PENELOPE AND NAUSICAA 193 
in strings before the fire or simply spread out on one 
end of tlie porch floor, and the appearance of which 
makes one's mind turn with lessened repugnance to 
the thought of berries preserved in powders. 
But the most cherished occupation of the moun- 
tain woman for generations was, and to a very lim- 
ited extent still is, weaving, an occupation exclu- 
sively her own and which in a peculiar way relates 
her to a by-gone world. Traveling along the road, 
you glance through an open doorway to see a woman 
"sitting in a loom," a large, clumsy, home-made 
loom in which she is weaving cloth. One always 
experiences a thrill of pleasure at sight of a loom here 
in the mountains. Some memory of Penelope and 
Evangeline seems to linger about it. But the weavers 
of to-day are neither great ladies nor fair young girls. 
The girls of the mountains prefer machine-made 
cloth to the home product and the labor of weaving 
it. "I can't learn her noway," the mother says of 
her daughter who takes no interest in the ancestral 
loom. 
In the corner near the loom stands the spinning- 
wheel, not as a mere parlor ornament with a ribbon 
around its neck, but in readiness to spin a thread. 
Sometimes loom and spinning-wheel stand upon the 
porch, where they lend a peculiar air of domesticity 
to the landscape. As a rule, however, they are inside 
the house, for weaving is the woman's winter work, 
crone might say her recreation, for like the woman of 
antiquity she loves to spin and weave. And she is 
proud of the result. Even the coarse "jeans " for her 
