HOME INDUSTRIES 159 



life at home, instead of frittering away half their time in 

 looking for it somewhere else ; when they honoured their 

 own state of life by making the best of it within its own 

 good limits, instead of tormenting themselves with a restless 

 striving to be, or at any rate to appear to be, something 

 that they are not. Surely that older life was better and 

 happier and more fruitful, and even, I venture to assume, 

 much fuller of sane and wholesome daily interests. 



Surely it is more interesting, and the thing when made 

 of a more vital value, when it is made [at home from the 

 very beginning, than when it is bought at a shop. 



Look at the picture of the little silk-winder. Perhaps 



A Silk-Winder 



it belonged, a hundred years ago, to some squire's wife or 

 daughter. She was possibly doing a piece of that pretty 

 old work where a soft narrow silk ribbon is gathered up 

 into little flowers. She wanted some yards of ribbon of a 

 golden colour, something like oat-straw. Nothing of the 

 kind was to be had in the market-town, and she had seen 

 nobody of late likely to be going to London, who could do 

 her commission. So she kept some silk-worms, and when 

 they had done their work she wound off the silken thread from 

 the cocoons on this little winder — a few cocoons at a time 

 bobbing about in a basin of lukewarm water. Then she 



