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,
And thinking, thinking, thinking
Only of me.

"F.H."

Mr. Best joined Ironsyde.

"These walls!" he said. "It's about time we had a coat of whitewash.
Mister Daniel thinks so too."

"Why--good lord--this is the most interesting part of the whole show.
This is alive! Who's F.H.?"

"The girls will keep that. They like it, though I tell them it would be
better rubbed out. Poor Flossy Hackett wrote that. She was going to
marry a sailor-man, but he changed his mind, and she broke her heart and
drowned herself--that's all there is to it."

"The damned rascal. I hope he got what he deserved."

Mr. Best allowed his mind to peep from the shell that usually concealed
it.

"If he did, he was one man in a thousand. He married a Weymouth woman
and Flossy went into the river--in the deep pool beyond the works. A
clever sort of girl, but a dreamer you might say."

"I'd like to have had the handling of that devil!"

"You never know. She may have had what's better than a wedding ring--in
happy dreams. Reality's not the best of life. People do change their
minds. He was honest and all that. Only he found somebody else he liked
better."

At this moment Daniel Ironsyde came into the works, and while John Best
hastened to him, Raymond pursued his amusement and studied the wall by
the spinning frame where Sabina Dinnett worked. He found a photograph of
her mother and a quotation from Shakespeare torn off a calendar for the
date of