nly wondering as years went
on why there were not better days, and, if they were to mend for others,
whether she had part in it or not. Far up under the roof of an old
house, clung to because it was old, Rose climbed, well satisfied after
the minutes in the little church in which she laid down the burden that
long ago had become too heavy for her, and which, if it returned at all,
could always be dropped again at the shrine which had heard her first
prayer.

"It is Paris that I know best," she said, "and that I love always, but I
am not born in it, nor none of mine. It is my father that desired much
that we should gain more, and who is come here when I am so little that
I can be carried on the back. He is a weaver, madame, a weaver of silk,
and my mother knows silk also from the beginning. Why not, when it is to
her mother who also has known it, and she winds cocoons, too, when she
is little? I have played with them for the first plaything, and indeed
the only one, madame, since, when I learn what they are and how one
must use them, I have knowledge enough to hold the threads, and so
begin. It was work, yes, but not the work of to-day. We worked together.
If my father brought us here, it was that all things might be better;
for he loved us well. He sang as he wove, and we sang with him. If hands
were tired, he said always: 'Think how you are earning for us all, and
for the _dot_ that some day you shall have when your blue eyes are
older, and some one comes who will see that they are wise eyes that, if
they laugh, know also all the ways that these threads must go.' That
pleased me, for I was learning, too, and together we earned well, and
had our _pot au feu_ and good wine and no lack of bread.

"That was the hand-loom, and when at last is come another that goes with
steam, the weavers have revolted and sworn to destroy them all, since
one could do the work of many. I hear it all, and listen, and think how
it is that a man's mind can think a thing that takes bread from other
men. I am sixteen, then, and skilful and with good wages for every day,
and it is then that Armand is come,--Armand, who was weaver, too, but
who had been soldier with the great Emperor, and seen the girls of all
countries. But he cared for none of them till he saw me, for his thought
was always on his work; and he, too, planned machines, and fretted that
he had not education enough to make them with drawings and figures so
that the masters would un