al and of too long standing. The crisis
came; the mills were closed; for a few days the strikers
believed they would win the day.

At the end of a week the mills opened with a new set of
operatives hired from a neighboring town. Riots and
bloodshed followed. Those were troublous times. I could not
keep my hand from giving aid to the suffering wives and
children of men I had lived among all my life. I took no
thought for consequences. One day I received my discharge.
I was dazed by the cruel blow; I went about like a man
walking in his sleep.

One night as I walked the streets, some one I met told me
that my friend, the man I am writing of, was ill. I went at
once to his room, which was in the building over the
printing office where he had now gotten to be foreman. I
found him restless and feverish, and at his request I stayed
with him until the small hours of the night. Then I went
home. No one saw me going in or out of his room, but I met
two or three stragglers on my way home. I had been half an
hour in bed when an alarm of fire was sounded, and I rose
and joined the crowd in the streets. The ---- Mills were
burning, and in a short time were burned to the ground. The
same day I was arrested on a charge of having set the fire.
I laughed at the charge. My friend, who was now delirious
with fever, would soon put me right. My trial was deferred
until he was able to appear. When the day came at last, he
stood up, white and haggard, in that crowded court-room, and
swore he had not seen me at all on the night I had spent
with him--the night of the fire. There were other things
against me: my known friendship for the leaders of the
strike, my discharge, my absence from home at the time the
fire must have been started, and other small but damning
evidence. I was convicted, and sentenced to transportation.
I saw my old mother fall as if dead! I saw Barbara's white
face bending over her; plainer than all, I saw that man who
had been my friend, and the look he gave the woman who was
to have been my wife! Something leaped into life within me
then--something which has never died. If I could have
reached him then and there!

I do not suppose twenty people in the town believed me
guilty. I do not believe the jury which convicted me