ANSORGE
That's just how it is—what the manufacturer leaves us, their lordships takes from us.
SECOND OLD WEAVER
[Has taken a seat at the next table.] I've said it to his lordship hisself. By your leave, my lord, says I, it's not possible for me to work on the estate so many days this year. I comes right out with it. For why—my own bit of ground, my lord, it's been next to carried away by the rains. I've to work night and day if I'm to live at all. For oh, what a flood that was…! There I stood an' wrung my hands, an' watched the good soil come pourin' down the hill, into the very house! And all that dear, fine seed!… I could do nothin' but roar an' cry until I couldn't see out o' my eyes for a week. And then I had to start an' wheel eighty heavy barrow-loads of earth up that hill, till my back was all but broken.
PEASANT
[Roughly.] You weavers here make such an awful outcry. As if we hadn't all to put up with what Heaven sends us. An' if you are badly off just now, whose fault is it but your own? What did you do when trade was good? Drank an' squandered all you made. If you had saved a bit then, you'd have it to fall back on now when times is bad, and not need to be goin' stealin' yarn and wood.
FIRST YOUNG WEAVER
[Standing with several comrades in the lobby or outer room, calls in at the door.] What's a peasant but a peasant, though he lies in bed till nine?
FIRST OLD WEAVER
The peasant an' the count, it's the same story with 'em both. Says the peasant when a weaver wants a house: I'll give you a little bit of a hole to live in, an' you'll pay me so much rent in money, an' the rest of it you'll make up by helpin' me to get in my hay an' my corn—and if that don't please you, why, then you may go elsewhere. He tries another, and to the second he says the same as to the first.