though that shop-keeper was popularly supposed to be able to buy up any two mill-owners put together. To be sure the Rev. David Jones, the pastor at Aenon Chapel, and Mrs. David Jones and Miss Lydia Jones called at times and dutifully partook of tea and muffins in the sitting-room above the shop from which no ingenuity had been efficient to bar the insidious blend of many odours from the store beneath, and true also Martha was a constant attender at Dorcas meetings, class meetings, prayer meetings, and Chapel and Sunday School tea-parties, called by the scoffing and ungodly herd, “muffin-worrys.” But Martha was constrained, awkward, gauche, and though her heart, was ready to go half-way to meet an overture, she could not make an advance. Little children were not allured to her, girls of her own age ridiculed whilst they envied her dress jewellery, staider matrons thought it shame that grasping miser’s scarecrow daughter should “peark” herself out in dainty raiment whilst their own well favoured ones went in cheap cottons or plain home-spun.

Of all the worshippers at Aenon Chapel, none was more considered than Jabez Tinker. There were many reasons for this. One undoubtedly was that Jabez Tinker was one of the leading manufacturers in the valley. No one, not old Daft Tommy, who was reputed to be over a hundred years old, could remember a time when the Tinkers were not a great name in Holmfirth and when Wilberlee Mill was not run by them. The very name of Tinker is, curiously enough, significant the family connection with the staple industry of the valleys of the Colne and the Holme. It is said to be derived from the Latin, tinctor, a dyer, and to have come down from those far off times when the Roman conquerors introduced the arts of civilisation to the aboriginal Celts of these northern wilds. Certainly Jabez Tinker’s father and grandfather and great-grandfather before him made cloth and doubtless dyed it. And they had made good cloth, buckskin and doeskin of the best. They were not a pretentious nor an ambitious race. They worked hard made shrewd bargains, paid their way expected to be paid, and put by money slowly but steadily. They had mostly married money too, not, perhaps marrying for money, but taking care to marry where money was. They were just to their work people and were slow either to put a man on or to take a man off. Once get a job at Wilberlee Mill and you were there for good, if you behaved yourself—or, as the heads said, if Tinker didn’t know when he had a good man, the man knew when he had a good master. It was not that the Tinkers paid more than ruling prices for their labour. They made no pretence at being industrial philanthropists—that would not have been business; but they 

 Prev. P 30/194 next