Dan Baldromma's meeting in the market-place had not been the success he had expected. Standing on the steps of the town lamp, between the Saddle Inn and the Ship Store, he had discoursed on the rights of the labourer to the land he cultivated.
The Earth was the Lord's, and the fulness thereof. Therefore it could not belong to the big ones who were adding field to field—least of all to their wastrels of sons who were doing nothing but hang about the roads and the glens to ruin the daughters of decent men. The moral of this was that the land belonged to the people and the time was coming when they would pay no rent for it.
Dan's audience of Manx farmers had listened to this new gospel with Manx stolidity, but a group of young English visitors, clerks from the cotton factories, looking down from the balcony of the Saddle Inn, had received it with open derision.
Dan had ignored their opposition as long as possible, merely saying, when his audience laughed at their sallies,
"We must make allowance for some ones, comrades—children still, they've not been rocked enough."
But when at length they had called him Bradlaugh Junior and Ingersoll the Second and told him to keep his tongue off better men, Dan had looked up at the balcony and cried,
"If you're calling me by them honoured names I'm taking my hat off to you" (suiting the action to the word), "but if you're saying you are better men we'll be going into a back coort somewheres and taking off our jackets and westcots."
To preserve the peace the police had had to put an end to the meeting, whereupon Dan, spitting contemptuously and snorting about "The Cottonies" and "the Cotton balls," had harnessed his horse at the Plough Inn and driven home in a dull rage.
It had been ten o'clock when he got back to Baldromma, and after unharnessing his horse in his undrained stable, and wiping his best boots with a wisp of straw, he had stepped round to the kitchen.
His wife was there, beating time on the hearthstone to a long-drawn Methodist hymn while she stirred the porridge in a pot that hung over a slow peat fire.