d. Fifteen years ago, your Union
wrote letters of this kind to my wife (she was pregnant at the time),
and drove her into her grave, with fright and anxiety for her husband.
You shall not kill Tom's wife as well. The trade is a poor one at best,
thanks to the way you have ground your employers down, and, when you
add to that needling our clay, and burning our gear, and beating our
servants to death's door, and driving our wives into the grave, we bid
you good-by. Mr. Bolt, I'm the sixth brickmaster this Union has driven
out of the trade by outrages during the last ten years."

"Thou's a wrong-headed old chap," said the brickmakers' spokesman; "but
thou canst not run away with place. Them as takes to it will have to
take us on."

"Not so. We have sold our plant to the Barton Machine Brickmaking
Company; and you maltreated them so at starting that now they won't let
a single Union man set his foot on their premises."

The company in question made bricks better and cheaper than any other
brickmaster; but, making them by machinery, were ALWAYS at war with the
Brickmakers' Union, and, whenever a good chance occurred for destroying
their property, it was done. They, on their part, diminished those
chances greatly by setting up their works five miles from the town, and
by keeping armed watchmen and police. Only these ran away with their
profits.

Now, when this company came so near the town, and proceeded to work up
Whitbread's clay, in execution of the contract with which their purchase
saddled them, the Brickmakers' Union held a great meeting, in which full
a hundred brickmakers took part, and passed extraordinary resolutions,
and voted extraordinary sums of money, and recorded both in their books.
These books were subsequently destroyed, for a reason the reader can
easily divine who has read this narrative with his understanding.

Soon after that meeting, one Kay, a brickmaker, who was never seen to
make a brick--for the best of all reasons, he lived by blood alone--was
observed reconnoitering the premises, and that very night a quantity of
barrows, utensils, and tools were heaped together, naphtha poured over
them, and the whole set on fire.

Another dark night, twenty thousand bricks were trampled so noiselessly
that the perpetrators were neither seen nor heard.

But Bolt hired more men, put up a notice he would shoot any intruder
dead, and so frightened them by his blustering that they kept away,
being cowards at