Tom had been set to billy-piecing, but it was found that his fingers were too big and his joints too set for such work, so, to his great delight, he ceased to rub the skin off his knuckles till they bled again, and was transferred to the "scouring-hoil" and in time had charge of a willey, or as it was sometimes called a "devil," or "fearnowt," an iron monster into whose maw he threw the scoured wool just fresh from the "drying-hoil," to be torn and "teased" by the hundred fangs of the insatiable mouth, digest as it were, in its mechanic stomach, and thence cast out in a light and airy fluff ready to be scribbled, slubbed and in time spun into warp and weft.
But though, for a time, Tom escaped the most arduous and confining and debilitating part of an operative's daily lot, his lines were hard enough. He looked back upon his workhouse life with a sickening yearning, and when he remembered the regular and abundant meals of the House, his gorge rose at the ever-recurring surfeit of water-porridge to breakfast, water-porridge to dinner, water-porridge to supper, and water-porridge between meals.
But for all that Tom grew apace, and his was not the willowy, weedy growth of the towns. If the advocates of vegetarianism want to press their proofs, let them recur to the country-bred, porridge-fed youngsters of a by-gone generation, when they were not cooped up in mills and worked beyond the endurance of Nature. As Tom was often sent out with the lant-barrel to collect from the cottages for miles around the scouring liquid for which ammonia is the modern substitute, he had ample opportunity to stretch his legs and broaden his chest and brace his sinews; so that when, as time went on; he attained to the dignity of a loom, he was as well-set-up a youth as one would meet in a day's march, straight, old Hannah Garside vowed, as any "picking rod," with strong limbs and corded muscles, and, best of all, with a sound head and a warm heart,--a happy contrast to the many of his comrades whose shoulders were rounded, and backs bent and legs curved by weary hours of standing and stooping at tasks and under burdens beyond the immature powers of ill-nurtured bodies. It was a common saying in those days that nine out of every ten of the mill-hands of Holmfirth could not stop a pig with their legs.