tedjus. You can't march straight home, covered with glory. Here's our
money in the hospital, first up, then down, and all the doctors in the
land tinkering with allopathic doses and homoeopathic doses, and
blisters and poultices and remedies, when all it wants is a little
honest letting-alone. It doesn't occur to these long-headed doctors that
the best way out is to show everybody that we're willing to go to work
and pay our debts just as fast as we can. And any fool might know that
when you are paying up back debts you can't have much money to sport
around on. Never you mind, Jack: we're coming out straight in five years
time,--I'll bet my old hat on that!"

Jack wrung his hand warmly.

In May there was quite a jollification over the marriage of two
mill-hands. Ben Hay took to wife pretty Rose Connelly; and the
coffee-house parlor was denuded of tables and benches, trimmed with
evergreens and flowers, and such a merry-making as did one's heart good.
There was a bountiful supper, plenty of tea, coffee, and lemonade,
dancing, and ice-cream, and the utmost good-humor and good wishes.
Connelly _pere_ had gone back to his cups, thrown up his situation, come
home and stirred up a general "ruction," and had now gone off on a
tramp. Ben Hay was to cast his lot with the Connelly household for the
present.

"But I tell you what it is, Mr. Darcy," said he, "if any luck comes to
Hope Mills, in five years' time I'll have my own little house and
garden. I tramped around a bit in the dull times, but I didn't see many
prettier places than Yerbury. And, the more I study this business of
co-operation, the more I think it will succeed in the end."

Jack experienced a great throb of comfort when he heard such words as
these.

Another mill-hand had married Mary Moran. She was not the beauty of
Yerbury, by any means, but everybody declared she had improved
wonderfully, and that she was the smartest girl in town. Their
wedding-party was given at the club-room. It was a larger and rather
more boisterous affair; and some of the Morans' warm-hearted Irish
friends brought a "dhrop of the craythur" in their pockets, to drink the
bride's health. Everybody admitted that there wasn't such another
bread-maker in town, unless it was Miss Morgan.

In fact, it was quite astonishing to see what a revolution had been
worked in this most important article of diet. The women had learned to
distinguish between poor and good flour, and Kilburn's trade