which would be standing ready in crocks full of dyes to give the brown and yellow and green and blue tint to these hanks of rag-cord. Then the weaving loom would be got ready in the attic and the shuttle would fly back and forth and the rags would soon be transformed into a smooth, well-striped carpet, which would come off in pieces several yards long. Later on these would be sewed together into a beautiful floor covering to be used for the parlor first, afterward, when the freshness was somewhat worn off, for the living-room; later for some hallway, and last of all, what remained from many footsteps would be made into little rugs to be put down extra in such places as needed special protection. The craftswoman who did all this was equally gifted in making the cross-stitch initials for the corner of the bolster and the knitted lace for its edge. She was master of all tricks with the needle as well as with the shuttle and the wooden spoon. Moreover, that grandmother was the mother of fifteen children, and there was nobody but herself to make mittens and stockings for all of them for both winter and summer. So her knitting-needles simply had to fly in all the interstices between tasks of weaving and spinning and dyeing and soap-making and candle-making and other work. All this was to be done besides what the average women of to-day have to do and think pretty hard for them. Edith Abbott in her book, _Woman in Industry_, mentions forty-nine different processes in the factory of to-day that now take the place of the work of one woman as she stitched a pair of shoes in her home, as women often did in the middle New England pioneering era, to accomplish the detail of all the industries that passed through the hands of that capable little grandmother of ours in, say, 1790 or thereabouts. In still earlier days the women performed prodigies of heavy labor and bore a child a year while they did it. History, however, grimly adds the illuminating note that most of these had a short career. And it is just possible that the women of that earlier time went beyond their strength, exhausting their resources of vigor, so that the women of to-day have not their full share of energy for the tasks before them and therefore do not add to the sum of life in the same numbers that their foremothers did.