Another kind of embroidery for garments was in gold, worked sometimes by itself, sometimes with coloured silk thread laid down alternately beside it; so as to lend a tinge of green, crimson, pink, or blue to the imagined tissue of the robe, as if it were made of a golden stuff shot with another tint. This gold “passing” was sewn on. The workwomen taking thin silk, while fastening the passing, dotted it all over in small stitches set exactly in a way that showed the same pattern. With no other appliance they were thus enabled to lend to their draperies the appearance of having been not wrought by the needle but actually cut out of a piece of textile; for which they have been sometimes mistaken. Anciently, also, in England another mode of embroidering articles, either for church use or for household furniture, was by darning or working the subject upon linen netting. This was called net-work, filatorium, as we learn from the Exeter inventory, where we read that its cathedral possessed in 1327 three pieces of it for use at the altar: one in particular for throwing over the desk. These thread embroideries were chiefly wrought during the fourteenth century; but as early as 1295 St. Paul’s had a cushion of the kind. [Illustration: Embroidered hangings of a bed; from a MS. of the fifteenth century, in the British museum.] Crochet, knitting done with linen thread, and the thick kinds of lace wrought (chiefly in Flanders) upon the cushion with bobbins, were much employed under the name of nun’s lace from the sixteenth century and upwards, for bordering altar-cloths, albs, and every sort of towel required for church purposes. CHAPTER X. Tapestry is neither real weaving nor true embroidery, but in a manner unites in its working those two processes into one. Though wrought in a loom and upon a warp stretched out along its frame, it has no woof thrown across those threads with a shuttle or any like appliance but its weft is done with many short threads, all variously coloured and put in by a needle. It is not embroidery, though so very like it, for tapestry is not worked upon what is really a web, having both warp and woof, but upon a series of closely set fine strings. From the way in which tapestry is spoken of in Holy Writ we may be sure that the art is very old; and if it did not take its first rise in Egypt, we are led by the same authority to conclude that it soon became successfully cultivated by the people of that land. The woman in the book of Proverbs says: “I have woven my bed with cords. I have covered it with painted tapestry, brought from Egypt.” We find, therefore, not only that it was employed as an article of household furniture among the Israelites, but that the Egyptians were the makers.