cient relief could not be raised. There was
no help then; so the unemployed underwent their destiny--ate the bread
and drank the waters of affliction.

Misery generates hate. These sufferers hated the machines which they
believed took their bread from them; they hated the buildings which
contained those machines; they hated the manufacturers who owned those
buildings. In the parish of Briarfield, with which we have at present to
do, Hollow's Mill was the place held most abominable; Gerard Moore, in
his double character of semi-foreigner and thorough-going progressist,
the man most abominated. And it perhaps rather agreed with Moore's
temperament than otherwise to be generally hated, especially when he
believed the thing for which he was hated a right and an expedient
thing; and it was with a sense of warlike excitement he, on this night,
sat in his counting-house waiting the arrival of his frame-laden wagons.
Malone's coming and company were, it may be, most unwelcome to him. He
would have preferred sitting alone; for he liked a silent, sombre,
unsafe solitude. His watchman's musket would have been company enough
for him; the full-flowing beck in the den would have delivered
continuously the discourse most genial to his ear.

* * * * *

With the queerest look in the world had the manufacturer for some ten
minutes been watching the Irish curate, as the latter made free with the
punch, when suddenly that steady gray eye changed, as if another vision
came between it and Malone. Moore raised his hand.

"Chut!" he said in his French fashion, as Malone made a noise with his
glass. He listened a moment, then rose, put his hat on, and went out at
the counting-house door.

The night was still, dark, and stagnant: the water yet rushed on full
and fast; its flow almost seemed a flood in the utter silence. Moore's
ear, however, caught another sound, very distant but yet dissimilar,
broken and rugged--in short, a sound of heavy wheels crunching a stony
road. He returned to the counting-house and lit a lantern, with which he
walked down the mill-yard, and proceeded to open the gates. The big
wagons were coming on; the dray-horses' huge hoofs were heard splashing
in the mud and water. Moore hailed them.

"Hey, Joe Scott! Is all right?"

Probably Joe Scott was yet at too great a distance to hear the inquiry.
He did not answer it.

"Is all right, I say?" again asked Moore, when the elephant-like