The mill employees had helped to bear these trials; and so they afterward submitted a new schedule, asking twenty per cent raise. They got five per cent, and the world seemed rosy indeed. But very soon the price of steel billets, the standard of the wages, began to go down, as fast as the prices of all other steel things rose; and men noticed how the new tariff act made the duty on billets so very low, and wondered if the Company had known anything about it. It was several years after all this that there came the dreadful winter when the snow lay two feet deep in the streets, and the price of coal went five per cent higher a month; and then the Hungerville Company, in the person of its new president, began to be pestered by delegations from this union and that union, a very annoying thing to the president, who was new at the business. No one must imagine, of course, that he was harsh in the matter. I might quote the experience of the good clergyman who had been persuaded by the unions to plead for them, and narrate how the president told him several capital stories, and finally begged off because he had an engagement to a poker party that night, and laughingly promised the clergyman all his winnings to help the poor along. And what could a good clergyman say to that--especially as Mr. van Rensselaer had only a few months ago donated to the same church a wonderful window representing the miracle of the loaves and fishes? IX The dreadful winter passed by without change, and without the promised rise in the price of billets. The Hungerville Savings Bank suspended business, because deposits were so few; and the Hungerville constables had their hands full preventing incendiary speeches to the excited crowds that filled the Hungerville saloons. But all through the long panting summer the giant mills toiled on, turning out their tens of thousands of dollars and thousands of tons of steel every day. The delegations could no longer see the president, for the _Aurora_, the magnificent single-sticker built for Robert van Rensselaer at a cost of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, was in those days electrifying the country by her wonderful performances at Newport. And then came the chill days of autumn and the prospect of another dreadful winter, with the price of billets three per cent lower yet. Mr. Robert van Rensselaer's palatial steam yacht, the _Comet_, was about to start on a trip down the coast of Florida, when he was called to Hungerville by an urgent telegram, saying that the crisis was at hand. And truly there was some bad feeling--even the president could see that; when one walked about the streets of Hungerville, he saw pale, sickly children, bent and haggard women, and men glaring at him from under lowering brows. He saw houses out of repair, and starving people being turned away from them. He saw angry crowds harangued by wild-eyed men, in Polish and other strange tongues.