Raymond, released for a moment from the attentions of the foreman, strolled among the machines of the minders and spinners.  Then his eyes were held by an intimate and personal circumstance that linked these women to this place.  He found that on the whitewashed walls beside their working corners, the girls had impressed themselves—­their names, their interests, their hopes.  With little picture galleries were the walls brightened, and with sentiments and ideas.  The names of the workers were printed up in old stamps—­green and pink—­and beside them one might read, in verses, or photographs, or pictures taken from the journals, something of the history, taste and personal life of those who set them there.  Serious girls had written favourite hymns beside their working places; the flippant scribbled jokes and riddles; the sentimental copied love songs that ran to many verses.  Often the photograph of a maiden’s lover accompanied them, and there were also portraits of mothers and sisters, babies and brothers.  Some of the girls had hung up fashion-plates and decorated their workshop with ugly and mean designs for clothing that they would never wear.

Raymond found that picture postcards were a great feature of these galleries, and they contained also, of course, many private jests and allusions lost upon the visitor.  Character was revealed in the collections; for the most part they showed desire for joy, and aspiration to deck the working-place with objects and words that should breed happy thoughts and draw the mind where its treasure harboured.  Each heart it seemed was holding, or seeking, a romance; each heart was settled about some stalwart figure presented in the picture gallery, or still finding temporary substance for dreams in love poetry, in representations of happy lovers at stiles, in partings of soldier and sailor lads from their sweethearts.  Beside some of the old workers the walls were blank.  They had nothing left to set down, or hang up.

Raymond was arrested by a little rhyme round which a black border had been pasted.  It was original: 

“I am coiling, coiling, coiling
  Into the can,
And thinking, thinking, thinking,
  Of my dear man.

“He is toiling, toiling, toiling
  Out on the sea,
And thinking, thinking, thinking
  Only of me.

“F.H.”

Mr. Best joined Ironsyde.

“These walls!” he said.  “It’s about time we had a coat of whitewash.  Mister Daniel thinks so too.”

“Why—­good lord—­this is the most interesting part of the whole show.  This is alive!  Who’s F.H.?”

“The girls will keep that.  They like it, though I tell them it would be better rubbed out.  Poor Flossy Hackett wrote that.  She was going to marry a sailor-man, but he changed his mind, and she broke her heart and drowned herself—­that’s all there is to it.”

“The damned rascal.  I hope he got what he deserved.”

Mr. Best allowed his mind to peep from the shell that usually concealed it.