A man who threw in at the Co-op was a marked and envied man. The pick of the operatives were willing to take the looms as fast as they could be put up. It was Lucy who suggested that the new concern should go into the making of shawls. Everyone who knows the manufacturing districts of Yorkshire and Lancashire knows the shawl of the mill girl. It is to her what the cloak is to the Irish butter-woman, the plaid to the Scotch shepherd, or the mantilla to the Spanish donna. It was Dorothy who designed the pattern for the first shawl and, as time went on, the warm, bright-coloured covering might be seen over the head and shoulders of the women and girls in every mill in the Valley of the Holme. There was no need to be concerned about the texture or the fastness of the colours. It was a Co-op shawl. That was guarantee enough. Tom and Ben worked early and late. Tom indeed had had a bed fixed up in a small room of the lower story of the mill. Many a night, indeed often for weeks together every night except Saturday and Sunday, he slept in the mill. He was the one to open the mill-gate in the morning and greet the hands as they streamed into the yard and hand them their time checks. His was the hand that, when the long day, yet all too short for his endless round of duties, lagged to its weary close, fastened the gate upon the last of the toilers; and oft and oft, far into the silent hours, he would bend over stock-book and ledger or, when the moon shone high above the mill, would walk round the mill dam and up the rugged hank of the babbling stream that fed it. His constant companion was Jack, no longer Workh'us Jack, but Jack, plain Jack, or Jack o' th' Co-op, or Tom Pinder's Jack, anything but Workh'us Jack; a new, transformed Jack, wearing his corduroys and smock as proudly as if they had been a Field Marshal's uniform. Sometimes a wag, further learned than others, would dub him "Man Friday;" but it was all one to Jack. He was Tom's body servant, his dog, if need be, to fetch and carry. And who so popular all through that beautiful valley and who so welcome at the hill-side farms and cottages as cheery, smiling, cherry-faced Jack with his kindly jest and merry quip and crank? Why, he was worth a dozen commercial travellers rolled into one. When he led the cart from the mill to the coal-shoots and back, or went his round with the great red-coloured barrel on wheels in quest of the ammonia laden refuse of the house-hold it was a sorry day for Jack when he did not bring back two or three orders for the pretty, taking shawls, and what insight into the delightful vanities of lovely maiden Jack did not acquire on his rounds was really not worth noticing.