At his mother’s knee, Tom, like all the Bradshaws of the seed of John, had lisped, “’A ’ate th’ ’epplestalls,” and, when he was a little older, had learned that he hated them “Because they’re dirty thieves. Because yon mills o’ theirn are ourn by rights.” This was not socialism and had nothing to do with the doctrine that all property is theft; it was the family superstition of the Bradshaws, and they believed it as the first article of their faith. They believed it blindly and perhaps none of them were eager to have their eyes opened because other people’s eyes might have been opened at the same time and, as things usefully were, it was romantic to be the wronged heirs to Hepplestall’s. It excused so much, it invited compassion for the victims of injustice, it extorted charity for these martyrs to foul play. Details were conspicuously lacking, but the legend had life and won sympathy for the view the Bradshaws took of themselves--that they couldn’t be expected to go to work in the mills of the usurping Hepplestalls. As a family, they were professional cadgers whose stock-in-trade was their legend, and Staithley held enough people who were credulous or who were “agin the government” on principle (whether they took the Bradshaw claim seriously or not) to make the legend a profitable asset. Repetition is infallible, as the advertiser knows, and these ragged Ortons of the Staithley slums had plenty of adherents. There were several scores of ways of earning a livelihood in Staithley without working at Hepplestall’s, but the average Bradshaw pretended that as a natural pride prevented him from serving the despoiler, he was barred from work entirety, though he did not object to his children working for him, and Tom began as a half-timer in the mills. A bad time he had of it too at first. He did not say it for himself, but the other half-timers said it for him: he was the “lad as owned Hepplestall’s,” and if there was any dirty work going, the owner did it, nursing anger against his family and coming young to a judicious opinion of their pretensions. He had his handicap in life, but soon gave proof that if he was a Bradshaw it was an accident which other people would be wise to forget, fighting his way from the status of a butt till he was cock of the walk amongst the half-timers. There is much to be said for a wiry physique as the basis of success, but Tom shed blood and bruised like any other boy and the incidents of his battling career amongst the half-timers at Hepplestall’s did nothing to disturb that first lesson of his life, “’A ’ate th’ ’epple-stalls.”