Oh! we weave a damask doublet
For my love’s coat of steel.
Hark! the timid turning treadle
Crooning soft old-fashioned ditties,
To the low, slow murmur of the
Brown, round wheel.”
So sang an Irish maid of long ago, and to-day we still look to Ireland for some of the finest spinning and weaving in existence.
It would be trite to refer to Margaret, dreaming of Faust over her spinning, were she not eminently typical. What maiden of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did not sit in the garden idly spinning her allotted tasks while her thoughts were far away? It is a picture based on fact, as all great literary pictures are.
