salmon-colored
petals with her glue-finger, and pasting them daintily around the
fast-growing rose. I watched her pinch and press and crease each frail
petal with her hot iron instruments, and when she had put on a thick
rubber stem and hung the finished flower on the line she looked up and
smiled.

"Want to see a rose-maker's hand?" she remarked, turning her palm up for
my inspection. She laughed aloud at my exclamation of horror. Calloused
and hard as a piece of tortoise-shell, ridged with innumerable
corrugations, and hopelessly discolored, with the thumb and forefinger
flattened like miniature spades, her right hand had long ago lost nearly
all semblance to the other.

"It is the hot irons do that," she said, drawing her pincers from the
fire and twirling them in the air until they grew cool enough to proceed
with the work. "We use them every minute. We crease the petals with
them, and crinkle and vein and curl the outer edges. And we always have
to keep them just hot enough not to scorch the thin muslin."

"How many can you make a day?"

"That depends on the rose. This sort--" picking up a small, cheap June
rose--"this sort a fair worker can make a gross of a day. But I have
made roses where five single flowers were considered a fine day's job.
Each of those roses had one hundred and seventy-five pieces, however;
and there were eighteen different shapes and sizes of petals; and
besides that, every one of those pieces had to be put in its own place.
If one piece had been wrongly applied, the whole rose would have been
spoiled. But they don't make many of such complicated roses in this
country. They have to import them. They haven't enough skilled workers
to fill big orders, and it doesn't pay the manufacturers to bother with
small orders."

The girl did all the fine work of the place, and had always more waiting
to be done than she could have accomplished with four hands instead of
two. She had no rival to whom this surplus work could be turned over.
The dull season had no terrors for her, nor would it have had for her
comrades had they been equally skilled. She made from twenty-two to
twenty-five dollars a week, all the year round, and was too busy ever to
take a vacation. The other girls averaged nine dollars, and if they got
eight months' work a year they considered themselves fortunate. They
were clever and industrious, but they had not learned to make the finer
grade of roses.

The third week came and