s spun.

Mr. Waldron was not a ladies' man, and after helping with the tea,
served under a big mulberry tree in the garden, he turned his attention
to Mr. Roberts, already known favourably to him as a cricketer, and
Benny Cogle, the engine man. They departed to look at a litter of
puppies and the others perambulated the gardens. Estelle had a plot of
her own, where grew roses, and here, presently, each with a rose at her
breast, the girls sat about on an old stone seat and listened to Mr.
Churchouse discourse on the lore of their trade.

Some, indeed, were bored by the subject and stole away to play beside a
fountain and lily pond, where the gold fish were tame and crowded to
their hands for food; but others listened and learned surprising facts
that set the thoughtful girls wondering.

"You mustn't think, you spinners, that you are the last word in
spinning," he said; "no, Alice and Nancy and Sabina, you're not; no more
are those at other mills, who spin in choicer materials than flax and
hemp--I mean the workers in cotton and silk. For the law of things in
general, called evolution, seems to stand still when machinery comes to
increase output and confuse our ideas of quality and quantity. Missis
Chick here will tell you, when she was a spinner and the old rope walks
were not things of the past, that she spun quite as good yarn from the
bundle of tow at her waist as you do from the regulation spinners."

"And better," said Mrs. Chick.

"I believe you," declared Ernest, "and before your time the yarn was
better still. For, though some of the best brains in men's heads have
been devoted to the subject, we go backwards instead of forwards, and
things have been done in spinning that I believe will never be done
again. In fact, the further you go back, the better the yarn seems to
have been, and I'm sure I don't know how the laws of evolution can
explain that. The secret is this: machinery, for all its marvellous
improvements, lags far behind the human hand, and the record yarns were
spun in the East, while our forefathers still went about in wolf-skins
and painted their faces blue. You may laugh, but it is so."

"Tell us about them, Mister Churchouse," begged Estelle.

"For the moment we needn't go back so far," he said. "I'll remind you
what a girl thirteen years old did in Ireland a hundred years ago. Only
thirteen was Catherine Woods--mark that, Sabina and Alice--but she was a
genius who lived in Dunmore, County