any other Saxon women anywhere. The paintresses, however, have some
slight advantage over the mill-girls in the outward reticences of
demeanour, due no doubt to the fact that their ancient craft demands a
higher skill, and is pursued under more humane and tranquil conditions.
Mary Beechinor worked in the 'band-and-line' department of the
painting-shop at Price's. You may have observed the geometrical
exactitude of the broad and thin coloured lines round the edges of a
common cup and saucer, and speculated upon the means by which it was
arrived at. A girl drew those lines, a girl with a hand as sure as
Giotto's, and no better tools than a couple of brushes and a small
revolving table called a whirler. Forty-eight hours a week Mary
Beechinor sat before her whirler. Actuating the treadle, she placed a
piece of ware on the flying disc, and with a single unerring flip of the
finger pushed it precisely to the centre; then she held the full brush
firmly against the ware, and in three seconds the band encircled it
truly; another brush taken up, and the line below the band also stood
complete. And this process was repeated, with miraculous swiftness, hour
after hour, week after week, year after year. Mary could decorate over
thirty dozen cups and saucers in a day, at three halfpence the dozen.
'Doesn't she ever do anything else?' some visitor might curiously
inquire, whom Titus Price was showing over his ramshackle manufactory.
'No, always the same thing,' Titus would answer, made proud for the
moment of this phenomenon of stupendous monotony. 'I wonder how she can
stand it--she has a refined face,' the visitor might remark; and Mary
Beechinor was left alone again. The idea that her work was monotonous
probably never occurred to the girl. It was her work--as natural as
sleep, or the knitting which she always did in the dinner-hour. The calm
and silent regularity of it had become part of her, deepening her
original quiescence, and setting its seal upon her inmost spirit. She
was not in the fellowship of the other girls in the painting-shop. She