Eustace threw back his head, and the fire flashed from his eyes. His nature was always stirred to its depths by the thought of the wrongs of humanity. He had not found round and about Penarvon quite that amount of physical misery that he had heard described in other places; yet he had seen enough of the bovine apathy and stolid indifference of the rustics to rouse within him feelings of indignation and keen anger. He argued fiercely within himself that men were made into patient beasts of burden just to suit the selfish desires of the classes above them, who dreaded the day of reckoning which would follow any awakening on their part to a sense of their wrongs. The artisans of the Midlands and the North had partially awakened, and from all sides was the cry going up--the cry for justice, for a hearing, for some one to expound their grievances and make a way out of them. Their helpless rage had hitherto been expended in the breaking of machinery, which they took to be their worst enemy, and in riots which had brought condign punishment upon them. Now they were being taken in hand by men of wealth and power, and were raising the cry of reform--crying aloud for representation in Parliament--agitating for a thing the nature of which they hardly understood, but which they were told would bring help and well-being in its wake. And men like Eustace Marchmont, with generous ardour all aflame in the cause which they held to be sacred and righteous, longed to see the spread of this feeling through the length and breadth of the land. The agricultural labourers were far more difficult to arouse than the artisan classes had been; but if the whole nation with one accord raised its voice aloud in a cry for justice, would not that cry prevail in spite of the whole weight and pressure brought to bear against it, and carry all before it in a triumphant series of long-needed reforms?