 his own. He had known, to use his words, a peck of trouble. He was
usually called Old Stephen, in a kind of rough homage to the fact.
    A rather stooping man, with a knitted brow, a pondering expression of face,
and a hard-looking head sufficiently capacious, on which his iron-grey hair lay
long and thin, Old Stephen might have passed for a particularly intelligent man
in his condition. Yet he was not. He took no place among those remarkable
»Hands,« who, piecing together their broken intervals of leisure through many
years, had mastered difficult sciences, and acquired a knowledge of most
unlikely things. He held no station among the Hands who could make speeches and
carry on debates. Thousands of his compeers could talk much better than he, at
any time. He was a good power-loom weaver, and a man of perfect integrity. What
more he was, or what else he had in him, if anything, let him show for himself.
    The lights in the great factories, which looked, when they were illuminated,
like Fairy palaces - or the travellers by express-train said so - were all
extinguished; and the bells had rung for knocking off for the night, and had
ceased again; and the Hands, men and women, boy and girl, were clattering home.
Old Stephen was standing in the street, with the old sensation upon him which
the stoppage of the machinery always produced - the sensation of its having
worked and stopped in his own head.
    »Yet I don't see Rachael, still!« said he.
    It was a wet night, and many groups of young women passed him, with their
shawls drawn over their bare heads and held close under their chins to keep the
rain out. He knew Rachael well, for a glance at any one of these groups was
sufficient to show him that she was not there. At last, there were no more to
come; and then he turned away, saying in a tone of disappointment, »Why, then, I
ha' missed her!«
    But, he had not gone the length of three streets, when he saw another of the
shawled figures in advance of him, at which he looked so keenly that perhaps its
mere shadow indistinctly reflected on the wet pavement - if he could have seen
it without the figure itself moving along from lamp to lamp, brightening and
fading as it went - would have been enough to tell him who was there. Making his
pace at once much quicker and much softer, he darted
