United States or Réunion ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In number they may have been four hundred or thereabouts. The peasants of Rockbere, with flail and scythe, led the next column, followed by the banner of Honiton, which was supported by two hundred stout lacemakers from the banks of the Otter.
There are a few paved streets with cafés and shops, as usual, but the most industrious inhabitants appear to be the lacemakers women seated at the doorways of the old houses, wearing the quaint horseshoe comb and white cap with fan-like frill, which are peculiar to Bayeux.
The chalk hills break into cliffs that overhang the Thames, or form valleys clothed with beech; the wilder portion of the country is rendered beautiful by exuberant vegetation; and the cultivated part is peculiarly fertile. The women are lacemakers, and lose their health by sedentary labour, for which they were very ill paid.
Finally it came to the ears of Pascale that Gian took this regular trip to Murano. "It is a rendezvous," said Pascale; "worse than that, an orgy among those lacemakers and the rogues of the glassworks. Oh, to think that Gian should stoop to such things at his age his pretended asceticism is but a mask and at his age!"
From the wooden balconies of the houses the young lacemakers nodded as he passed. The summits of the mountains glowed in the red evening sunset, and the green lakes beneath the dark trees reflected the glow. Then he thought of the sea coast by the bay Kjoge, with a longing in his heart that was, however, without pain.
Young children of her own class were not exactly what her dream of usefulness had devised; but she had already a decided theory of education, and began to read up with all her might, whilst taking the lead in all the details of house taking, servant hiring, &c., to which her regular occupations of night school in the evening and reading to the lacemakers by day, became almost secondary.
But a centime a day is a great deal in Brabant, when one has not always enough for bare bread, and when, in the long chill winter, one must weave thread lace all through the short daylight for next to nothing at all; for there are so many women in Brabant, and every one of them, young or old, can make lace, and if one do not like the pitiful wage, one may leave it and go and die, for what the master lacemakers care or know; there will always be enough, many more than enough, to twist the thread round the bobbins, and weave the bridal veils, and the trains for the courts.
It is a curious fact that the production of precisely those articles which serve the personal adornment of the ladies of the bourgeoisie involves the saddest consequences for the health of the workers. We have already seen this in the case of the lacemakers, and come now to the dressmaking establishments of London for further proof.
It included "tailoresses, plain and coarse sewing, shirt makers, book-folders and stickers, capmakers, straw-workers, dressmakers, crimpers, fringe and lacemakers," and other trades open to women "who were like oppressed." The New York Herald reported "about 700 females generally of the most interesting age and appearance" in attendance.
The people of Arras are uncommonly dirty, and the lacemakers do not in this matter differ from their fellow-citizens; yet at the door of a house, which, but for the surrounding ones, you would suppose the common receptacle of all the filth in the vicinage, is often seated a female artizan, whose fingers are forming a point of unblemished whiteness.
Word Of The Day