was universal in country districts had a flax or
tow warp, and a coarser slack-twisted cotton or tow filling. This cloth
was dyed and pressed and was called fustian. It was worth a shilling a
yard in 1640. It was named in the earliest colonial accounts, and was in
truth the ancient fustian, worn throughout Europe in the Middle Ages for
monks' robes and laborers' dress, not the stuff to-day called fustian.
We read in _The Squier of Low Degree_, "Your blanketts shall be of
fustayne."

Another coarse cloth made in New England, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and
the Carolinas was crocus. The stuff is obsolete and the name is
forgotten save in a folk-saying which lingers in Virginia--"as coarse as
crocus." Homespun stuff for the wear of negroes was known and sold as
"Virginia cloth." Vast quantities of homespun cloth was made on
Virginian plantations, thousands of yards annually at Mount Vernon for
slave-wear, and for the house-mistress as well.

It is told of Martha Washington that she always carefully dyed all her
worn silk gowns and silk scraps to a desired shade, ravelled them with
care, wound them on bobbins, and had them woven into chair and
cushion covers. Sometimes she changed the order of things. To a group of
visitors she at one time displayed a dress of red and white striped
material of which the white stripes were cotton, and the red, ravelled
chair covers and silk from the General's worn-out stockings.

Checked linen, with bars of red or blue, was much used for bedticks,
pillow-cases, towelling, aprons, and even shirts and summer trousers. In
all the Dutch communities in New York it was woven till this century.
When Benjamin Tappan first attended meeting in Northampton,
Massachusetts, in 1769, he was surprised to find that all the men in the
church but four or five wore checked shirts. Worcester County men always
wore white shirts, and deemed a checked shirt the mark of a Connecticut
River man.

It is impossible to overestimate the durability of homespun materials. I
have "flannel sheets" a hundred years old, the lightest, most healthful,
and agreeable summer covering for children's beds that ever any one was
blessed with. Cradle sheets of this thin, closely woven, white worsted
stuff are not slimsy like thin flannel, yet are softer than flannel.
Years of use with many generations of children have left them firm and
white.

Grain-bags have been seen that have been in constant and hard use for
seventy years, home