y always pick their weather," observed Mr. Slocum.

"It will not be for long," said Richard encouragingly. "Our own
hands and the spinners, who had no ground for complaint, will return
to work shortly, and the managers of the iron mills will have to
yield a point or two. In a week at the outside everything will be
running smoothly, and on a sounder foundation than before. I believe
the strike will be an actual benefit to everybody in the end."

By dint of such arguments and his own sanguine temperament,
Richard succeeded in reassuring Mr. Slocum for the time being, though
Richard did not hide from himself the gravity of the situation. There
was a general strike in the village. Eight hundred men were without
work. That meant, or would mean in a few days, two or three thousand
women and children without bread. It does not take the wolf long to
reach a poor man's door when it is left ajar.

The trades-union had a fund for emergencies of this sort, and some
outside aid might be looked for; but such supplies are in their
nature precarious and soon exhausted. It is a noticeable feature of
strikes that the moment the workman's pay stops his living expenses
increase. Even the more economical becomes improvident. If he has
money, the tobacco shop and the tavern are likely to get more of it
than the butcher's cart. The prolonged strain is too great to be
endured without stimulant.

XVII

During the first and second days of the strike, Stillwater
presented an animated and even a festive appearance. Throngs of
operatives in their Sunday clothes strolled through the streets, or
lounged at the corners chatting with other groups; some wandered into
the suburbs, and lay in the long grass under the elms. Others again,
though these were few, took to the turnpike or the railroad track,
and tramped across country.

It is needless to say that the bar-room of the tavern was crowded
from early morning down to the hour when the law compelled Mr.
Snelling to shut off his gas. After which, John Brown's "soul" could
be heard "marching on" in the darkness, through various crooked lanes
and alleys, until nearly daybreak.

Among the earliest to scent trouble in the air was Han-Lin, the
Chinaman before mentioned. He kept a small laundry in Mud Lane, where
his name was painted perpendicularly on a light of glass in the
basement window of a tenement house. Han-Lin intended to be buried
some day in a sky-blue coffin in his own land, and