A form of decorative work in which many women took great delight and became astonishingly skilful was what was known, or at any rate advertised, by the ambitious title of Papyrotamia. It was simply the cutting out of stiff paper of various decorative and ornamental designs with scissors. At the time of the Revolution it was evidently deemed a very high accomplishment, and the best pieces of work were carefully cherished, mounted on black paper, framed and glazed, and given to friends or bequeathed by will. One old lady is remembered as using her scissors with extraordinary deftness, and amusing herself and delighting her friends by occupying the hours of every afternoon visit with cutting out entirely by her trained eye various pretty and curious designs. Valentines in exceedingly delicate and appropriate patterns, wreaths and baskets of varied flowers, marine views, religious symbols, landscapes, all were accomplished. Coats of arms and escutcheons cut in black paper and mounted on white were highly prized. Portrait silhouettes were cut with the aid of a machine which marked and reduced mechanically a sharp shadow cast by the sitter's profile through candle-light on a sheet of white paper. Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney wrote in rhyme of a revered friend of her youth, Mrs. Lathrop, of a period about a century ago:-- "Thy dextrous scissors ready to produce The flying squirrel or the long-neck'd goose, Or dancing girls with hands together join'd, Or tall spruce-trees with wreaths of roses twin'd, The well-dress'd dolls whose paper form display'd, Thy penknife's labor and thy pencil's shade." I once found in an old lacquered box in a cupboard a paper packet containing all the cut-paper designs mentioned in this rhyme--and many more. The workmanship of the "spruce-trees with wreaths of roses twin'd" was specially marvellous. I plainly saw in that design a derivative of the English Maypole and encircling wreaths. This package was marked with the name of the paper-cutter, a Revolutionary dame who died at the beginning of this century. Her home was remote from the Norwich home of Mrs. Lathrop, and I know she never visited in Connecticut, yet she made precisely the same designs and indeed all the designs. This is but a petty proof among many other more decided ones of the fact that even in those days of scant communication and infrequent and contracted travel, there were as in our own times waves of feminine fancy work, of attempts at artistic expression, which flooded every home, and receding, left behind much decorative silt of varying but nearly universal uselessness and laborious commonplaceness.