ernest of nods to
her guest took an abrupt leave.

Mr. Yorke was in no mild mood, and in no measured terms did he express
his opinion on the transaction of the night. Moore, the magistrates, the
soldiers, the mob leaders, each and all came in for a share of his
invectives; but he reserved his strongest epithets--and real racy
Yorkshire Doric adjectives they were--for the benefit of the fighting
parsons, the "sanguinary, demoniac" rector and curate. According to him,
the cup of ecclesiastical guilt was now full indeed.

"The church," he said, "was in a bonny pickle now. It was time it came
down when parsons took to swaggering amang soldiers, blazing away wi'
bullet and gunpowder, taking the lives of far honester men than
themselves."

"What would Moore have done if nobody had helped him?" asked Shirley.

"Drunk as he'd brewed, eaten as he'd baked."

"Which means you would have left him by himself to face that mob. Good!
He has plenty of courage, but the greatest amount of gallantry that ever
garrisoned one human breast could scarce avail against two hundred."

"He had the soldiers, those poor slaves who hire out their own blood and
spill other folk's for money."

"You abuse soldiers almost as much as you abuse clergymen. All who wear
red coats are national refuse in your eyes, and all who wear black are
national swindlers. Mr. Moore, according to you, did wrong to get
military aid, and he did still worse to accept of any other aid. Your
way of talking amounts to this: he should have abandoned his mill and
his life to the rage of a set of misguided madmen, and Mr. Helstone and
every other gentleman in the parish should have looked on, and seen the
building razed and its owner slaughtered, and never stirred a finger to
save either."

"If Moore had behaved to his men from the beginning as a master ought to
behave, they never would have entertained their present feelings towards
him."

"Easy for you to talk," exclaimed Miss Keeldar, who was beginning to wax
warm in her tenant's cause--"you, whose family have lived at Briarmains
for six generations, to whose person the people have been accustomed for
fifty years, who know all their ways, prejudices, and preferences--easy,
indeed, for _you_ to act so as to avoid offending them. But Mr. Moore
came a stranger into the district; he came here poor and friendless,
with nothing but his own energies to back him, nothing but his honour,
his talent, and his industry to make