144 
House & Garden 
,'inmnt o 
Unsurpassed 
Cooking Speed 
This latest New Perfection range 
is equipped exclusively with 
SUPERFEX Burners. One bur¬ 
ner on every stove is the big 
GIANT SUPERFEX. The others 
are “Little Giants” or standard 
size SUPERFEX burners. 
The standard SUPERFEX equals 
the cooking speed of the ordina¬ 
ry gas burner and is faster than 
any other oil burner, except its 
own big brother the GIANT 
SUPERFEX. And the big GIANT 
itself is unsurpassed even by the 
giant gas burner. 
Price of range 
illustrated - - $80.45 
Stove,without oven 
and cabinet « - $58.50 
Prices are slightly higher 
in far West, Southwest 
and Canada. 
Announced 
A Year Ago— 
Now Used 
Nation-Wide 
TITER ALLY tens of thousands of 
1-/ women are now enthusiastic 
users of the NEW PERFECTION 
Oil Range with SUPERFEX Bur¬ 
ners, the revolutionizing invention 
announced only a year ago. The 
secret of its remarkable success is 
its powerful SUPERFEX Burners. 
The speed, intensity and wide range 
of their cooking heat is unsurpassed 
by that of any other stove. 
With this new range, families in the 
suburbs and country now enjoy, for 
the first time, all the cookstove 
speed and satisfaction of gas. And 
to city homes it affords a real sav¬ 
ing—for its economical fuel costs 
less than eighty-five cent gas. 
See a demonstration at the nearest 
stove dealer’s and you’ll be con¬ 
vinced. Prices range from $36.00 
to $145.00. 
In addition to the new SUPERFEX 
models, our long established BLUE 
CHIMNEY models of the NEW PER¬ 
FECTION line, used in 4 , 000,000 homes 
continue to be the world’s most satisfactory 
oil stove at their lower range of prices- 
THE CLEVELAND METAL PRODUCTS COMPANY 
7150 PLATT AVENUE CLEVELAND, OHIO 
Also makers of PERFECTION Oil Heaters 
Sold in Canada by The Perfection Stove Co., Ltd., Sarnia, Ontario 
NEW PERFECTION 
Oil Range with SUPERFEX Burners 
19th Century Samplers 
(Continued from page 142) 
Perhaps one of the most striking 
points about American samplers is 
their “home-brewed” design. Pattern 
books were scarce enough during Colo¬ 
nial days and during the cradle-years 
of the Republic. Patterns, therefore, 
were invented and drawn by the needle- 
workers themselves, for the most part, 
with the result that a refreshing origi¬ 
nality—we find it a “quaintness”—crept 
into American samplers and was main¬ 
tained in the 19th Century examples as 
well. Coarse loose linens were used for 
the grounds and one seldom meets with 
samplers embroidered on the fine mus¬ 
lins more or less common in Continen¬ 
tal European sampler work. Home- 
dyed threads were used, and of partic¬ 
ular note was a sort of silk floss some¬ 
what crude in texture, which appears 
to have reached America from China al¬ 
though not to have been employed by 
the needleworkers of England or other 
European countries during the same pe¬ 
riod. American needleworkers also 
used satin for backgrounds, but this was 
exceptional. The ingenuity of young 
American sampler workers was infinite. 
Those of the early 19th Century appear 
to have experimented in a thousand and 
one ways: We find little needlework 
figures with inset faces of parchment, 
painted with water-color. Again beads 
are sewn in for eyes. Gambolling lambs 
of white kid frisk past chenille 
shrubbery or graze in bead meadows. 
A sampler worked by Ann E. Kelly in 
1825 had a needlework figure with a 
face painted on the ground under very 
thin gossamer linen; it still suggests the 
flush of youth intended by Miss Ann. 
So universal did sampler making be¬ 
come, that one wonders if the little 
maids of the earlier years of the 19th 
Century found time for their dolls. We 
find samplers stitched by six-year-olds, 
and someone has discovered that 11 
years was the average age of the sam¬ 
pler workers of this century as against 
the 13 years of the 18th Century. 
