“With her maidens drawing off The tresses from the distaff, lectured them Old tales of Troy, and Fiesole, and Rome.” And a Spanish writer of past times says, speaking of the model woman: “Behold this wife who purchases flax that she may spin with her maids. See her thus seated in the midst of her women.” Thus did Andromache spin among her attendants. So have we seen old nuns spinning in the cloisters of the remote provinces of France: the white wool on their distaffs diminishing slowly and calmly as their own even lives. They looked as if spinning out their own serene destinies. Such a happy destiny is not reserved for all whose thread is drawn out by Lachesis. “Twist ye, twine ye! even so Mingle shades of joy and woe, Hope and fear, and peace and strife, In the thread of human life.” At Rome there are two white lambs blessed on S. Agnes’ day (“S. Agnes and her lambs unshorn,” says Keats) in her church on the Nomentan road, and then they are placed in a convent till they are shorn, when their wool is spun by the sacred hands of the nuns. Of this the pallium is made—the distinctive mark of a metropolitan. I have called the distaff the earliest implement of feminine industry. Such is the old tradition. There is a pathetic miniature of the twelfth century depicting an angel giving Adam a spade and Eve a distaff previous to their expulsion from Paradise: and on the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus of the fourth century, Adam is represented with a sheaf of grain, for he was to till the earth, and Eve with a lamb whose fleece she was to spin. And we have our old English rhyme: “When Adam delved and Eve span, Where was then the gentleman?” And so faithfully was the tradition handed down that the distaff has always been regarded as a symbol of womanhood, which woman scorned to see even in the hands of a Hercules. In these days, when even our rustic belles are overloaded with accomplishments, the piano takes the place of “Hygeia’s harp” on which the fair maidens of the olden time loved to discourse fair music, like the gentle Evangeline of Acadie, seated at her father’s side, “Spinning flax for the loom that stood in the corner behind her,” who, I fear, would be regarded in these days of improvement, at least in our country, with nearly as much horror as those other indefatigable spinners are by the good housewife: “Weaving spiders, come not here; Hence, you long‐legged spinners, hence!” What charming pictures some of us retain in our memories of our gray‐ haired grandmothers of New England country life—delicately nurtured, too—sitting down in the afternoon by the huge fire‐place to spin flax on a little carved wheel! How many of us carefully preserve such a wheel in memory of those by‐gone days, when we loved to linger and watch the mysterious process, and look at the face that always was so kindly, and listen to the whirr whose music is now hushed for ever!