The Spinners | Page 9

that there's nothing better for the nerves and temper than steady work."
Neddy chaffed Mr. Gurd's sentiments and Raymond said nothing. He was looking in front of him, his mind occupied with personal problems.
Neddy Motyer made another encouraging suggestion.
"There's your aunt, Miss Ironsyde," he said. "She's got plenty of cash, I've heard people say, and she gives tons away in charity. How do you stand with her?"
"Mind your own business, Ned."
"Sorry," answered the other promptly. "Only wanted to buck you up."
"I'm not in need of any bucking up, thanks. If I've got to work, I'm quite equal to it. I've got more brains than Daniel, anyway. I'm quite conscious of that."
"You've got tons more mind than him," declared Neddy.
"And if that's the case, I could do more good, if I chose, than ever Daniel will."
"Or more harm," warned Mr. Gurd. "Always remember that, Mister Raymond. The bigger the intellects, the more power for wrong as well as right."
"He'll ask me to go into the works, I expect. And I may, or I may not."
"I should," advised Neddy. "Bridetown is a very sporting place and you'd be alongside your pal, Arthur Waldron."
"Don't go to Bridetown with an idea of sport, however--don't do that, Mister Raymond," warned Richard Gurd. "If you go, you put your back into the work and master the business of the Mill."
The young men wasted an hour in futile talk and needless drinking while Gurd attended to other customers. Then Raymond Ironsyde accepted an invitation to return home with Motyer, who lived at Eype, a mile away.
"I'm going to give my people a rest to-day," said Raymond as he departed. "I shall come in here for dinner, Dick."
"Very good, sir," answered Mr. Gurd; but he shook his head when the young men had gone.
Others in the bar hummed on the subject of young Ironsyde after his back was turned. A few stood up for him and held that he had been too severely dealt with; but the majority and those who knew most about him thought that his ill-fortune was deserved.
"For look at it," said a tradesman, who knew the facts. "If he'd been left money, he'd have only wasted the lot in sporting and been worse off after than before; but now he's up against work, and work may be the saving of him. And if he won't work, let him die the death and get off the earth and make room for a better man."
None denied the honourable obligation to work for every responsible human being.
CHAPTER III
THE HACKLER
The warehouse of Bridetown Mill adjoined the churchyard wall and its northern windows looked down upon the burying ground. The store came first and then the foreman's home, a thatched dwelling bowered in red and white roses, with the mill yard in front and a garden behind. From these the works were separated by the river. Bride came by a mill race to do her share, and a water wheel, conserving her strength, took it to the machinery. For Benny Cogle's engine was reinforced by the river. Then, speeding forward, Bride returned to her native bed, which wound through the valley south of the works.
A bridge crossed the river from the yard and communicated with the mills--a heterogeneous pile of dim, dun colours and irregular roofs huddled together with silver-bright excrescences of corrugated iron. A steady hum and drone as of some gigantic beehive ascended from the mills, and their combined steam and water power produced a tremor of earth and a steady roar in the air; while a faint dust storm often flickered about the entrance ways.
The store-house reeked with that fat, heavy odour peculiar to hemp and flax. It was a lofty building of wide doors and few windows. Here in the gloom lay bales and stacks of raw material. Italy, Russia, India, had sent their scutched hemp and tow to Bridetown. Some was in the rough; the dressed line had already been hackled and waited in bundles of long hemp composed of wisps, or 'stricks' like horses' tails. The silver and amber of the material made flashes of brightness in the dark storerooms and drew the light to their shining surfaces. Tall, brown posts supported the rafters, and in the twilight that reigned here, a man moved among the bales piled roof-high around him. He was gathering rough tow from a broken bale of Russian hemp and had stripped the Archangel matting from the mass.
Levi Baggs, the hackler, proceeded presently to weigh his material and was taking it over the bridge to the hackling shop when he met John Best, the foreman. They stopped to speak, and Levi set down the barrow that bore his load.
"I see you with him, yesterday. Did you get any ideas out of the man?"
Baggs referred to the new master and John