woof--was given out to the workpeople to be
wound on bobbins or spread into the web before it was fixed in the loom.
After every such operation this silk was brought back to be reweighed,
and only when the piece was finished in a woven fabric did it find its
way into the lower warehouse, there to be measured and inspected. Access
was gained to this upper warehouse by a door in a back street, inscribed
with the words "A. Dormeur. Weavers' Entrance." And thence the
workpeople, of whom there were many each day waiting their turn, went
across a paved yard and into a passage terminating in a kind of square
lobby, at the bottom of the deep well which lighted the gloomy staircase
by a glazed window from the roof of the house.

Close to this lobby was a sliding panel, opening on a counter where the
great scales hung for weighing the silk; and here weavers and winders
gave in or took out their work from the "scale-foreman," whose name was
Bashley--one of those bad men who, with a bullying pretence of candour
and honesty, contrive to impose even on the victims over whom they
tyrannize, and at the same time, as it were, wrest from their superiors
the acknowledgment that they are "rough diamonds."

By a horrible fiction it is often thought that such a man is "just fit
to deal with workpeople." The same opinion prevailed then, and thus
Bashley was able to get a character which obtained for him a place in
the warehouse of Anton Dormeur. He had been there for some twelve
months, in place of old Pierre Dobree--a faithful fellow who had joined
his old master in London after the calamities which drove them both from
France. Pierre had been in Paris, and had escaped to bring to his master
the awful intelligence that the daughter he had denounced was now beyond
his relentless anger; but the old man, having grown old and feeble, had
retired with a pension to the French Hospital which then stood in St.
Luke's, and was called La Providence: a refuge founded to receive poor
Protestant emigres, mostly aged men and women, who had their little
rooms quaintly furnished with their own poor household goods; and who
walked daily in the quadrangle, laid out in beds and borders.

Bashley had been only fifteen months in Dormeur's service, and yet he
had come between the grandfather and Antoine, suggesting suspicions of
the young man's probity, but so artfully that while he only seemed to
hint at small blemishes, which he pointed out for the sake of the