places; the flippant scribbled jokes and riddles; the sentimental copied
love songs that ran to many verses. Often the photograph of a maiden's
lover accompanied them, and there were also portraits of mothers and
sisters, babies and brothers. Some of the girls had hung up
fashion-plates and decorated their workshop with ugly and mean designs
for clothing that they would never wear.

Raymond found that picture postcards were a great feature of these
galleries, and they contained also, of course, many private jests and
allusions lost upon the visitor. Character was revealed in the
collections; for the most part they showed desire for joy, and
aspiration to deck the working-place with objects and words that should
breed happy thoughts and draw the mind where its treasure harboured.
Each heart it seemed was holding, or seeking, a romance; each heart was
settled about some stalwart figure presented in the picture gallery, or
still finding temporary substance for dreams in love poetry, in
representations of happy lovers at stiles, in partings of soldier and
sailor lads from their sweethearts. Beside some of the old workers the
walls were blank. They had nothing left to set down, or hang up.

Raymond was arrested by a little rhyme round which a black border had
been pasted. It was original:

"I am coiling, coiling, coiling
Into the can,
And thinking, thinking, thinking,
Of my dear man.

"He is toiling, toiling, toiling
Out on the sea,