left of her handiwork outside Hampton Court. She
left no dainty little book-covers, bags, or boxes, as her ideas were
fixed on larger pieces of embroidery. Had she lived in the Berlin-wool
picture days, she would have filled every nook and cranny with these
atrocities, as many humbler devotees to the needle have done to our own
knowledge. Needlework can become a _passion_, and certainly Queen Mary
must have possessed it.

After the complete collapse of the Stuart stump pictures, when every
vestige of loyalty seems to have been swept away with the hated James
II., the ancient Petit Point pictures came back into fashion. Very
clever work was put into them, but, alas! their scope was purely to
depict religious scenes of the rigorous kind. No dainty fairy-like
little people now ruled in pictured story, but actual representations of
Bible history.

The illustration of "The Baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch by St. Philip"
is a fair sample of the needlework picture of this time. The picture is
a strange mixture of the early Stuart Petit Point, the Jacobean
wall-hanging, and the newly revived religious spirit. The duck-pond, the
swans and the water-plants might have been copied bodily from James I.'s
time. The paroquet and the flying bird, and the immense leaves and
blossoms, are direct from the wall-hangings, while the figures only too
surely foretell the coming dark days of needlecraft, when a Scripture
picture and a coarsely worked sampler were part of every girl's liberal
education. The work in this picture is extremely good, and it is
excruciatingly funny without intending to be so. The pretty little
equipage with its diminutive ponies surely was never intended to carry
either St. Philip or the Eunuch! The open book, with Hebraic
inscription, is very delightful. It brings to mind the Tables of the Law
rather than the light reading that the charming little Cinderella coach
should carry.

These pictures are not common, and we scarcely know whether to be
thankful for them or not. Unlike the early petit point, they were worked
in _worsteds_, whereas the early pictures were wrought in silk. The moth
has a natural affinity for wool, as we all know, and his tribe has
cleared off many hundreds of examples. Why so many of the old Jacobean
hangings remain is that they were worked for _use_, and not ornament,
and even after they ceased to be fashionable ornaments for sitting and
bed rooms, they were either relegated to the servants'