Steam fastened on this generation, stunting it, twisting it, blasting it, and if Barraclough had been reasonably tall, reasonably well-made and nourished he would have been marked at once as something different from the workers who were to accept him as one of themselves. So, in spite of looking like a spy, he was qualified to be a spy in Hepplestall’s because he looked like any other undergrown, underpaid, underfed weaver lad. And there is good in all things, though Hepplestall was not thinking of the Blackburn riots as good when he was cavalier about them with Needham. There was the good, for Hepplestall’s, that the destruction of the Blackburn looms and their products brought an exceptional rush of orders to Reuben; and Thomas Barraclough, applying for work when he ended his tramp at the factory gates, found himself given immediate employment. He found, too, that as an honest spy he had no occupation in this place. He could report distress, sullen suffering and patient suffering; he could report the ordinary things and would have to say, in honesty, that here the ordinary things had extraordinary mitigations; and he found nothing of the violent flavor expected by Needham. It remained for him to take the initiative and to provide against disappointing his master’s expectations, but the mental sketch he had made of himself as an effective explosive did not seem likely to be justified in any hurry. The Blackburn riots had not been followed by such ferocity of punishment as had befallen the Luddites a few years previously, but there had been men killed by soldiers during the riots: there were ten death sentences at Lancaster Assizes, reduced afterwards to transportation for life: and thirty-three rioters were sent to prison. That was fairly impressive, as it was meant to be, but much more impressive was the appalling distress which quite naturally fell upon the Blackburn people who had destroyed the looms, and if all this was salutary from the point of view of law and order it was excessively inopportune from the special point of view of Mr. Barraclough.