Miss Bessie Daingerfield, a Kentuckian, who is in close touch with these mountaineers, tells us what a void the quilt fills in the lives of the lonely women of the hills: "While contemporary women out in the world are waging feminist war, those in the mountains of the long Appalachian chain still sit at their quilting frames and create beauty and work wonders with patient needles. There is much beautiful and skilful handiwork hidden away in these hills. The old women still weave coverlets, towels, and table linen from wool from their own sheep and from flax grown in their own gardens. The girls adorn their cotton gowns with 'compass work,' exact, exquisite. In some places the men and boys, girls and women, make baskets of hickory reeds and willows to delight the heart of the collector. But from the cradle to the grave, the women make quilts. The tiny girl shows you with pride the completed four patch or nine patch, square piled on square, which 'mammy aims to set up for her ag'inst spring.' The mother tells you half jesting, half in earnest, 'the young un will have several ag'inst she has a home of her own.' No bride of the old country has more pride in her dower chest than the mountain bride in her pile of quilts. The old woman will show you a stack of quilts from floor to ceiling of her cabin. One dear old soul told me she had eighty-four, all different, and 'ever' stitch, piecin', settin' up, quiltin', my own work and ne'er another finger tetched hit.'" Patchwork was an important factor in making plain the knotty problems of existence, as Eliza Calvert Hall clearly shows when she makes "Aunt Jane of Kentucky" say: "How much piecin' a quilt is like livin' a life! Many a time I've set and listened to Parson Page preachin' about predestination and free will, and I've said to myself, 'If I could jest git up in the pulpit with one of my quilts I could make it a heap plainer to folks than parson's makin' it with his big words.' You see, you start out with jest so much caliker; you don't go to the store and pick it out and buy it, but the neighbours will give you a piece here and a piece there, and you'll have a piece left over every time you cut a dress, and you take jest what happens to come. And that's like predestination. But when it comes to the cuttin' out, why, you're free to choose your own pattern. You can give the same kind o' pieces to two persons, and one'll make a 'nine patch' and one'll make a 'wild-goose chase,' and there'll be two quilts made out of the same kind of pieces, and jest as different as they can be. And that is jest the way with livin'. The Lord sends us the pieces, but we can cut them out and put 'em together pretty much to suit ourselves, and there's a heap more in the cuttin' out and the sewin' than there is in the caliker."