able to ask with a steady face at what distance a man or woman could be killed by the weapon that might be offered me.  I was pretty cool-headed in relation to such practical aspects of my affair.  I had some little difficulty in finding a gunsmith.  In Clayton there were some rook-rifles and so forth in a cycle shop, but the only revolvers these people had impressed me as being too small and toylike for my purpose.  It was in a pawnshop window in the narrow High Street of Swathinglea that I found my choice, a reasonably clumsy and serious-looking implement ticketed “As used in the American army.”

I had drawn out my balance from the savings bank, matter of two pounds and more, to make this purchase, and I found it at last a very easy transaction.  The pawnbroker told me where I could get ammunition, and I went home that night with bulging pockets, an armed man.

The purchase of my revolver was, I say, the chief business of those days, but you must not think I was so intent upon it as to be insensible to the stirring things that were happening in the streets through which I went seeking the means to effect my purpose.  They were full of murmurings:  the whole region of the Four Towns scowled lowering from its narrow doors.  The ordinary healthy flow of people going to work, people going about their business, was chilled and checked.  Numbers of men stood about the streets in knots and groups, as corpuscles gather and catch in the blood-vessels in the opening stages of inflammation.  The woman looked haggard and worried.  The ironworkers had refused the proposed reduction of their wages, and the lockout had begun.  They were already at “play.”  The Conciliation Board was doing its best to keep the coal-miners and masters from a breach, but young Lord Redcar, the greatest of our coal owners and landlord of all Swathinglea and half Clayton, was taking a fine upstanding attitude that made the breach inevitable.  He was a handsome young man, a gallant young man; his pride revolted at the idea of being dictated to by a “lot of bally miners,” and he meant, he said, to make a fight for it.  The world had treated him sumptuously from his earliest years; the shares in the common stock of five thousand people had gone to pay for his handsome upbringing, and large, romantic, expensive ambitions filled his generously nurtured mind.  He had early distinguished himself at Oxford by his scornful attitude towards democracy.  There was something that appealed to the imagination in his fine antagonism to the crowd—­on the one hand, was the brilliant young nobleman, picturesquely alone; on the other, the ugly, inexpressive multitude, dressed inelegantly in shop-clothes, under-educated, under-fed, envious, base, and with a wicked disinclination for work and a wicked appetite for the good things it could so rarely get.  For common imaginative purposes one left out the policeman from the design, the stalwart policeman protecting his lordship, and ignored the fact that while Lord Redcar had his hands immediately and legally on the workman’s shelter and bread, they could touch him to the skin only by some violent breach of the law.