Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/282

298 the great part of the women not to earn much more than their maintenance.

“My grand-mother made whole watches!” said an old woman, with a sigh, who was now sitting at home with her daughter, employed in one single operation in a little cog, for the great manufactory, “and at that time, women were much higher in the work than they are now, and also got higher payment. They were few in number, but extremely dexterous. Now they are innumerable, but their dexterity is employed upon a mere nothing—a very crumb.”

And this was true, as far as the old woman was concerned, for the whole of her work consisted in drilling one little hole in a small steel plate, with a little machine which resembled a tiny spinning-wheel. Her daughter was seated at another little machine, and was merely making a little alteration in the hole which her mother had drilled; and six hundred of such holes must be made before they could earn three francs.

The old woman, who came of a race of watch-makers “from time immemorial,” and whose grandmother had made whole watches, seemed to me, as she sat there, reduced to making one single little hole, a little portion of the watch, like a dethroned watch-making queen. You saw plainly that her fate grieved her, but she bore it worthily, and with resignation, acknowledging that numbers now lived by that work, which, in her grandmother's days, belonged to a few privileged persons, and made them rich. Her daughters were both agreeable young girls, with fresh courage for life. The one had learned her mother's