“Never mind that: I have chosen a fine day for it. The sun is warm. By to-morrow they won’t feel the need of their wool. And besides, ought not the sheep to suffer a little cold so that we may be warm?”
“We warm? How?”
Spinning-wheel
“You astonish me. You do not know that, you who read so many books? Well, with this wool they will make you stockings and knitted things for this winter; they will even make cloth, fine cloth for clothes.”
“Peuh!” exclaimed Emile. “This wool is too dirty and ugly to make stockings, knitted things, and cloth.”
“Dirty at present,” Jacques agreed, “but it will be washed in the river, and when it has become very white Mother Ambroisine will work it on her spinning-wheel and make yarn of it. This yarn knitted with needles will become stockings that one is very glad to have on one’s feet when obliged to run in the snow.”
“I have never seen red, green, blue sheep; and yet there are red, green, blue, and other colored wools,” said Emile.
“They dye the white wool that the sheep gives us; they put it into boiling water with drugs and coloring matter, and it comes out of that water with a color that stays.”
“And cloth?”