There was such a flood of color out of doors, the fields and trees were so green, the tangle of larkspurs in the garden was so blue, the sunbeams so radiant, that the attic seemed but a dull abiding-place for a summer’s day; but as the eye grew accustomed to the dimmer light and learned to avoid the piercing arrows of sunshine that burned in through the heart-shaped holes in the shutters and made every mote of wavering dust in their path a point of unbearable glitter, then the attic seemed quiet and peaceful, and its shadows were grateful; and even the bang, bang of the loom when it was started up was not a garish rattle. Heaps of gay woollen yarns lay under the eaves, and a roll or two of rag-carpeting and strips of worn-out bed-coverlets of various patterns were hung on the beams or piled in heaps. There were vast boxes of cotton twine; and many yarn-beams ready wound, and swifts and quilling-wheels and “scarnes,” many in number, thrust under the garret eaves. Among the discarded wool-wheels and flax-wheels heaped high in the corner--obsolete before their fellow, the hand-loom--I did not peer deep. Though neglected, they are jealously treasured, for “that was grandma’s foot-wheel,” and “Aunt Eunice used that wool-wheel sixty-two year,” showed that what seemed to me useless lumber was haloed with association and tradition. I have never seen or felt elsewhere any such picture, any such atmosphere of an industrial life that is forever past, as that old-time weaving. The dim half-light of the loom-room and the darker garret beyond; the ancient chairs that thrust out a broken arm, and tables that put forth a claw-foot from the shadows; the low buzzing of hornets that fluttered against the upper skylight or hung in dull clusters on the window-frame--hornets so dull, so feeble, so innocuous in their helplessness that they seemed the ancients of their day; the eerie clamor of swallows in the chimney; the pungent aroma of “dry, forgotten herbs,” that swayed in the summer wind from every rafter; and the weaver, pale and silent, laboriously weaving his slow-growing web with a patience of past ages of workers, a patience so foreign to our present high-pressure and double-speed rates that he seemed a century old, the very spirit of colonial, nay, of mediæval days. There was a monotonous yet well-controlled precision in this weaver’s work that was most soothing, and that seems to be a characteristic influence of the homespun industries. It was felt by Wordsworth and voiced in his sonnet: “Grief, thou hast lost an ever-ready friend Now that the cottage spinning-wheel is mute.” This precision in work is that of the skilled hand and thinking brain controlling the machine, not the vast power of steam relentlessly crowding the overworked body and dulled brain.