"What is all this to me?" said Mr Brownlow. "Who is your widow woman? Do you want me to do anything for her? has she a family? There are plenty of charities in Masterton if she belongs to the place. But it does not seem worth while to have brought me here for this."

"You know better than that, John Brownlow," said Mrs Fennell, in a kind of frenzy. "If it was any poor woman, what would I have cared? Let 'em starve, the hussies, as brings it all on themselves. There's but one woman as would trouble me, and you know who it is, John Brownlow; and that old witch there, she knows, and it's time to put a stop to it all. It's time to put a stop to it all, I say. She's a-carrying on with that woman; and my Bessie's children will be robbed before my very eyes; and I'm a poor old creature, and their own father as ought to take their part I tell you, it's that woman as she's a-carrying on with; and they'll be robbed and ruined, my pretty dears, my Bessie's children and she'll have it all, that wretch! I'd kill her, I'd strangle her, I'd murder her, if it was me!"

Mrs Fennell's eyes were bloodshot, and rolled in their sockets wildly-her head shook with palsied rage-her voice stammered and staggered-and she lifted her poor old lean hands with wild incoherent gestures. She was half-mad with passion and excitement. She, who was so terribly in earnest, so eager in her insane desire to save him, was in reality the traitor whom he had most to fear; and Mr Brownlow had his senses sufficiently about him to perceive this. He exerted himself to calm her down and soothe her. "I will see after it-I will see after it," he said. "I will speak to Nancy-don't excite yourself." As for Mrs Fennell, not his persuasion, but her own passion, wore her out presently, and reduced

while she sank into silence, and the half-doze, half-stupor of extreme age. When this reaction had come on, Mr Brownlow left the room, making a sign to Nancy to follow him, which the old woman did with gradually-rising excitement, feeling that now indeed her turn had come. But he did not take her apart, as she had hoped and supposed, to have a desperate passage of arms. He turned round on the stair, though the landlady stood below within hearing ready to open the door, and spoke to her calmly and coldly. "Has she been long like this?" he said, and looked Nancy so steadily in the face that, for the first time, she was discomfited, and lost all clue to his meaning. She stood and stared at him for a minute, not knowing what to say.

"Has she been long like this?" Mr Brownlow repeated a little sharply. "I must see after a doctor at once. How long has it lasted? I suppose no one can tell but you?"

"It's lasted--but I don't know, sir," said Nancy-"I don't know; I couldn't say, as it was nothing the matter with her head. She thinks as there's a foundation. It's her notion as I've found out-—”

"That will do," said Mr Brownlow; "I have no curiosity about your friends. It is your mistress's health I am thinking of. I will call on Dr Bayley as I go back; and you will see that she is kept quiet, and has every attention. I am grieved to see her in such an excited state. And, by the way, you will have the goodness not to leave her again. If your friends require your visits, let me know, and I will send a nurse. If it has been neglect that has brought this on, you may be sure it will tell on yourself afterwards," Mr Brownlow added, as he went out. All this was said in the presence of the mistress of the house, who heard and enjoyed it. And he went away without another look at her,

without another word, without praying for her silence, or pleading with her for her secret, as she had expected. Nancy was confounded, notwithstanding all her knowledge. She stood and stared after him with a sinking heart, wondering if there were circumstances she did not know, which held him harmless, and whether after all it had been wise of her to attach herself to the cause of his adversaries. She was disappointed with the effect she had produced-disappointed of the passage of arms she had expected, and the keen cross-examination which she had been prepared to baffle. She looked so blank that the landlady, looking on, felt that she too could venture on a passing

arrow.

"You'll take my word another time, Nancy," she said. "I told you as it was shameful neglect to go and leave her all by herself, and her so old and weakly, poor soul ! You don't mind the likes of us, but you'll have to mind what your master says. "

"He ain't no master of mine," said Nancy, fiercely, "nor you ain't my mistress, Lord be praised. You mind your own business, and I'll mind mine. It's fine to be John Brownlow, with all his grandeur; but pride goes before a fall, is what I says," the old woman muttered, as she went back to Mrs Fennell's room. She had said so at Brownlows, looking at the avenue which led to the great house, and at the cozy little lodge out of which she had already planned to turn old Betty. That vision rose before her at this trying moment, and comforted her a little. On the one side the comfortable lodge, and an easy life, and the prospect of unbounded tyranny over a new possessor, who should owe everything to her; but, on the other side, dismissal from her present post, which was not unprofitable, an end of her good wages and all her consolations. Nancy drew her breath hard at the contrast; the

risk seemed to her as great almost as the hope.

