The reporter’s curiosity was awakened by Mr. Baker’s mention of the old lady who made those very fine draw plates, and on his return to the city he hunted her up.  Mrs. Francis A. Jeannot, the lady in question, was found in neat apartments in a handsome flat in West Fifty-first street.  Age has silvered her hair, but her eyes are still bright, and her movements indicate elasticity and strength.  She is a native of Neufchatel, Switzerland, and speaks English with a little difficulty, but whenever the reporter’s English was a little hard for her a very pretty girl with brilliant eyes and crinkly jet-black hair, who subsequently proved to be a daughter of Mrs. Jeannot, came to the rescue.  With the girl’s occasional aid, the old lady’s story was as follows: 

“I have been in this business for thirty years.  I learned it when I was a girl in Switzerland.  Very few in this country know anything correctly about it.  Numbers of people endeavor to find it out, and they experiment to learn it, especially to do it by machinery, but without success.  But, ah, me!  It is no longer a business that is anything worth.  Thirty years ago many stone draw plates were wanted, for then there was a great deal done in filigree gold jewelry.  Then the plates were worth from $2.50 up to as high as $15, according to the magnitude of the stones and the size of the holes I bored in them.  Now, however, all that good time is past.  Nobody wants filigree gold jewelry any more, and there is so little demand for fine wire of the precious metals that few draw plates are desired.  The prices now are no more than from $1.25 up to say $8, but it is very rare that one is required the cost of which is more than $4.  And of that a very large part must go to the lapidary to pay for the stone and for his work in cutting it to an even round disk.  Then, what I get for the long and hard work of boring the stone by hand is very little.  ‘By hand?’ Oh, yes.  That must always be the only good way.  The work of the machine is not perfect.  It never produces such good plates as are made by the hand and eye of the trained artisan.  ‘How are they bored?’ Ah, sir, you must excuse me that I do not tell you that.  It is simple, but there is just a little of it that is a secret, and that little makes a vast difference between producing work which is good and that which is not.  It has cost me no little to learn it, and while it is worth very little just now, perhaps fashion may change, and plates may be wanted to make gold wire again to an extent that may be profitable.  I do not wish to tell everybody that which will deprive me of the little advantage my knowledge gives me.  ’The stones?’ Oh, we of course do not use finely colored ones.  They are too valuable.  But those that we employ must be genuine sapphires and rubies, sound and without flaws.  Here are some.  You see they look like only irregular lumps of muddy-tinted broken glass.  Here is a finished one.”

The old lady exhibited a piece of solid brass about an inch long, three-quarters of an inch in width, and one-sixteenth in thickness.  In its center was a small disk of stone with a hole through it, a hole that was very smooth, wide on one side and hardly perceptible on the other.  The stone was sunk deep into the brass and bedded firmly in it.  She went on: