VI.
“Laxey, Isle of Man, March 4th, 1876.
“Dear Sir,—In this month’s ‘Fors,’ page 107—‘Affairs of the Master,’—if you add up the amounts paid out, I think you will find, instead of £360 2s. 0d., the amount should be £370 2s. 3d., and leaves a proper balance of £225 5s. 6d.
“I hope you will not be offended at me for troubling you with these trifling errors, of no moment; but I have got a singular habit—that I can never pass over a column of added figures, no matter what length, without testing their correctness.
“Yours truly,
“E. Rydings.”
(If only my good correspondent—now a Companion—will indulge himself constantly in this good habit as respects the Fors accounts, I shall be much more at ease about them. But his postscript is more important.)
“P.S. You say that the girls of St. George’s Company shall learn to spin and weave, etc. There is a good deal of hand-spinning [[140]]done on this little island, but I am sorry to say that there are no young girls learning now to spin; and in a few years more, the common spinning wheel here will be as great a curiosity as it is in Lancashire, where one is never seen—only at the theatre. I have gone to some little trouble to ascertain why the young girls are not learning now to spin; and the principal reason I can gather is that home-spun ‘Manks-made dresses,’ as they are called, last too long, and therefore do not give the young women a chance of having four or five new dresses in the year. I could give you some interesting information about hand-spinning and weaving here, but must reserve it for another time, and will send you patterns of cloth, etc. All our blankets, sheets, flannels, skirts, jacket cloth, stockings, and yarns, have been spun by my wife and her mother before her. We have now linen sheets in wear, not a hole or a tear in them, that were spun by my wife’s mother,—and she, poor body, has been dead twenty-eight or twenty-nine years,—the flax grown on their own farm. Fine and white they are, and would compare favourably in fineness with machine-made Irish linen. The daughters of Lord Auckland, when he was bishop here, used to go every Saturday afternoon to my wife’s mother’s, (who lived just behind Bishop Court,) to learn to spin.
“But I must write you a special letter on the subject when I have got my patterns ready.”
[[141]]
[1] Exaggerated a little, I’m afraid.—J. R. [↑]
[2] The shells sent, for which I heartily thank my correspondent, are, I think, the same as mine, only not so white. [↑]