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poetry, and the national life of a hundred races, the distaff held gentle sway, and the shuttle flew with rhythmic beat. In our own country, no maiden went to her new home without a "plenishing" of good linen, spun by her mother's and her own thrifty fingers. Then we come to the year 1787, when flax was

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first spun by machinery, and ever since we have been devoting half our energies to inventing labour-saving machines, and the other half in discovering work for the unemployed.

As regards England, the good old handicrafts of spinning and weaving seemed finally dead and buried, and no man had ventured to write Resurgam on their tombstones. A few years ago, how

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ever, there was a wave of public feeling in the direction of reviving village industries, and a ripple of the great tide reached us here in Westmorland. I knew by experience that

"It takes the ideal to blow an inch aside.

The dust of the actual,"

but, although I had many ideal incentives and suggestions, the practical difficulties were great, and I hesitated. At last, after long pondering over Wordsworth's sonnets and Mr. Ruskin's eloquent appeals in Fors, I was lifted into action by the homely speech of one of my poor neighbours. "When t'ould wheels died out," said she, "the gude times went too, m'happen they'd coome back if t'wheels did." Then I determined the wheels should come back. That was five years ago, and now all up and down Langdale, by many a quiet fireside, the murmur of the wheel is once more heard,

Then I took a cottage and made it into a Spinning Home, routed out two looms and an old weaver, and set up a tidy bleaching ground, and here we spin, weave, and sell many hundred yards of honest, old-fashioned linen. It is interesting to know that the structure of the loom in use to-day is practically the same as that which Giotto represented on the Campanile. Every month-end the village women bring their yarn to the Spinning Home, where it is weighed, tested, and paid for.

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good spinster can earn about six shillings a week spinning at odd hours by her fireside.

We produce a stout sheeting, pronounced by Mr. Ruskin to be "the soundest and fairest linen fabric that care can weave, or field dew blanch," and we spin and weave many different makes

for art needlework and decorative purposes, keeping a number of poor ladies employed embroidering approved designs on our linen.

During these past five years Langdale linen has been put to many wise and lovely purposes, but there seems a special grace and fitness in its being chosen to hold and bind together this little sheaf of spinning songs, gathered by kindly hands from long centuries of immortal verse.

ALBERT FLEMING.

Langdale, Ambleside.