the cutting into inch-wide strips of woven ingrain
or three-ply carpet. This, through the cotton warp, makes a really
artistic monochrome floor-covering.

In one of the most romantic and beautiful spots in old Narragansett
lives the last of the old-time weavers; not a weaver who desultorily
weaves a run of rag carpeting to earn a little money in the intervals of
other work, or to please some importunate woman-neighbor who has saved
up her rags; but a weaver whose lifelong occupation, whose only means of
livelihood, has always been, and is still, hand-weaving. I have told his
story at some length in my book, _Old Narragansett_,--of his kin, his
life, his work. His home is at the cross-roads where three townships
meet, a cross-roads where has often taken place that curious and
senseless survival of old-time tradition and superstition--shift
marriages. A widow, a cousin of the Weaver Rose's father, was the last
to undergo this ordeal; clad only in her shift, she thrice crossed the
King's Highway and was thus married to avoid payment of her first
husband's debts. It is not far from the old Church Foundation of St.
Paul's of Narragansett, and the tumble-down house of Sexton Martin Read,
the prince of Narragansett weavers in ante-Revolutionary days. Weaver
Rose learned to weave from his grandfather, who was an apprentice of
Weaver Read.

In the loom-room of Weaver Rose a veritable atmosphere of the past still
lingers. Everything appertaining to the manufacture of homespun
materials may there be found. Wheels, skarnes, sleys, warping-bars,
clock-reels, swifts, quilling-wheels, vast bales of yarns and
thread--for he no longer spins his thread and yarn. There are piles of
old and new bed coverlets woven in those fanciful geometric designs,
which are just as the ancient Gauls wove them in the Bronze Age, and
which formed a favorite bed-covering of our ancestors, and of country
folk to-day. These coverlets the weaver calls by the good old English
name of hap-harlot, a name now obsolete in England, which I have never
seen used in text of later date than Holinshead's _Survey of London_,
written four hundred years ago. His manuscript pattern-book is over a
hundred years old, and has the rules for setting the harnesses. They
bear many pretty and odd names, such as "Rosy Walk," "Baltimore
Beauty," "Girl's Love," "Queen's Fancy," "Devil's Fancy," "Everybody's
Beauty," "Four Snow Balls," "Five Snow Balls," "Bricks and Blocks,"
"Garden