mains.

I believe I should have gone striding athwart the dark stage of
that stagnant industrial drama without asking a question, if Lord
Redcar had not chanced to come upon the scene about the same time
as myself and incontinently end its stagnation.

He had promised that if the men wanted a struggle he would put
up the best fight they had ever had, and he had been active all
that afternoon in meeting the quarrel half way, and preparing as
conspicuously as possible for the scratch force of "blacklegs"--as
we called them--who were, he said and we believed, to replace the
strikers in his pits.

I was an eye-witness of the whole of the affair outside the Bantock
Burden pit, and--I do not know what happened.

Picture to yourself how the thing came to me.

I was descending a steep, cobbled, excavated road between banked-up
footways, perhaps six feet high, upon which, in a monotonous
series, opened the living room doors of rows of dark, low cottages.
The perspective of squat blue slate roofs and clustering chimneys
drifted downward towards the irregular open space before the
colliery--a space covered with coaly, wheel-scarred mud, with a
patch of weedy dump to the left and the colliery gates to the right.
Beyond, the High Street with shops resumed again in good earnest
and went on, and the lines of the steam-tramway that started out
from before my feet, and were here shining and acutely visible
with reflected skylight and here lost in a shadow, took up for one
acute moment the greasy yellow irradiation of a newly lit gaslamp
as they vanished round the bend. Beyond, spread a darkling marsh
of homes, an infinitude of little smoking hovels, and emergent,
meager churches, public-houses, board schools, and other buildings
amidst the prevailing chimneys of Swathinglea. To the right, very
clear and relatively high, the Bantock Burden pit-mouth was marked
by a gaunt lattice bearing a great black wheel, very sharp and
distinct in the twilight, and beyond, in an irregular perspective,
were others following the lie of the seams. The general effect,
as one came down the hill, was of a dark compressed life beneath
a very high and wide and luminous evening sky, against which these
pit-wheels rose. And ruling the calm spaciousness of that heaven
was the great comet, now green-white, and wonderful for all who
had eyes to see.

The fading afterglow of the sunset threw up all the contours and
skyline to the west, and the comet rose e