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days. Like most middle-class families, we always had in our service Czech maids, one and all of whom were very partial to garnet jewellery, not imitation stuff but real stones set in low-grade gold or silver.
In design these bits of jewellery were quite attractive, though often very simple. It sufficed to see a girl or a woman of the working classes in Vienna wear a garnet brooch, ring or earrings to conclude that she was a Bohemian, if not a Slavonian. From this early connection of domestic servants with red garnets in my youthfully snobbish mind, I am afraid that interested as I was from an early age Jn every kind of gem stone, yet I never took the red garnet seriously and it was the only stone within my reach that I excluded from my boyhood collection. Now, of course, I know why our maids were so partial to red garnets. The stone is native to Bohemia and occurs in that country in the neighbourhood of Teplitz in rather great abundance. Teplitz, by the way, is in the Sudetenland so perhaps the German hamfrmien will now blossom out in red garnets as a "patriotic" gesture. A considerable garnet industry sprang up in the Teplitz region, just as we have seen that the agate deposits in the vicinity of Idar a/Nahe in Germany led to the creation of at first an agate and subsequently a more general gem industry based upon large importations of suitable material from all parts of the world.
The garnet is not a very hard stone and its several kinds vary in hardness from 6.5 to 7.5 in the accepted scale (Mohs' table).
Most people, when garnet is mentioned, immediately
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