er of twenty-two, with death in his face, told Henry he had
come into that room when he was eleven. "It soon takes hold of boys,"
said he. "I've got what I shall never get shut on."

Another, who looked ill, but not dying, received Henry's sympathy with a
terrible apathy. "I'm twenty-eight," said he; "and a fork-grinder is an
old cock at thirty. I must look to drop off my perch in a year or two,
like the rest."

Only one, of all these victims, seemed to trouble his head about whether
death and disease could be averted. This one complained that some
employers provided fans to drive the dust from the grinder, but Cheetham
would not go to the expense.

The rest that Henry spoke to accepted their fate doggedly. They were
ready to complain, but not to move a finger in self-defense. Their
fathers had been ground out young, and why not they?

Indifferent to life, health, and happiness, they could nevertheless be
inflamed about sixpence a week. In other words, the money-price of their
labor was every thing to them, the blood-price nothing.

Henry found this out, and it gave him a glimpse into the mind of
Amboyne.

He felt quite confused, and began to waver between hate, contempt, and
pity. Was it really these poor doomed wretches who had robbed him of his
livelihood? Could men so miscalculate the size of things, as to strike
because an inoffensive individual was making complete caring-tools all
by himself, and yet not strike, nor even stipulate for fans, to carry
disease and death away from their own vitals? Why it seemed wasting
hate, to bestow it on these blind idiots.

He went on to the wet-grinders, and he found their trade much healthier
than dry-grinding: yet there were drawbacks. They suffered from the grit
whenever a new stone was hung and raced. They were also subject to
a canker of the hands, and to colds, coughs, and inflammations, from
perspiration checked by cold draughts and drenched floors. These floors
were often of mud, and so the wet stagnated and chilled their feet,
while their bodies were very hot. Excellent recipe for filling graves.

Here Bayne retired to his books, and Henry proceeded to the
saw-grinders, and entered their rooms with no little interest, for they
were an envied trade. They had been for many years governed by Grotait,
than whom no man in England saw clearer; though such men as Amboyne
saw further. Grotait, by a system of Machiavellian policy, ingeniously
devised and carried out, no