The introduction of power looms threatened to abolish their calling.

It was true that although these machines wove the cloth more evenly and smoothly than the hand looms, croppers were still required to give the necessary smoothness of face; still the tendency had been to lower wages.
The weavers were affected even more than the croppers, for strength and skill were not so needed to tend the power looms as to work the hand looms.

Women and boys could do the work previously performed by men, and the tendency of wages was everywhere to fall.
For years a deep spirit of discontent had been seething among the operatives in the cotton and woolen manufactures, and there had been riots more or less serious in Derbyshire, Nottingham, Lancashire and Yorkshire, which in those days were the headquarters of these trades.
Factories had been burned, employers threatened and attacked, and the obnoxious machines smashed.

It was the vain struggle of the ignorant and badly paid people to keep down production and to keep up wages, to maintain manual labor against the power of the steam engine.
Hitherto factories had been rare, men working the frames in their own homes, and utilizing the labor of their wives and families, and the necessity of going miles away to work in the mills, where the looms were driven by steam, added much to the discontent.
Having found his fishing appliances Ned hurried off to the school, where his chum Tompkins was already waiting him, and the two set out at once on their expedition.
They had four miles to walk to reach the spot where they intended to fish.

It was a quiet little stream with deep pools and many shadows, and had its source in the heart of the moorlands.