A “WROUGHT SHEET” PLANNED
“I want,” Constance told me, “to design a quilt for a big ‘four-poster.’ What they would in the seventeenth century have called a ‘great wrought sheet.’ I am thinking of doing,” she said, “a great border of old-world flowers all round my ‘bed-spread,’ as it is now called in the art shops.”
“What more enchanting,” I cried enthusiastically, and recalled to her mind the beautiful woodcuts that illustrate “Gerard’s Herbal.” “There are there, all the flowers and herbs,” I said, “that you could possibly wish for, and they are all exquisitely drawn and well adapted for such a purpose. The Great Holland, the single Velvet, the Cinnamon, the Provence and the Damask roses, the very names are full of poetry; then of wild flowers, you must think of the Wolfe’s Bane, the Mede Safron, Ladies’ Smock, and Golden Mousear. In the garden, there is the Guinny Hen, and, above all, the gilly-flowers of sorts, and May pinks; and round you might work scrolls of words from poets and philosophers about the joys of sleep.” Then we talked the matter over, and I got quite keen about the colour of the background, and suggested a particular tint of jonquil canary. But Constance would not hear of this, declared she preferred white, and meant to use the hand-made “homespun,” as Shropshire folks call the sheets of the country that were made formerly at Westwood and round Wenlock up to the second half of the last century. “I bought,” she told me, “several old pairs of large hand-made linen sheets at a sale two years ago, and I feel sure they will be delightful to work on. They are not unlike the Langdale linen, only not so fine.” Then Constance went on to say how, in the eighteenth century, every farmhouse in Shropshire had its spinning wheels, and every cottager her love spinning, when her neighbours would come and spin with her out of love and good-fellowship. Besides the good wife’s spinning, many a maiden’s wedding garments were thus made for her by her own playmates, while it was with her own hands that the lass’s wedding sheets were always spun.
Was it a better world, I have often asked myself, when women loved their spinning-wheels and tambour-frames?
Anyway it was a simpler world we both agreed, and probably a more contented one, for all ladies then took delight in superintending, and in the perfection of household work; and the world, high and low, did not commonly feel wasted as it so often does now; and our tongues ran on, on the servant problem.
THE SERVANT PROBLEM DISCUSSED
“A little more education,” argued Constance, “and perhaps the world will move more smoothly. If all the girls could play a tune or two and knew a little more French, the world would not be so proud of one-finger melodies, or isolated syllables of Gallic, that we can vouch are incomprehensible to the native understanding. ’Tis not to be expected, as old Betty in the Dingle says, ‘as the sun can find all the crannies at once.’ Education is slow because gentility is great, and real love or desire for knowledge rare. What we want is not, as Montaigne said, ‘more education, but better education.’”
Then we wandered on to what is knowledge and what are the things worth knowing, and no doubt the hour till tea would have passed all too quickly, if we had not been interrupted by Bess, who dashed downstairs breathless, and bubbling over with excitement.
“A letter,” she cried, “and a letter all for me. Nana,” she explained, “said I must not say ‘yes’ without your leave. But why should papa only have dogs as a matter of course? Here is the note.”
I took the little crumpled paper from Bess’s hands. It was from Maimie Armstrong and written to Bess by a friend’s little girl. I read that “there are several little pups. Mamma,” continued Maimie, “says you are to have one when it is old enough to leave old Nick-nack. They are all blind now and cannot see, but suck all day. One shall be sent in a basket.