Reading aloud to himself the words—­’Real Christian charity is swallowed up in the Will of God, nor is it in its nature to extend itself one step beyond, nor desire one thing contrary to, the glory of Jehovah.  All the charity we possess beyond this may be properly called fleshly charity’—­he lifted his eyes to see two of his ‘back-tenters’ playing behind the frames, and his real Christian charity displayed itself in pulling their ears until they tingled and bled, and in freely using his feet in sundry kicks on their shins.  And yet, wherein was this man to blame?  Was he not what commerce and Calvinism had made him?

The finger of the clock in the factory yard was creeping towards the hour of eleven, when a smell, ominous to every old factory hand, was borne into the nostrils of Amos.  In a moment his ‘Everlasting Task’ was thrust into his shirt-breast, and he ran towards the door from which the stairway of the room descended.

No, he was not mistaken, the smell was the smell of fire, and scarcely had he gone down a half-dozen steps before he met a man with blanched face, who barely found breath to say: 

‘Th’ scutchin’ room’s ablaze.’

Amos carried a cool head.  His religion had done one thing for him:  it had made him a fatalist, and fatalists are self-contained.

In a moment he took in the whole situation.  He knew that the stairways would act as a huge draught, up which the flames from the room below would bellow and blaze.  He knew, too, that all way of escape being cut off below, screaming women and girls, maddened with fright, would rush to the topmost room of the mill, where probably they would become a holocaust to commerce.  He knew, too, that those who sought the windows and let themselves down by ropes and warps would lose their presence of mind, and probably fall mangled and broken on the flag floor of the yard, sixty or seventy feet below.  All this passed through his mind ere the old watch in his fob had marked the lapse of five seconds.

In a moment his resolve was taken.  He went back to the roving-room with steady step, and a face as calm as though he were standing in the light of a summer sun.  By the time he reached the room the machinery was beginning to slow down, and a mad stampede was being made by the hands towards the door.

Raising his arm, he cried: 

’Go back, lasses; there’s no gate daan theer.  Them of us as ’as to be brunt will be brunt, and them of us as is to escape will ged off wi’ our lives.  Keep cool, lasses; we’ll do our best; and remember ‘at th’ Almeety rules.’

One thing turned out in the favour of Amos and of his rovers.  The mad rush from below poured into the room under him, and not, as he expected, into his own, the lower room being one where there was a better chance of escape.  Seeing this, he barred up his own doorway to prevent the girls and women swarming below, where they would have made confusion worse confounded.  Then he beat out one of the windows, and proceeded to fix and lower a rope by way of escape.