“P.S. You say that the girls of St. George’s Company shall learn to spin and weave, etc. There is a good deal of hand-spinning done on this little island, but I am sorry to say that there are no young girls learning now to spin; and in a few years more, the common spinning wheel here will be as great a curiosity as it is in Lancashire, where one is never seen—only at the theatre. I have gone to some little trouble to ascertain why the young girls are not learning now to spin; and the principal reason I can gather is that home-spun ‘Manks-made dresses,’ as they are called, last too long, and therefore do not give the young women a chance of having four or five new dresses in the year. I could give you some interesting information about hand-spinning and weaving here, but must reserve it for another time, and will send you patterns of cloth, etc. All our blankets, sheets, flannels, skirts, jacket cloth, stockings, and yarns, have been spun by my wife and her mother before her. We have now linen sheets in wear, not a hole or a tear in them, that were spun by my wife’s mother,—and she, poor body, has been dead twenty-eight or twenty-nine years,—the flax grown on their own farm. Fine and white they are, and would compare favourably in fineness with machine-made Irish linen. The daughters of Lord Auckland, when he was bishop here, used to go every Saturday afternoon to my wife’s mother’s, (who lived just behind Bishop Court,) to learn to spin. “But I must write you a special letter on the subject when I have got my patterns ready.” FORS CLAVIGERA. LETTER LXV. I told you in last Fors to learn the 15th chapter of Genesis by heart. Too probably, you have done nothing of the sort; but, at any rate, let us now read it together, that I may tell you, of each verse, what I wanted, (and still beg,) you to learn it for. 1. “The word of God came to Abram.” Of course you can’t imagine such a thing as that the word of God should ever come to you? Is that because you are worse, or better, than Abram?—because you are a more, or less, civilized person than he? I leave you to answer that question for yourself;—only, as I have told you often before, but cannot repeat too often, find out first what the Word is; and don’t suppose that the printed thing in your hand, which you call a Bible, is the Word of God, and that the said Word may therefore always be bought at a pious stationer’s for eighteen-pence.