Mr Brownlow left the door composed and serious, as a man does who has just been in the presence of severe perhaps fatal illness, and he went to Dr Bayley, and told that gentleman that his mother-in-law's brain was, he feared, giving way, and begged him to see her immediately; and then he went to the office, grave and silent, without a touch of apparent excitement. When he got there, he stopped in the outer office, and called Powys into his own room. "We have not seen you at Brownlows for a long time," he said. Jack has some young fellows with him shooting. You had better take a week's holiday, and come up with me to-night. I shall make it all right with Wrinkell. You can go home and get your bag before the dogcart comes."

He said this quickly, without any pause for consideration, as if he had been giving instructions about some deed drawing out; and it was some time before Powys realised the prospect of paradise thus opening before him. "I, sir-do you mean me?" he cried, in his amazement. "To-night?" And Mr Brownlow appeared to his clerk as if he had been an angel from heaven.

"Yes," he said, with a smile, "to-night. I suppose you can do it? You do not want much preparation for pleasure at your age."

Then poor Powys suddenly turned very pale. Out of the first glow of delight he sank into despondency. "I don't know, sir— if you may have forgotten-what I once said to you-about-aboutmy folly," faltered the young man, not daring to look into his employer's face.

"About- ?" said Mr Brownlow; and then he made as though he suddenly recollected, and laughed. "Oh, yes, I remember," he said. "I suppose all young men are fools sometimes in that respect. But I don't see it is any business of mine. You can settle it between

you. Be ready for me at six o'clock."

And thus it was all arranged. Powys went out to get his things, not knowing whether he walked or flew, in such a sudden amaze of delight as few men ever experience; and when he was gone Mr Brownlow put down his ashy face into his clasped hands. Heaven! had it come to this? At the last moment, when the shore was so near,

the tempest wellnigh spent, deliverance at hand, was there no resource but this, no escape? All his precautions vain, his wiles, his struggle of conscience! His face was like that of a dead man as he sat by himself and realised what had happened. Why could not he fly to the end of earth, and escape the Nemesis? Was there nothing for it but, like that other wretched father, to sacrifice his spotless child?

THERE should be no connection between honest work and foul murder; but recent disclosures seem to show that in some parts of England, and in some trades, the connection is but too close. There may, however, arise the question whether any work that has to do with murder can be considered honest? The peculiarity of the case is, that great numbers of men, who think they are honest, do not look upon murder as the greatest of crimes, provided it be committed in the interest, real or supposed, of the particular kind of work to which they have been educated, and by which alone they can earn their daily bread. When, in May last, we wrote on the general subject of "Strikes and TradesUnions" (vide Maga for June), the fearful confessions extorted from the professional assassins of Sheffield had not been given to the world, and the names of Broadhead, Crookes, and Hallam had scarcely been heard beyond the limits of the town which the presence of such men polluted, and even within those narrow bounds were only familiar to the members of their own trade. We propose, therefore, in view of the great social, if not political, importance of the subject, to recapitulate the facts that have been recently brought to light, not only in Sheffield, but in Manchester, and to

draw from them such instruction and warning as we may. It is for the interest of all classes, and most of all of the working classes, that the whole truth should be made known. From what has already been divulged, it is clear that a very large proportion of the mechanics and labourers of England, blinded to their real interest, and to their most sacred duty as men and Christians, by supposed Trade necessities, have been made the victims, as well as the agents, of very horrible crimes, and an all but incredible tyranny; and that they have yet much to learn on the most elemental matters of public and private liberty, and Christian conduct, before they can be accepted as good men or good citizens. It is to be feared also that the thinking classes, who feel that, in consequence of these revelations, the fair fame of the British people has been tarnished, and a flagrant scandal inflicted upon our civilisation, have yet much to do before the taint can be removed, or the scandal forgotten.

No man, it has often been said, knows himself-not even the wisest. After the Sheffield disclosures, if they are the worst we may expect, which is not quite certain, considering what we already know of the Manchester Brickmakers, the same may be said of the British people. We do not know ourselves.

Neither the Church nor the law tries, or if it tried would be able, to discover the hidden depths of our depravity. Philosophy cannot account for the abnormal phenomena that daily present themselves in the moral condition of the people; while statesmanship, scarcely able to punish, confesses itself wholly unable to prevent the continually recurring wrong that, in new and unexpected shapes, betrays itself among us. Our civilisation, vaunt it as loudly as we will, is full of unclean mysteries; yet we go on boasting of the material and scientific triumphs of our age, as if these were all in all, and never bestow a thought upon the moral shortcomings that render our civilisation, however advanced it may be, the merest mockery of what it should be, if our wealth and our virtue kept pace with each other. Thirty or forty years ago; when Captain Sleeman published his work on the Thugs,* and told us that there existed in India a religious sect all the members of which considered it a holy duty to rob and murder travellers, the people of England held up their hands in horror, and called for the immediate extirpation of the assassins by the strong arm of British power. If any one had said at that time that a system almost as atrocious, founded not upon the mysteries of a so-called religion, but on those of a particular trade, existed in England, he would have been laughed to scorn, or scouted as a lunatic and a slanderer of his countrymen. Yet such a system was in existence, as we now know, and its devotees thought, like the Thugs, that they did no wrong. At any time within living memory, when Irish landlords, bailiffs, and land- agents have been openly murdered by the decree of a secret Vehmgericht of small farmers and cotters, and it was impossible for the law, either by terror or promise of reward, to

