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Updated: June 24, 2025
In the greatest and longest battle that the world had yet seen, that Army of city clerks, Midland farm-lads, Lancashire mill-hands, Scottish miners, and Irish corner-boys, side by side with their great-hearted brethren from Overseas, stormed positions which had been held impregnable for two years, captured seventy thousand prisoners, reclaimed several hundred square miles of the sacred soil of France, and smashed once and for all the German-fostered fable of the invincibility of the German Army.
He knew how in these long years he should slowly die, but not until soul and body had become corrupt and rotten, how, when he came out, if he lived to come, even the lowest of the mill-hands would jeer him, how his hands would be weak, and his brain senseless and stupid. He believed he was almost that now. He put his hand to his head, with a puzzled, weary look. It ached, his head, with thinking.
Even the mill-hands remarked to one another that their mate, Moby, was a changed man. "'Twas like that wi' some," they said. "Trouble sowered 'em, like, and made 'em seem as though they 'ould throw the Almighty o' one side. And once folk got on a downward grade, same as that, it wasn't often as they was found on the mending hand no, it wasn't for sure."
The mill-hands, formerly such as I have described them, have been almost entirely replaced by Canadians and Irish, who have given a new character and aspect to the Lowell of forty years ago.
At election times the mill-hands of both sexes were locked up for fear of rows, but in spite of this the locks were broken and the rows were perpetual. When my father turned out the sitting Tory, Sir Graham Montgomery, in 1880, there were high jinks in Peebles.
Nearly the first work done was the building of a double log cabin, about half a mile from the mill-site. We commenced the mill about Christmas. Some of the mill-hands wanted a cabin near the mill. This was built, and I went to the Fort to superintend the construction of the mill-irons, leaving orders to cut a narrow ditch where the race was to be made.
The landlords, on the contrary, were losing power and prestige, and their farm labor, despite strenuous efforts, was drifting to town attracted by new and incidental work and higher wages. The mill-hands were more and more overworked and underpaid, and hated the Negroes for it in accordance with their leaders' directions.
How it came about is not now exactly discoverable; but just at this period of Murphy's life a decree was issued that several of the family were to be boarded out; and the next day the young dog found himself moved to the home of one of the mill-hands, half a mile and more away.
He tried to prove the fellow crazy; but it wouldn't go. Thing was plain as daylight: money found on him. 'Twas a hard sentence, all the law allows; but it was for 'xample's sake. These mill-hands are gettin' onbearable. When the sentence was read, he just looked up, and said the money was his by rights, and that all the world had gone wrong.
Still, next day, hearing by chance that the new-comer was going to preach at a hamlet the other side of Clough End, he went, found a large mixed meeting mostly of mill-hands, and the tide of Revivalism rolling high. This time Mr. Dyson picked him out at once the face and head indeed were easily remembered.
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