hat sloped down from the house which Miss W--- afterwards
inhabited, and were armed by their leaders with pistols, hatchets, and
bludgeons, many of which had been extorted by the nightly bands that
prowled about the country, from such inhabitants of lonely houses as had
provided themselves with these means of self-defence. The silent sullen
multitude marched in the dead of that spring-night to Rawfolds, and
giving tongue with a great shout, roused Mr. Cartwright up to the
knowledge that the long-expected attack was come. He was within walls,
it is true; but against the fury of hundreds he had only four of his own
workmen and five soldiers to assist him. These ten men, however, managed
to keep up such a vigorous and well-directed fire of musketry that they
defeated all the desperate attempts of the multitude outside to break
down the doors, and force a way into the mill; and, after a conflict of
twenty minutes, during which two of the assailants were killed and
several wounded, they withdrew in confusion, leaving Mr. Cartwright
master of the field, but so dizzy and exhausted, now the peril was past,
that he forgot the nature of his defences, and injured his leg rather
seriously by one of the spiked rollers, in attempting to go up his own
staircase. His dwelling was near the factory. Some of the rioters vowed
that, if he did not give in, they would leave this, and go to his house,
and murder his wife and children. This was a terrible threat, for he had
been obliged to leave his family with only one or two soldiers to defend
them. Mrs. Cartwright knew what they had threatened; and on that
dreadful night, hearing, as she thought, steps approaching, she snatched
up her two infant children, and put them in a basket up the great
chimney, common in old-fashioned Yorkshire houses. One of the two
children who had been thus stowed away used to point out with pride,
after she had grown up to woman's estate, the marks of musket shot, and
the traces of gunpowder on the walls of her father's mill. He was the
first that had offered any resistance to the progress of the "Luddites,"
who had become by this time so numerous as almost to assume the character
of an insurrectionary army. Mr. Cartwright's conduct was so much admired
by the neighbouring mill-owners that they entered into a subscription for
his benefit which amounted in the end to 3,000_l_.

Not much more than a fortnight after this attack on Rawfolds, another
manufactu