as so imperative
an essential.

Along the darkling streets, amidst the sullen crowds, the thought
of Nettie, my Nettie, and her gentleman lover made ever a vivid
inflammatory spot of purpose in my brain.

Section 3

It was three days after this--on Wednesday, that is to say--that
the first of those sinister outbreaks occurred that ended in the
bloody affair of Peacock Grove and the flooding out of the entire
line of the Swathinglea collieries. It was the only one of these
disturbances I was destined to see, and at most a mere trivial
preliminary of that struggle.

The accounts that have been written of this affair vary very widely.
To read them is to realize the extraordinary carelessness of truth
that dishonored the press of those latter days. In my bureau I
have several files of the daily papers of the old time--I collected
them, as a matter of fact--and three or four of about that date I
have just this moment taken out and looked through to refresh my
impression of what I saw. They lie before me--queer, shriveled,
incredible things; the cheap paper has already become brittle and
brown and split along the creases, the ink faded or smeared, and I
have to handle them with the utmost care when I glance among their
raging headlines. As I sit here in this serene place, their quality
throughout, their arrangement, their tone, their arguments and
exhortations, read as though they came from drugged and drunken men.
They give one the effect of faded bawling, of screams and shouts
heard faintly in a little gramophone. . . . It is only on Monday
I find, and buried deep below the war news, that these publications
contain any intimation that unusual happenings were forward in
Clayton and Swathinglea.

What I saw was towards evening. I had been learning to shoot with
my new possession. I had walked out with it four or five miles
across a patch of moorland and down to a secluded little coppice
full of blue-bells, halfway along the high-road between Leet and
Stafford. Here I had spent the afternoon, experimenting and practising
with careful deliberation and grim persistence. I had brought an
old kite-frame of cane with me, that folded and unfolded, and each
shot-hole I made I marked and numbered to compare with my other
endeavors. At last I was satisfied that I could hit a playing-card
at thirty paces nine times out of ten; the light was getting too
bad for me to see my penciled bull's-eye, and in that state of
quiet moo