The March night had fallen, and the lights of the scattered farmhouses of the Shelf might almost have been stars, so lofty were they. The market-place was filled with the dim illumination that came through the blinds and the chinks of the shutters of the surrounding houses. A lantern that had been set down for a moment on one of the pieceboards made a dull gleam down the polished surface. The crimson square of the window of the “Pipes” was broken by the shadows of heads within the window-seat, and up the dark alleyway to the kitchen, through an ace-of-heart’s perforation in the upper part of the door, another light flickered, as of a candle guttering in a draughty passage. In the kitchen a fire of peats smouldered on the hearth and made a rich glow on the copper kettle that bubbled before it. The lid of the kettle vibrated with a continuous sound of purring metal. Two oil-lamps hung side by side from the low ceiling; and the blur of lamp carbon on the plaster above them was patterned with concentric circles that intersected and made as it were the eyes of an enormous owl. A deep recess formed a window-seat; opposite, a niche in the wall was hidden by a curtain on a string; and the kitchen was spotlessly clean and smelt of new bread. Matthew Moon sat on an infant’s stool by the hearth, with a quill set bit-wise between his teeth. On the floor by his side lay a ledger. Goîtred John Raikes (who, in this business that was not cloth, represented the Back o’ th’ Mooiners on the Executive) lay smoking along the window-seat. Eastwood, the flockmaster, was spinning a bright crown-piece on the table; and Arthur Monjoy bestrode the hearth colossus-wise with the back of his fox-skin cap rubbing against the high mantel. The purring of the kettle seemed to irritate Matthew Moon; he set the lid on edge, the sound ceased, and a little cloud of vapour escaped. Presently Monjoy spoke. “Well, say you have it so,” he said. “I’ll not deny the prudence of watching, setting an extra crow or two along the Causeway, and all that; but why do you want to shift the Forge? We were glad enough to move from Fluett; before that we were Booth way, and a pretty time we had getting there; and now you’d set it up in Brotherton Slack, the dampest, darkest hole in all the district, five miles from the Causeway--Brotherton Slack, where the ground steams like a tip and toadstools come up out o’ the bog rank as sink-strippings and red as a runner’s waistcoat----” Matthew Moon answered earnestly. “Do listen, Arthur. If the Causeway’s handy for us, it’s handy for others too. Fluett was different. You know why we left Fluett. Fluett was over-easy got at t’other side, Trawden side, and the lime-trade was brisk at Fluett, too, and folk about. As for toadstools, it’s safety we’re taking to the Slack for, not health.”