ticular specialty. Each
wore a jeweller's glass in one eye. Tessie had worked at the watch
factory for three years, and the pressure of the glass on the eye socket
had given her the slightly hollow-eyed appearance peculiar to
experienced watchmakers. It was not unbecoming, though, and lent her,
somehow, a spiritual look which made her diablerie all the more piquant.

Tessie wasn't always witty, really. But she had achieved a reputation
for wit which insured applause for even her feebler efforts. Nap Ballou,
the foreman, never left the escapement room without a little shiver of
nervous apprehension--a feeling justified by the ripple of suppressed
laughter that went up and down the long tables. He knew that Tessie
Golden, like a naughty schoolgirl when teacher's back is turned, had
directed one of her sure shafts at him.

Ballou, his face darkling, could easily have punished her. Tessie knew
it. But he never did, or would. She knew that, too. Her very insolence
and audacity saved her.

"Some day," Ballou would warn her, "you'll get too gay, and then you'll
find yourself looking for a job."

"Go on--fire me," retorted Tessie, "and I'll meet you in Lancaster"--a
form of wit appreciated only by watchmakers. For there is a certain type
of watch hand who is as peripatetic as the old-time printer. Restless,
ne'er-do-well, spendthrift, he wanders from factory to factory through
the chain of watchmaking towns: Springfield, Trenton, Waltham,
Lancaster, Waterbury, Chippewa. Usually expert, always unreliable,
certainly fond of drink, Nap Ballou was typical of his kind. The steady
worker had a mingled admiration and contempt for him. He, in turn,
regarded the other as a stick-in-the-mud. Nap wore his cap on one side
of his curly head, and drank so evenly and steadily as never to be quite
drunk and never strictly sober. He had slender, sensitive fingers like
an artist's or a woman's, and he knew the parts of that intricate
mechanism known as a watch from the jewel to the finishing room. It was
said he had a wife or two. Forty-six, good-looking in a dissolute sort
of way, possessing the charm of the wanderer, generous with his money,
it was known that Tessie's barbs were permitted to prick him without
retaliation because Tessie herself appealed to his errant fancy.

When the other girls teased her about this obvious state of affairs
something fine and contemptuous welled up in her. "Him! Why, say, he
ought to work in a pickle fact