*

lay hold of the assassin, though every man and every woman in every town and village of the district was familiar with his name and whereabouts, the enlightened British people blessed God that such things could not be done on their side of the Channel. But after the Sheffield and Manchester disclosures the British people will doubtless find reason to qualify their self-complacency, and to own that there may be, not only motes, but beams in their own eyes, as well as in those of their neighbours, whether in India or in Ireland.

When Trades-unions were first legalised, the members of those societies, which multiplied very rapidly all over the country, never sufficiently remembered that there are unlawful methods of doing lawful things. It is lawful, for instance, to go to church; but it is not lawful to batter down the church-door to procure admittance. It is lawful for John Smith to decline to work for less than six shillings a-day; it is lawful for him to persuade John Brown, if he can, to imitate his example, and refuse five-and-sixpence; but it is not lawful for Smith to break Brown's head if his attempts at persuasion be ineffectual. It is upon this rock that the Trades-unions have split. Not contented with the law of the land, they have made a law of their own, and enacted various pains and penalties against those who transgress it-pains and penalties varying from pecuniary fine to wounding and maiming, and, in obstinate cases, to the extreme penalty of DEATH. Working men gaining their daily bread by the exercise of any trade or handicraft, skilled or unskilled, and having neither the means, the opportunity, nor perhaps the inclination to change that craft for any other, naturally, when they enter into an association for mutual support and protection, do their best to keep up the respecta

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bility of the trade, and to fix a minimum of wage below which no man should work. In this respect they but follow the example set by the learned professions, the members of which draw up for their guidance certain rules to be observed, and establish a minimum of fee, or honorarium, less than which no member can accept without forfeiture of social and professional position. So far the trades and the professions row in the same boat;" but, as Douglas Jerrold said on an occasion by no means parallel, with what a difference of skulls!" If a physician were to accept a shilling instead of a guinea fee, and so brought himself under the ban of the medical profession, it would be considered very extraordinary and very wrong, even by the members of Trades-unions, if other physicians were to "picket" him, and "ratten" his medical books; and if, persisting in his unprofessional practices, they were to hire ruffians to pour gunpowder down his chimney, or shoot him, if convenient opportunity presented, as he went to visit his patients. Yet this is the practice of the Trades-unionists of Sheffield and other places, who consider that by so doing they uphold the dignity of Labour, and merit the approbation of all true friends of the working classes.

Eighty years ago, a working man, Robert Burns, the most illustrious of his class, declared to his brother Gilbert that he could not conceive a more mortifying picture of human life than an honest man seeking work in vain. Clothing this thought with immortal verse, he drew the picture of such a man as he imagined :

"See yonder poor o'erlaboured wight,
So abject, mean, and vile,
Who begs a brother of the earth
To give him leave to toil.
And see his lordly fellow-worm
The poor petition spurn,
Uninindful though a weeping wife

And helpless children mourn." Though not intended to apply to

Trades-unions, but possibly to some individual, real or imaginary, who had refused work to a peasant, these lines, with the single exception of the epithet "lordly," describe in terms as correct as they are pathetic the conduct of the Trades-unionists to men of their own class. A man in our days must ask "leave to toil," not from his superiors in rank, station, and fortune, but from his equals; and his equals too commonly "spurn" the poor petition, and sometimes prevent him from starving, by the expeditious process of blowing his brains out.

In London, as far as is known, the Trades have never proceeded to such extremities as have disgraced Sheffield and Manchester, and, if report do not grossly belie them, Leeds, Brmingham, and the Black Country. "Rattening" and

picketing," with such minor forms of intimidation and social persecution as refusal to work in the same shop with a man who has disobeyed the sacred edicts of the Union, have been the worst penalties, as far as published, that the leaders of the London Trades have deemed it politic, or safe, to inflict. Whether it be that the men of the metropolis, being always in an overheated and impure atmosphere, are less hardy, robust, and energetic than the men of the Midland Counties and the Northwhether they, as a rule, are better educated-or whether men, like the tailors, who do what ought to be women's work, are rendered effeminate by their employmentare subjects that might not be unprofitably discussed, if time and space allowed. Whatever the causes may be, it is certain that the London workpeople, whether tailors or others, have shown less brutality and committed fewer acts of violence than their compeers in the farther North; the worst cases yet proved against them having amounted to nothing more heinous than the frightening of a tailor's wife