Some of the subjects dear to the 
earlier American needleworkers found 
little favor with their 19th Century 
followers; the “Adam and Eve” was 
one of these. But if the first occupants 
of the Garden of Eden were thus 
slighted, it was through no impiety, 
for 19th Century samplers seem fairly 
to bristle with designs of churches. 
After 1800 the grapevine and the morn¬ 
ing glory became favorite motifs in 
sampler design, and just as the Penn¬ 
sylvania Dutch delighted in depicting 
somewhat plaintive weeping willows, 
other nimble fingers lent their skill to 
stitching designs of soldierly poplars 
and capable oak trees. 
The taste for architectural motifs de¬ 
veloped in colonial sampler design 
when the buildings of Brown University 
and the old State House at Providence, 
R. I., were depicted on a sampler of 
1778, continued to manifest itself in the 
19th Century samplers where we find 
Yale, Princeton, William and Mary and 
other college buildings pictured in 
stitchery as well as the Capitol at 
Washington, Independence Hall, and 
frequently the local habitations of the 
young needleworkers themselves. Family 
pride came to the front in such instances 
as the genealogical sampler stitched by 
Eliza F. Parker in 1818 where the fam¬ 
ily tree of the Rice family is firmly 
planted. 
In the Wallace Collection, London, 
is a painting by George Morland, “The 
Visit to the Boarding School” (repro¬ 
duced in Marcus B. Huish’s “Samplers 
and Tapestry Embroideries”) showing 
visitors to a young ladies’ boarding- 
school examining a sampler which ap¬ 
pears to be the work of the radiant 
Miss who is being brought forward by 
the head of the establishment. This re¬ 
minds us that in the 19th Century as 
well as in the 18th, sampler embroidery 
was one of the important requirements 
in American boarding-schools. One of 
the most important of these was con¬ 
ducted by Miss Polly Balch in Provi¬ 
dence, R. I. Here in the Balch Semi¬ 
nary from 1785 to 1810, as at Miss 
Sarah Stivour’s School in Salem, it may 
be presumed that every young lady pu¬ 
pil was required to produce an example 
of her prowess in “cross-stitch, tent- 
stitch, tapestry-stitch, back-stitch, 
rope-stitch, square eyelet-stitch, satin- 
stitch, Queen Anne-stitch, long-stitch” 
or any of the many stitches calculated 
to improve the nimbleness of elegant 
young fingers. 
As I look up at a lovely 19th Cen¬ 
tury sampler, I am reminded of what 
Ruskin wrote in his “Ariadne Floren- 
tina”. There one reads as follows: “On 
the walls of the little room... hangs 
an old silken sampler of great grand¬ 
ma’s work: representing the domestic 
life of Abraham; chiefly the stories of 
Isaac and Ishmael. Sarah at her tent- 
door, watching, with folded arms, the 
dismissal of Hagar: above, in a wilder¬ 
ness full of fruit trees, birds and butter¬ 
flies, little Ishmael lying at the root of 
a tree, and the spent bottle under an¬ 
other.. .being all wrought with involu¬ 
tion of such ingenious needlework as 
may well rank, in the patience, the 
natural skill, and the innocent pleasure 
of it, with the truest works of Floren¬ 
tine engraving... and the richness of 
pleasurable fancy is as great skill in 
these silken labors, as in the marble 
arches and golden roof of the cathedral 
of Monreale (Florence). But what is 
the use of explaining or analyzing it? 
Such work as this means the patience 
and simplicity of all feminine life; and 
can be produced, among us at least, 
no more”. 
I think we all feel this about these 
heirlooms of the past, memories which 
haunt them to become our own in turn, 
and evoking too, our own memories. 
And with the 19th Century American 
samplers this seems particularly true, 
for they do not seem too remote from 
us, and we understand intimately their 
courtesies. 
