8 



That the twelvemoutli is not lost to many, their works attest. 

 Needlework is to woman a most natural exercise. Her work 

 basket is stamped with her identity, and matron or maid who 

 hums in her low rocker, and plys the bright needle, finds little 

 " ennui in life. Who ever knew a hypochondriac to sew ? The 

 listless, dreaming woman who finds life a hardship is she 

 whose needles are flecked with rust, and whose cottons are 

 sallow from being long lain. A whole troop of miseries can be 

 transferred from the nerves of an idle woman's body into a 

 batch of rags, if she will, from out their apparent worthless- 

 ness, bring forth a useful article, such as decked our w^alls at 

 the Fair. A storekeeper attested to me once, upon enquiry, 

 that the merry, chipper, womanly little housekeepers who 

 visited his store were those who were ever buying spools 

 of cotton and silk, pounds of yarn, and every number of 

 needle. Woman has no time to study up fashionable diseases 

 when she is employed. Industry is the doctor's rival. In a 

 direct sequence, we can trace disease from indolence : its 

 stages are aversion of work, decreased energy, flagging exer- 

 cise, inaction, disease. The old monasteries, where the hooded 

 nuns lived their solitary lives, would not have had such sweet 

 serenity written on their inmates' pale faces, if marvelous tap- 

 estries and grand pictures had not been wrought by their 

 untiring fingers. The immolation, the cell, the penance would 

 have made them beat their bars in frenzy, the chant would have 

 become a wail, had not hours of work filled up their lives. The 

 ferns of woodlands, the remembered landscapes, the, soft blue 

 of summer skies, the richly draped women, the mailed knights 

 their needles painted on the great canvases, supplied that warm 

 tone of life their spiritual zeal had denied them. 



While our tables held the useful and beautiful, they alsa 

 held the frivolous, so that the dividing line between the chil- 



