ce's earthenware manufactory, where she worked, said or
thought that 'there was something about her ...' and left the phrase
unachieved. She was twenty-five, and she had lived under the same roof
with Edward Beechinor for seven years, since the sudden death of her
parents. The arrangement then made was that Edward should keep her,
while she conducted his household. She had insisted on permission to
follow her own occupation, and in order that she might be at liberty to
do so she personally paid eighteenpence a week to a little girl who came
in to perform sundry necessary duties every day at noon. Mary Beechinor
was a paintress by trade. As a class the paintresses of the Five Towns
are somewhat similar to the more famous mill-girls of Lancashire and
Yorkshire--fiercely independent by reason of good wages earned, loving
finery and brilliant colours, loud-tongued and aggressive, perhaps, and
for the rest neither more nor less kindly, passionate, faithful, than
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, m