How patiently the little fingers toiled over these records of their wonderful (even if enforced) application! Truly, samplers are the needle-craft primers of yesterday. We have only to recall an old English play, “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” probably the very first of the earlier English folk comedies, to understand the great importance attached to the needle. This play, written about 1560 (and attributed to John Still, Bishop of Wells, and formerly Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge, where it was first produced) shows how, during the period of its conception, a steel needle was treasured as few family treasures of to-day, and so when Gammer Gurton lost hers--the only one she possessed--the misfortune took on the importance of genuine calamity. As collectors of samplers and writers on the subject of samplers have been baffled in trying to discover why no samplers dated or positively known to have been worked before the middle of the eighteenth century are extant, this clue to the probable reason which we find in “Gammer Gurton’s Needle” is of interest; the fact is that as needles were so uncommon and such treasured possessions they were not to be entrusted to tiny fingers. Later, when invention turned its attention to needle-making, needles became common enough. I imagine many a little girl of the eighteenth century wished that needles had never been “born”! Very fine samplers containing both names and dates prior to 1800 are not to be found at every turn. Notwithstanding this, the sampler-collector need anticipate no discouraging difficulty in getting together examples for a fairly representative collection. It is only in comparatively recent years that we have discovered the value of old samplers as excellent decorative accessories on the walls of a room in which old pieces of furniture are placed. Samplers may be mounted and framed for hanging on a wall as a picture might be, and I know of few objects in the line of antiques that seem so appropriate for use in this manner for adorning the walls of a bedchamber.