If it was a strain upon Oliver Constable to make such a speech except to his cronies, and he only made it by a kind of mental and physical convulsion, it was also a strain upon the young men in the mill to listen properly. They could not compose themselves to catch half the words, far less their meaning. They grinned and gaped at each other, and every man looked how his immediate neighbour was conducting himself, rather than attended to Oliver. Yet they did not fail to develop instantly keen criticism of what might be called Oliver’s style of public speaking. ‘Goin’ to school and college hain’t made him speak out, or thump with his fist in the right place, like old Sam Snuffles the Methody, as roars hisself hoarse, and lashes all around him so that a chap has to duck his head for safety. Old Sam beats the young master, old Sam does, hout and hout,’ reflected one lad, in a vein of class conceit and agreeable superciliousness. Another promising youth, who had been reared at a seaport, made an apt comparison in his mind between the speaker and a heavily-laden vessel, sailing against the wind, labouring and tacking; ‘and if I was only near him, I would lay you any odds but I’d hear his timbers groaning,’ the ingenious youngster silently pursued the simile which he was reserving for future use. But Ted Green, the head man in the mill, never got beyond the news that ‘the concern’ was not to stand still or be transferred to other ownership, which might have endangered Ted’s late rise in the world. He pondered throughout the whole of the remaining sentences, on the substance of the introductory remark. He wished he could go home to his wife and repeat to her the welcome assurance. Wishes were useless in the present case, they could not even free Ted from the responsibility of acting as the mouthpiece of the men under him in replying to the address. Naturally, Ted only replied to what had gone into his ears and taken hold of his mind. Still, as the intelligence grasped by him had been of a pleasant sort, one might have expected that there would have been warmth, at least, in the partial response. But Ted was stolid as well as stupid—a large, heavy-looking, fair-complexioned young man, with the fairness increased to positive pallor by such a plentiful application of flour to the skin as would have put to shame the thick powdering preceding the thicker painting of the fine ladies of the last century. Ted leant against the door-post with that hopeless incapacity to stand upright which is mostly shown by sailors on firm ground. ‘You aire, sir,’ said Ted, abruptly and concisely, with idiotic vagueness and apparently the utmost phlegm.