If Will saved the situation, he began by nearly bringing disaster upon it. It happened that the spokesman's father was an undertaker in Stepney, and that on Sundays the lad, with becoming gravity, frequently walked as a mute at funerals. Just as the solemn procession of aggrieved apprentices was about to enter the office, the employer's wondering eye upon them through the window, Will called out in a stage whisper: "Now, Joe, put on your best Sunday face!" The fearful tension was broken. All the boys burst into laughter. The lads tumbled over each other in their eagerness to get outside the passage. When the head of the firm opened his door Will alone remained. "What's all this about, Crooks?" The youngest apprentice thereupon briefly ran over the lads' grievances, and on being asked why the deputation fled in laughter, he explained the meaning of the Sunday face. The employer laughed as boisterously as his boys. He told Crooks to go back to work, promising that the lads should have fair play. That very day he issued orders placing the apprentices under better conditions. One of the lads, with an unconquerable liking for lying in bed, had not turned up by nine o'clock on a certain morning. The other apprentices stole out with a barrow and went to his house with the object of wheeling him to work. Half an hour later the lad rushed into the cooperage panting and dishevelled, his clothes torn, his hat missing. "Done 'em!" he gasped, after the manner of Alfred Jingle. "I rushed out o' the back door, got over the wall, over the next wall, fell on a flower-bed, man came out (such langwidge!), climbed his wall afore he could ketch me, landed clean on a dog kennel, dog tore me clothes, got over another wall--into the street at last--boys caught sight o' me, howling chase with barrow, woman let me run through her house, over another wall. Done 'em!" Something more than laziness explained the occasional absence of others from work. Certain of the men would be missing for two or three days. During an unusually long absence of one of the older coopers, the men and lads rigged up a dummy figure, dressing it in whatever clothes of their own they could spare. They placed the dummy in an improvised coffin by the side of their missing comrade's bench, with an imitation tombstone at the head, bearing the inscription, "Not dead, but drunk." The morning came when the delinquent turned up. A deep silence fell over the workshop as he entered. Men and apprentices alike suddenly appeared to be absorbed in work. The late-comer pretended not to see the effigy by his bench. With quiet deliberation he took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and lighted the furnace-fire. No one spoke. The old man brought two handfuls of shavings and piled them on the fire until it roared again. Then suddenly he seized the dummy figure and hurled it on the flames.