If we ask more we need only turn to Homer, the inimitable reflector of the customs of his day. In his verse the spinner lives again, as she spins the fine white linen and gorgeous colored wool. Beautiful are the pictures she weaves into the cloth, stories of gods and demi-gods and heroes. Odysseus, entering the feasting hall of the Phæacians, is transfixed with wonder at its splendor; its seats, throughout all their length, were spread with the marvellous work of the Phæacian maidens, showing radiant in the torchlight, for the Phæacian women far exceeded all others in this household art. Did not the Phæacian queen recognize on Odysseus the very garments she herself and her maidens had made? And all the while loyal-hearted Penelope sat at home and wove her web to keep off suitors, not to catch them, though Shakespeare rather sneeringly remarks that “all the yarn she spun in Ulysses’ absence did but fill Ithaca full of moths.” Evidently spinning and the making of the household garments were not beneath the dignity of royal fingers in those old Greek days. Queenly indeed were these occupations, and right royal these distaffs of ivory and gold, the gifts of kings and poets, the symbols of woman’s dominion. Was not the wool basket even of Helen of Troy lipped with gold? And in the excavations on the site of Troy to-day are found innumerable spindle-whorls of terra-cotta; and in the later excavations Dr. Schliemann found, twenty-eight feet below the surface in the Royal Mansion, a distaff eleven inches long to which a quantity of blackened woollen thread was still adhering. In those days of war and pillage the garments a man wore were the best tokens of his identity; the handiwork of the matron and her daughters was an individual seal set, as it were, upon the lives of their male relatives; home-made and home-spun were their garments, not turned out by the dozen, ready-made from a factory. Penelope sees through the wiles of the false Odysseus when he describes the garments she had made for the real one. This custom of the matron weaving the household cloth has thus given the Greek poets a favorite means of recognition of lost relatives which is certainly more poetic than the worn-out device of the “strawberry-mark” on the “long-lost brother.” Even the water nymphs practise weaving; Circe also, and Calypso; mortals and immortals; yea, the mighty Hercules himself threw down his club and spun for love of Omphale: thus do Greek mythology and literature reflect the importance of spindle and distaff in the home-life of the Greeks, who, as we have learned, recognized the value and the dignity of woman’s labor in believing it to be under the particular tutelage and protection of the dread daughter of Zeus. The Romans copied the Greeks in this as in many other things. They borrowed the spinster-goddess outright and called her Minerva to hide the plagiarism. Our friend Poor Richard says: