Through the Fray | Page 5

it, and should have been there now if I hadn't followed my man to
the wars."
"Where are you going, Master Ned?" she asked as the boy, having
finished his dinner, ran to the high cupboard at the end of the passage
near the kitchen to get his fishing rod.
"I am going out fishing, Abijah."
"Not by yourself, I hope?"
"No; another fellow is going with me. We are going up into the hills."
"Don't ye go too far, Master Ned. They say the croppers are drilling on
the moors, and it were bad for ye if you fell in with them."
"They wouldn't hurt me if I did."
"I don't suppose they would," the nurse said, "but there is never no
saying. Poor fellows! they're druv well nigh out of their senses with the
bad times. What with the machines, and the low price of labor, and the
high price of bread, they are having a terrible time of it. And no wonder
that we hear of frame breaking in Nottingham, and Lancashire, and
other places. How men can be wicked enough to make machines, to
take the bread out of poor men's mouths, beats me altogether."
"Father says the machinery will do good in the long run, Abijah --that it
will largely increase trade, and so give employment to a great many
more people than at present. But it certainly is hard on those who have
learned to work in one way to see their living taken away from them."
"Hard!" the nurse said. "I should say it were hard. I know the croppers,
for there were a score of them in my village, and a rough, wild lot they
were. They worked hard and they drank hard, and the girl as chose a

cropper for a husband was reckoned to have made a bad match of it;
but they are determined fellows, and you will see they won't have the
bread taken out of their mouths without making a fight for it."
"That may be," Ned said, "for every one gives them the name of a
rough lot; but I must talk to you about it another time, Abijah, I have
got to be off;" and having now found his fishing rod, his box of bait, his
paper of books, and a basket to bring home the fish he intended to get,
Ned ran off at full speed toward the school.
As Abijah Wolf had said, the croppers of the West Riding were a rough
set. Their occupation consisted in shearing or cropping the wool on the
face of cloths. They used a large pair of shears, which were so set that
one blade went under the cloth while the other worked on its upper face,
mowing the fibers and ends of the wool to a smooth, even surface. The
work was hard and required considerable skill, and the men earned
about twenty-four shillings a week, a sum which, with bread and all
other necessities of life at famine prices, barely sufficed for the support
of their families. The introduction of power looms threatened to abolish
their calling. It was true that although these machines wove the cloth
more evenly and smoothly than the hand looms, croppers were still
required to give the necessary smoothness of face; still the tendency
had been to lower wages.
The weavers were affected even more than the croppers, for strength
and skill were not so needed to tend the power looms as to work the
hand looms. Women and boys could do the work previously performed
by men, and the tendency of wages was everywhere to fall.
For years a deep spirit of discontent had been seething among the
operatives in the cotton and woolen manufactures, and there had been
riots more or less serious in Derbyshire, Nottingham, Lancashire and
Yorkshire, which in those days were the headquarters of these trades.
Factories had been burned, employers threatened and attacked, and the
obnoxious machines smashed. It was the vain struggle of the ignorant
and badly paid people to keep down production and to keep up wages,
to maintain manual labor against the power of the steam engine.
Hitherto factories had been rare, men working the frames in their own
homes, and utilizing the labor of their wives and families, and the
necessity of going miles away to work in the mills, where the looms
were driven by steam, added much to the discontent.

Having found his fishing appliances Ned hurried off to the school,
where his chum Tompkins was already waiting him, and the two set out
at once on their expedition.
They had four miles to walk to reach the spot where they intended to
fish. It was a quiet little stream with deep pools and many shadows, and
had its source