22 
THE LADIES' FLORAL CABINET 
Perhaps no one piece of embroidery will be viewed 
with more interest than a yellowed strip about a yard 
long and ten inches wide, of coarse linen, enclosed 
within a frame, and, as we read the inscription accom¬ 
panying it, our hearts are also stirred with pity, for we 
are looking upon the last work of Marie Antoinette, 
done, while in prison, upon a piece of coarse linen used 
by her as a towel, as cloth for embroidery was not 
allowed her. It could only be done in secret in her 
dimly lighted cell, and was found by the officer in charge 
after she was led out for execution, and given by him 
to a man who conveyed it to one of the royal family. 
It was kept in their possession until Louis Philip abdi- 
wrought in the lower end, above these two bands of fine 
needlework embroidery in which were interspersed 
small eyelets; between these two bands an inch wide 
strip of solid work, above them another band two and 
one-half inches wide, of open, mesh-like work, in which 
birds were formed; the entire piece was covered with 
the several designs very finely executed. Poor unfortu¬ 
nate queen! how much more busily must her mind have 
worked than her fingers. How real this bit of embroid¬ 
ered linen makes her life seem to us, as we look upon 
the stitches she patiently worked, one by one, while the 
terrible guillotine was waiting to receive her. 
A black velvet bag, embroidered about the year 1812,. 
Daimio Box. 
cated and fled to Brighton. England, when it was sold 
by one of the officers who came with the refugees, to 
Mr. Charles Phillips, a well known citizen, who kept it 
in his possession till a short time before his death, which 
occurred last winter, at the age of 95; from him it 
passed to the hands of his daughter. 
Ten graduated bands of drawn and lace work were 
shows that ribbon-work was as popular then as now. 
Pansies, Pinks, Rose-buds and Convolvulus are formed 
by bits of colored crape and ribbon, and a dainty little 
card-case, on one side of which a sheaf of Wheat, with 
rake and sickle wound about with wild Morning Glory 
vines is worked, on the other a harp with Roses, forms a 
pretty decoration for the white satin foundation. 
THE POWERS OF VEGETATION. 
In those good old days, when there were no corn- 
factors in England to counteract that part of our Re¬ 
deemer’s prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread,” by 
hoarding up vast stores of grain until mouldiness and 
vermin had rendered it unfit for the use of man, there 
stood at Walton Hall a water-mill, for the interest of 
the proprietor and the good of the country round. 
Time, the great annihilator of all human inventions, 
saving taxation and the national debt, laid this fabric 
low in ruins some sixty years ago, and nothing now re¬ 
mains to show the place where it once stood except a 
massive millstone, which measures fully seventeen feet 
in circumference. The ground where the mill stood 
having been converted into meadow, this stone lay there 
unnoticed and unknown (save by the passing liay-m aker) 
from the period of the mill’s dissolution to the autumn of • 
the year 1813, when one of our nut-eating wild animals,, 
probably by way of a winter store, deposited a few 
nuts under its protecting cover. In the course of the 
following summer, a single nut, having escaped 
the teeth of the destroyer, sent up its verdant shoot 
through the hole in the centre of the procumbent 
millstone. 
One day I pointed out this rising tree to a gentleman- 
