“With her maidens drawing off
The tresses from the distaff, lectured them
Old tales of Troy, and Fiesole, and Rome.”
And a Spanish writer of past times says, speaking of the model woman: “Behold this wife who purchases flax that she may spin with her maids. See her thus seated in the midst of her women.” Thus did Andromache spin among her attendants.
So have we seen old nuns spinning in the cloisters of the remote provinces of France: the white wool on their distaffs diminishing slowly and calmly as their own even lives. [pg 136] They looked as if spinning out their own serene destinies. Such a happy destiny is not reserved for all whose thread is drawn out by Lachesis.
“Twist ye, twine ye! even so
Mingle shades of joy and woe,
Hope and fear, and peace and strife,
In the thread of human life.”
At Rome there are two white lambs blessed on S. Agnes' day (“S. Agnes and her lambs unshorn,” says Keats) in her church on the Nomentan road, and then they are placed in a convent till they are shorn, when their wool is spun by the sacred hands of the nuns. Of this the pallium is made—the distinctive mark of a metropolitan.