I think it was at Nottingham, in the back-end of 1811, I first saw any signs of a stir because of the new machinery. A man was shot at Bullwell, near that town, when trying to get at some new stocking-frames, I saw his body brought into the town on a stretcher by two constables I can see his eyes and open mouth, with the yellow teeth, and the tongue thrust out between them, and blood trickling down the sides of his chin and his hands, the fingers of one wide outspread, the other gripping tight some grass and sand he had clutched, and his right knee drawn up so rigid they could not stretch the body, and he was buried in a chest. They laid him on a table in the tap-room of the first inn they came to, and I saw him through the window. When we rode home to Slaithwaite, I remember my father was very silent, and would not talk about the new machinery, but I was soon to hear enough of it. I remember, as tho' it were yesterday, one winter's night about that time, my father was sat by the fire-side, smoking his pipe and taking a thoughtful pull at times at the yellow pewter pot from which he drank his ale; my mother in her rocking-chair knitting a pair of long, grey stockings for myself. I was reading by the candle-light a copy of Mr. Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man," which I had bought at Nottingham, and which, despite the groanings of Mr. Webster, our pastor at Powle Moor, I found a very sound and proper book, as, indeed, I still maintain it to be; and Mary was looking at the prints in Mr. Miller's Scripture History, with lives of the most celebrated Apostles, and wondering for the hundredth time how it came about that the frontispiece exhibits Father Adam with a full beard, whilst the very next print depicts him, after the fall, with a chin as smooth as an egg: for there is no mention of razors in the Garden of Eden. Martha was down in the village at a prayer-meeting; and Siah, the teamer, had had his porridge and his pint and had gone to bed. We could hear him, through the rafters, snoring in the room above. It must have been a Tuesday, for father had been to Huddersfield to market, and had come home, as he always did on market-days, more talkative than his wont. "Aw rode as far as th' Warrener, wi' Horsfall, o' Ottiwell," I heard my father say. "He could talk o' nowt but th' new machines 'at he's bahn to put i' Ottiwells. He's bahn, to ha' all his wark done under his own roof, he says. He's sick o' croppers an' their ways. An', he says, too, 'at it 'll noan be long afore there 'll be a new kind o' loom 'at 'll run ommost by itsen, an' pieces 'll come dahn to next to nowt. He says time's noan so far off when th' old hand-loom weavers 'll go dahn their own slot." "How long did you stop at th' Warrener?" asked my mother, who had her own way of putting a point.