‘I wish I were there,’ said Bessy, wearily. ‘But it’s not for me to get sick and tired o’ strikes. This is the last I’ll see. Before it’s ended I shall be in the Great City — the Holy Jerusalem.’

‘Hoo’s so full of th’ life to come, hoo cannot think of th’ present. Now I, yo’ see, am bound to do the best I can here. I think a bird i’ th’ hand is worth two i’ th’ bush. So them’s the different views we take on th’ strike question.’

‘But,’ said Margaret, ‘if the people struck, as you call it, where I come from, as they are mostly all field labourers, the seed would not be sown, the hay got in, the corn reaped.’

‘Well?’ said he. He had resumed his pipe, and put his ‘well’ in the form of an interrogation.

‘Why,’ she went on, ‘what would become of the farmers.’

He puffed away. ‘I reckon they’d have either to give up their farms, or to give fair rate of wage.’

‘Suppose they could not, or would not do the last; they could not give up their farms all in a minute, however much they might wish to do so; but they would have no hay, nor corn to sell that year; and where would the money come from to pay the labourers’ wages the next?’

Still puffing away. At last he said:

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