sun. By the time he reached the room t