Even on ordinary holidays the American workman, bitten as he is with the eager habitude of labor, more often than not some time during the day finds himself close to the place where at other times he is employed. There his thoughts are: thither his steps all unconsciously bend themselves. So now, in this melancholy, indefinite holiday which November had brought to Thessaly, the idlers instinctively hung about the deserted works. The tall, smokeless chimneys, the locked gates, the grimy windows--through which the huge dark forms of the motionless machines showed dimly, like the fossils of extinct monsters in a museum--the dreary stretches of cinder heaps and blackened waste which surrounded the silent buildings--all these had a cruel kind of fascination for the dispossessed toilers. They came each day and stood lazily about in groups: they smoked in taciturnity, told sardonic stories, or discussed their grievance, each according to his mood; but they kept their eyes on the furnaces and mills whence wages came no more and where all was still. There was something in it akin in pathos to the visits a mother pays to the graveyard where her child lies hidden from sight under the grass and the flowers. It was the tomb of their daily avocation that these men came to look at. But, as time went on, there grew to be less and less of the pathetic in what these men thought and said. The sense of having been wronged swelled within them until there was room for nothing but wrath. In a general way they understood that a trust had done this thing to them. But that was too vague and far-off an object for specific cursing. The Minster women were nearer home, and it was quite clear that they were the beneficiaries of the trust’s action. There were various stories told about the vast sum which these greedy women had been paid by the trust for shutting down their furnaces and stopping the output of iron ore from their fields, and as days succeeded one another this sum steadily magnified itself.