By this hand-weaving, as if to prove Ruskin’s glowing and inspiring assertions, this weaver earns an independent living in intelligent work, of reasonable hours, in a comfortable house, and in conditions favorable to health--a vast contrast to the overworked, unhealthy, poorly fed, stultified factory-worker. His business has so prospered of late that he has had a trade-card printed at the village printer’s like any other independent manufacturer. From it I learn that he weaves rag-carpets, bed-coverlets, and hap-harlots. Hap-harlots, forsooth! could anyone believe that obsolete word had been used since Holinshed’s day? He wrote in 1570, in his “Chronicles of England,” etc.: “Our fathers have lien full oft upon straw pallets or rough mats, covered onlie with a sheet under coverlets made of dagswain or hap-harlots, and a good round log under their heads instead of a bolster.” Yet here have been Narragansett weavers weaving hap-harlots, and sleeping under hap-harlots, and speaking of hap-harlots as though three centuries ago were as yesterday. I presume they have made dagswains also, since there still exists bills of Narragansett shepherds for dagging sheep. The old-time cotton and wool bed-spreads or coverlets, seen of old on every four-post bedstead, he now sells for portières and bathroom rugs, as well as for bed and couch spreads. They are woven in simple geometric patterns, just as in the times of the ancient Britons, when the wools of the weft were dyed with woad and broom. The patterns are nearly all over a century old. He has a worn pattern-book with bewildering rules for setting the heddles for over fifty designs. Quaint of name are the patterns: “chariot-wheels and church-windows,” is a bold, large design; “church-steps,” a simpler one; “bachelors’ fancy,” “devil’s fancy,” “five doves in a row,” “shooting-star,” “rising sun,” “rail fence,” “green veils,” offer little in their designs to give reason for their names. “Whig rose,” “Perry’s Victory,” and “Lady Washington’s fancy,” show an historical influence in naming. “Orange-peel” is simply a series of oblong hexagons honeycombed together. “All summer and all winter” was similar. “Bricks and blocks” is evenly checkered. “Capus diaper” is more a complicated design for weaving damask linen, taking five harnesses. Floral names are common, such as “Dutch tulip,” “rose in bloom,” “pansies in the wilderness,” “five snow-balls,” etc. The loom on which this Narragansett weaver works might be six centuries old. You may see precisely similar ones pictured by Hogarth in the middle of the eighteenth century; and an older one still in the Campanile at Florence, by Giotto, in 1334. These excerpts from a letter of Weaver Rose’s give some pleasant weaver’s lore, and are in the lucid, simple, and quaint English to be expected of a man who still weaves and talks of hap-harlots: