Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/72

60 business and devote my life to the successful carrying of it on. He gripped me tight with his sharp and bony fingers, smiled, nodded, sighed heavily, half closing his eyes, and was gone!'

Once more he paused, and as they rolled on down the country road, their faces faintly lit with the red sunset, he seemed again to live in that singular and significant scene.

'Well?' said Hastings softly.

Daniel sighed.

'A fortnight later,' he said, 'I received intelligence from the manager of our largest mills of what he called an ultimatum from the men. It was equivalent to a demand for 10 per cent. rise in wages of the whole of the rank and file, a ten hours' day, and the reform of many abuses of "discipline." I had, indeed, no idea of what was really going on around me till next morning, when a Pall Mall Gazette interviewer waited on me with a copy of the last evening's paper, and a request to be permitted to ask a few questions. First, I read the paper. The personal remarks were all passably correct.—I learned subsequently who supplied them. It was one of my Labour friends, who owed me everything pretty well but his existence.'—(He smiled, amused.)—'And so, in the main, as far as I was aware, were the facts concerning the "abuses" in the Daniel mills. They