f, was upon the domestic woman, who sewed
cloth into skirts instead of vegetable fiber into aprons.

[Illustration: _Left_--EMBROIDERED MITS

_Right_--WHITE COTTON VEST embroidered in colors. Eighteenth-nineteenth
century American.

_Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art_]

[Illustration: WHITE MULL embroidered in colors. Eighteenth-nineteenth
century American.

_Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art_]

[Illustration: EMBROIDERED VALANCE, part of set and spread for high-post
bedstead, 1788. Worked in crewels on India cotton, by Mrs. Gideon
Granger, Canandaigua, New York.]

It is curious to contrast the effect of this loss of embroidery in
the two countries, England and America. Doubtless there were other
reasons than the lost popularity of needlework as an art, that in
England it should have resulted in the life or death practice of
necessary needlework, and in America, that the facile fingers of woman
simply turned to the ivory keys of the piano for occupation. But the
fact remains that starvation threatened the woman of one country, while
in the other they were practicing scales. In England it was a period of
stress and strain, of veritable "work for a living," the period of "The
Song of the Shirt." Happily, in this blessed land, where hunger was
unknown, we were not conscious of its terrors, and perhaps hardly knew
why the "cambric needle" and the darning needle were the only ones in
the market. Embroidery needles had "gone out." Then came the relief of
the sewing machine, born in America, where it was scarcely needed, but
speedily flying across the ocean to its life-saving work in England,
where the tragedy of the poor seamstress was on the stage of life. Like
many another form of relief, it was not entirely adequate to the
situation. Its first effect was to create a need of remunerative work.
The sewing machine took upon itself the toil of the seamstress, but it
left the seamstress idle and hungry. This was a new and even darker
situation than the last, but Englishwomen came to the rescue with a
resuscitated form of needlework and embroidery tiptoed upon the empty
stage, new garments covering her ancient form, and was welcomed with
universal acclaim.

Most cultivated and fortunate Englishwomen had a certain knowledge of
art and were eager to put all of their uncoined effort at the service of
that body of unhappy women, who, without money, had the culture which
goes with the use and possession of money. These