had not chanced to come upon the scene about the same time as myself and incontinently end its stagnation.
He had promised that if the men wanted a struggle he would put up the best fight they had ever had, and he had been active all the afternoon in meeting the quarrel half-way, and preparing as conspicuously as possible for the scratch force of "blacklegs"--as we called them--who were, he said and we believed, to replace the strikers in the pits.
I was an eye-witness of the whole of the affair outside the Bantock Burden pit, and--I do not know what happened.
Picture to yourself how the thing came to me.
I was descending a steep, cobbled, excavated road between banked-up footways, perhaps six feet high, upon which, in a monotonous series, opened the living-room doors of rows of dark, low cottages. The perspective of squat blue slate roofs and clustering chimneys drifted downward towards the irregular open space before the colliery--a space covered with coaly, wheel-scarred mud, with a patch of weedy dump to the left and the colliery gates to the right. Beyond, the High Street with shops resumed again in good earnest and went on, and the lines of the steam-tramway that started out from before my feet, and were here shining and
