inadvertently, he let her run on,
till she told him how a poor grinder had been carried home to his wife,
blinded and scorched with gunpowder, and another had been taken home,
all bleeding, to his mother, so beaten and bruised with life-preservers,
that he had laid between life and death for nine days, and never uttered
one word all that time, in reply to all her prayers and tears.

Now Mrs. Little began these horrible narratives with a forced and
unnatural calmness; but, by the time she got to the last; she had
worked herself up to a paroxysm of sympathy with other wretched women in
Hillsborough, and trembled all over, like one in an ague, for herself:
and at last stretched out her shaking hands, and screamed to him, "Oh,
Harry, Harry, have pity on your miserable mother! Think what these
eyes of mine have seen--bleeding at my feet--there--there--I see it
now"--(her eyes dilated terribly at the word)--"oh, promise me, for
pity's sake, that these--same--eyes--shall never see YOU brought and
laid down bleeding like HIM!" With this she went into violent hysterics,
and frightened her son more than all the ruffians in the town had ever
frightened him.

She was a long time in this pitiable condition, and he nursed her: but
at last her convulsion ceased, and her head rested on her son's shoulder
in a pitiable languor.

Henry was always a good son: but he never loved his mother so tenderly
as he did this night. His heart yearned over this poor panting soul, so
stately in form, yet so weak, so womanly, and lovable; his playmate
in childhood; his sweet preceptor in boyhood; the best friend and most
unselfish lover he had, or could ever hope to have, on earth; dear to
him by her long life of loving sacrifice, and sacred by that their great
calamity, which had fallen so much heavier on her than on him.

He soothed her, he fondled her, he kneeled at her feet, and promised
her most faithfully he would never be brought home to her bruised or
bleeding. No; if the Unions rejected his offer he would go back to
London with her at once.

And so, thrust from Hillsborough by the trades, and by his fears for
Miss Carden, and also drawn from it by his mother's terrors, he felt
himself a feather on the stream of Destiny; and left off struggling:
beaten, heart-sick, and benumbed, he let the current carry him like any
other dead thing that drifts.

He still plied the hammer, but in a dead-alive way.

He wrote a few cold lines to Mr. Jobso