“DEAR SISTER,—I am highly pleased with the account Captain Freeman gives me of you. I always judged from your behavior when a child, that you would make a good, agreeable woman, and you know you were ever my peculiar favorite. I have been thinking what would be a suitable present for me to make, and for you to receive, as I hear you are grown a celebrated beauty. I had almost determined on a tea-table; but when I consider that the character of a good house-wife was far preferable to that of only being a pretty gentlewoman, I concluded to send you a _spinning-wheel_, which I hope you will accept as a small token of my sincere love and affection. Sister, farewell, and remember that modesty, as it makes the most homely virgin amiable and charming, so the want of it infallibly renders the most perfect beauty disagreeable and odious. But when that brightest of female virtues shines among other perfections of body and mind, in the same person, it makes the woman more lovely than an angel. Excuse this freedom and use the same with me. I am, dear Jenny, “Your loving brother, “B. FRANKLIN.” Compare Franklin’s sentiments emphasized still further in Poor Richard’s Almanac:— “Old England’s Laws the proudest Beauty name When single Spinster, and when married Dame, For Housewifery is Woman’s noblest Fame. The wisest household Cares to Women yield A large, an useful and a grateful Field.” Fancy the horror which would congeal the soul of Poor Richard to-day at the sight of woman stepping boldly outside that “large Field” of the kitchen and spinning-room! In the eyes of both Greek and American, the woman plying spindle and distaff was more nobly and graciously employed than the spoiled beauty gossiping over the teacups, for, says Richard,— “Many estates are spoiled in the getting, Since women for tea forsook spinning and knitting.” Nor should we forget the august Fates themselves, who spin the thread of human destiny, weaving it into the web of universal life, and cutting here and there a thread as each mortal fulfils his allotted hour,— “And sing to those who hold the vital shears, And turn the adamantine spindle round, On which the fate of gods and men is wound.” Here we see the spindle as the emblem of human destiny, and always in the hands of women. Witness the three Norns, likewise, of our own northern ancestors, who sit around the tree Igdrasil and spin out the world’s life on their whirring spindle.