no saying. Poor fellows! they're druv well nigh out of their senses
with the bad times. What with the machines, and the low price of
labor, and the high price of bread, they are having a terrible time
of it. And no wonder that we hear of frame breaking in Nottingham,
and Lancashire, and other places. How men can be wicked enough to
make machines, to take the bread out of poor men's mouths, beats
me altogether."

"Father says the machinery will do good in the long run, Abijah
--that it will largely increase trade, and so give employment to
a great many more people than at present. But it certainly is hard
on those who have learned to work in one way to see their living
taken away from them."

"Hard!" the nurse said. "I should say it were hard. I know the
croppers, for there were a score of them in my village, and a rough,
wild lot they were. They worked hard and they drank hard, and the
girl as chose a cropper for a husband was reckoned to have made a
bad match of it; but they are determined fellows, and you will see
they won't have the bread taken out of their mouths without making
a fight for it."

"That may be," Ned said, "for every one gives them the name of a
rough lot; but I must talk to you about it another time, Abijah,
I have got to be off;" and having now found his fishing rod, his
box of bait, his paper of books, and a basket to bring home the fish
he intended to get, Ned ran off at full speed toward the school.

As Abijah Wolf had said, the croppers of the West Riding were a
rough set. Their occupation consisted in shearing or cropping the