We cannot make old tapestries, but we can restore and preserve them by skilled labour in special ateliers. Restoration by the needle is the only perfect restoration, and this is as yet but little done here, although the method is so well known in Europe. We deplore the quicker way, to use the loom for weaving large sections of border or large bits which have gone into hopeless shreds, or have disappeared altogether by reason of the bitter years when tapestries had fallen into neglect. But the quicker way is the poorer, with these great claimants for time. The woven figures are relentless in this, that they claim of the living man a lion's share of his precious days. His reward is that they outlast him. Food for cynics lies there. The careful worker looks close and sees the warp exposed like fiddle strings here and there. She matches the colour of silk and wool to the elusive shades and covers stitch by stitch the bare threads, in perfect imitation of the loom's way. Sometimes the warp is gone. Then the work tests the best skill. The threads, the _chaine_, must be picked up, one by one, and united invisibly to the new, and then the pattern woven over with the needle. It happens that large holes remain to be filled entirely, the pattern matched, the design caught or imagined from some other part of the fabric. That takes skill indeed. But it is done, and so well, that the repairer is called not that, but a restorer. The two factories in New York, the Baumgarten and Herter ateliers, have certain employes always busy with repairs and restorations. Given even a fragment, the rest is supplied to make a perfect whole, in these studios where the manner of the old workers is so closely studied. For big repairs a drawing is made, a cartoon on the same principle as that of large cartoons, in colours, these following the old. Then it remains for the weaver to set his loom with the corresponding number of threads, that the new fabric may match the old in fineness. Then, too, comes the test of matching colours, a test that almost never discovers a worker equal to its exactions. That is as often as not the fault of the dyer who has supplied colours too fresh. It is the repairs done by the needle that give the best effect, although such restorations are costly and slow. Old repairs on old tapestries have been made, in some instances, very long ago. It often happens, in old sets, that a great piece of another tapestry has been roughly set in, like the knee-patches of a farm boy. The object has been merely to fill the hole, not to match colour scheme or figure. And these patches are by the judicious restorer taken out and their place carefully filled with the needle.