undue prominence to one description of
mental labour, and I fear that you will injure your brain if you are
always exercising it in one direction. Therefore when in the pit think
over other subjects, history, geography, what you will, but leave
calculations alone except when you have your books before you."

CHAPTER IX.

THE GREAT STRIKE.

It was Saturday afternoon, a time at which Stokebridge was generally
lively. The men, (dinner over, and the great weekly wash done,) usually
crowded the public-houses, or played bowls and quoits on a piece of
waste land known as "the common," or set off upon a spree to Birmingham
or Wolverhampton, or sat on low walls or other handy seats, and smoked
and talked. But upon this special Saturday afternoon no one settled down
to his ordinary pursuits, for the men stood talking in groups in the
street, until, as the hour of four approached, there was a general move
towards the common. Hither, too, came numbers of men from the colliery
villages round, until some four or five thousand were gathered in front
of an old "waste tip" at one corner of the common. Presently a group of
some five or six men came up together, made their way through the
throng, and took their stand on the edge of the tip, some twenty feet
above the crowd. These were the delegates, the men sent by the union to
persuade the colliers of Stokebridge and its neighbourhood to join in a
general strike for a rise of wages.

The women of the village stand at their doors, and watch the men go off
to the meeting, and then comment to each other concerning it.

"I ain't no patience wi' 'em, Mrs. Haden," said one of a group of
neighbours who had gathered in front of her house; "I don't hold by
strikes. I have gone through three of 'em, bad un's, besides a score of
small un's, and I never knowed good come on 'em. I lost my little Peg in
the last--low fever, the doctor called it, but it was starvation and
nothing more."

"If I had my way," said Mrs. Haden, "I'd just wring the heads off they
delegates. They come here and 'suades our men to go out and clem rather
than take a shilling a week less, just a glass o' beer a day, and they
gets their pay and lives in comfort, and dunna care nowt if us and th'
childer all dies off together."

"Talk o' woman's rights, as one hears about, and woman's having a vote;
we ought to have a vote as to strikes. It's us as bears the worse o't,
and we ought to have a say on't; if we did ther