And the same womanly implement is sometimes found in the hands of those of gentle birth in those old lands where so many still cling to the traditions of the past. We read of the now world‐famous Eugénie de Guérin that the same hand that wrote such charmingly naïve letters and journals did not disdain the spindle and the distaff. She writes thus in her journal: “I have begun my day by fitting myself up a distaff, very round, very firm, and very smart with its bow of ribbon. There, I am going to spin with a small spindle. One must vary work and amusements: tired of a stocking, I take up my needle and then my distaff. So time passes, and carries us away on its wings.” And again a day or two after: “I took my distaff by way of diversion, but all the while I was spinning, my mind spun and wound and turned its spindle at a fine rate. I was not at my distaff. The soul just sets that kind of mechanical work going and then leaves it.” This reminds us of Uhland’s verse: “Long, long didactic poems I spin with busy wheel, The lengthened yarns of epic Keep running off my reel: “My wheel itself has a lyrical whirr, My cat has a tragic mew, While my spindle plays the comic parts And does the dancing too.” Eugénie’s charming Arcadian life, passed in the primitive occupations of spinning, sewing, superintending the kitchen—even going, like Homer’s Nausicaa, to the margin of the stream to wash the linen in the running waters, and afterwards taking pleasure in spreading it all white on the green grass, or seeing it wave on the lines: all this, we say, without detracting from the poetry and grace of her nature, is enough to make us recall with a sigh the good old days when Queen Bertha span. And this queen was _Berthe au grand pied_, the mother of Charlemagne, who had one foot larger than the other, and hence her name: “You are the beautiful Bertha, the spinner, queen of Helvetia, She whose story I read at a stall in the streets of Southampton, Who, as she rode on her palfrey o’er valley and meadow and mountain, Ever was spinning her thread from a distaff fixed to her saddle. She was so thrifty and good, that her name passed into a proverb.”