Excerpt:
THERE is so much poetry, romance, and history associated with the distaff and spindle, and later with the old spinning-wheel, that we have looked upon them with a feeling almost of awe, certainly with a reverence for the gentle hands that spun so industriously generations ago. But it has now occurred to us that we too may set the wheel a-humming, taking up with enthusiastic eagerness the work laid down by our great-grandmothers so many years ago. The song of even the athletic girl will soon be like Martha's when she sings in the market-place:
"I can spin, sir,"
and the wheel will no longer be set aside as a relic of an industry past and gone.
All the old handicrafts are coming back again, and ere long we shall be as proud as the maids in Revolutionary[4] times of our hand-spun and hand-woven fabrics. To be able to spin and weave is to be accomplished in the newest as well as the oldest of household arts.
