zags, or squares, or any other fixed and mechanical shapes? The
spirit of it was true to its race and traditions. In the face of it, all
our beautiful copies of flowers, and growths, and gracious forms of
nature seemed almost experimental--the art of growing and changing
nations.

But as we do not make the early art of long existent races models upon
which to shape our search for the most beautiful, the persistence of
Eastern form in embroidery need not prevent our progress in design. I
made an interesting note of this persistence of Eastern design, when,
many years ago, I had an opportunity of examining some mummy wrappings
from a burial ground at Lima, Peru. They were wonderful weavings of
aboriginal cloth, bordered with embroidery done in dyed or colored
threads of flax, in designs as purely Eastern as can be found in any
ancient or modern Eastern embroidery. How could it happen that the
ornamental designs of the Far East and the Far West should touch each
other? Was it similarity of thought knowledge, the kinship of the human
mind, or some long-forgotten means of transmission of the material and
actual, of which we all-knowing moderns do not even dream? This
wonderful South American embroidery of past ages antedated many antique
remains of the art of stitchery which we treasure with as wide a margin
of time as lies between their day and ours.

Embroidery has become a dependence and a business for thousands of
women, and it is this which secures its permanence. We may trust
skillful executants who live by its practice to keep ahead of the
changing fancies of society and invent for it new wants and new
fashions. And this, because their chance of living depends upon it, and
it promises to be a permanent and growing art. It may, and will,
undoubtedly, take on new directions, but it is no longer a lost art. On
the contrary, it is one where practice has attained such perfection that
it is fully equal to any new demands and quite competent to answer any
of the higher calls of art.

CHAPTER VIII -- THE BAYEUX TAPESTRIES

While a description of this most important work of women's hands may
seem somewhat irrelevant in a book devoted to the development of the art
of embroidery in America, it is so important a link in the subject of
stitchery, executed as it was in the eleventh century, that a short
chapter on this most interesting and vital subject may not come amiss.

Among all our present possessions of early sk