The Project Gutenberg EBook of "Surly Tim", by Frances Hodgson Burnett

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Title: "Surly Tim"
A Lancashire Story

Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett

Release Date: November 4, 2007 [EBook #23324]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK "SURLY TIM" ***

Produced by David Widger

"SURLY TIM."

A LANCASHIRE STORY.

By Frances Hodgson Burnett

Copyright, 1877

"Sorry to hear my fellow-workmen speak so disparagin' o' me? Well,
Mester, that's as it may be yo' know. Happen my fellow-workmen ha' made
a bit o' a mistake--happen what seems loike crustiness to them beant so
much crustiness as summat else--happen I mought do my bit o' complainin'
too. Yo' munnot trust aw yo' hear, Mester; that's aw I can say."

I looked at the man's bent face quite curiously, and, judging from its
rather heavy but still not unprepossessing outline, I could not really
call it a bad face, or even a sulky one. And yet both managers and
hands had given me a bad account of Tim Hibblethwaite. "Surly Tim," they
called him, and each had something to say about his sullen disposition
to silence, and his short answers. Not that he was accused of anything
like misdemeanor, but he was "glum loike," the factory people said, and
"a surly fellow well deserving his name," as the master of his room had
told me.

I had come to Lancashire to take the control of my father's
spinning-factory a short time before, being anxious to do my best toward
the hands, and, I often talked to one and another in a friendly way, so
that I could the better understand their grievances and remedy them with
justice to all parties concerned. So in conversing with men, women, and
children, I gradually found out that Tim Hibblethwaite was in bad odor,
and that he held himself doggedly aloof from all; and this was how, in
the course of time, I came to speak to him about the matter, and the
opening words of my story are the words of his answer. But they did not
satisfy me by any means. I wanted to do the man justice myself, and see
that justice was done to him by others; and then again when, after my
curious look at him, he lifted his head from his work an