EDWARD’S “fat elephant” drove from Hepplestall’s meditating his retort to Reuben’s intransigeancy. He held that it was necessary to weld the manufacturers into a solid phalanx of opposition to the legalizing of Trade Unions, and that if Reuben were allowed to stand out, other masters, whom Needham regarded as weak-kneed, would stand out with him. Needham was obstinate and unscrupulous, with a special grudge against “kid-gloved” Hepplestall, and if there were no overt manifestations of discontent in Hepplestall’s factory, his business was to provoke them. There was surely latent discontent there as everywhere else and the good days of Sidmouth and Castlereagh had shown what could be achieved in the way of manufacturing riot by the use of informers. Informers were paid to inform, and lost their occupation if no information were forthcoming; they did not lose their occupation; they were agents provocateurs, and Gentleman Hepplestall was, if Needham knew right from left, to be thwacked into line by the activities of an informer. He hadn’t much difficulty--he was that sort of man--in laying hands upon a suitable instrument. The name of the instrument was Thomas Barraclough, and it was, indeed, in Needham’s hands already working as a weaver in his factory, not, to be sure, for the purpose of provoking unrest there but merely for decent spying. There is honesty in spying as in other things and the decent spy is the observer and reporter of what others do spontaneously; the indecent spy is he who instigates the deeds he afterwards reports. Barraclough was quite willing, for a higher fee, to undertake to prove to Hepplestall that Trade Unions were murder clubs. The affair was not stated, even by blunt Needham to his spy, with quite such candor as this, but, “If tha’ sees signs o’ trouble yonder, tell me of ’em; and if tha’ sees no signs tha’s blinder than I tak’ thee for,” was a sufficiently plain direction to an intelligent spy, and Barraclough nodded comprehendingly as he went off to begin his cross-country tramp to Hepplestall’s. A spy who looks like a spy is disqualified at once, but what are the symptoms of spying? What signs does spying hang out on a man that we shall know him for a spy? Is he bent with a life spent in crouching at key holes? A keen-eyed, large-eared ferret of a man? The fact is that Barraclough was small and bent, and ferretty, that he looked like your typical spy and yet did not look, in the Lancashire of those days, any different from a famished weaver. They were “like boys of fifteen and sixteen and most of them cannot measure more than 5 feet 2 or 3 inches.”