July 14, Some days ago the head of a local firm accidentally tore a button off his coat. The firm in question supports, or rather supported by, a considerable feminine staff. Otherwise admirable in all their ways, not tone of them, however, could produce a needle and' thread to put the button in its place again. There is no clause in their agreements that they are expected to be ready with the necessary implements against Such emergencies; but any man, losing a button, and with three farr colleagues sitting in the next room, would feel justified in turning with confidence to them for help. Later in the day one of the ladies was able to borrow a needle and thread from her great-aunt and the damage was repaired. There is a-rumour in the office that one held the coat, another the button while the third transfixed button and coat with the needle. But as the door was shut and no one admitted during the operation, this, as Liddell Scott might have said, is probably a needless embroidery.
Can it be that girls take lasa interest in needlework than they used to do? One prays it may not be so. Half the romance of history depends on needles and thread and the kindred arts. Snowdrop might never have been born if a certain queen had not sat sewing at a window during a snowstorm. She pricked her finger, it will be recalled:
'And there fell thereout three drops of blood. "Oh that I had a little daughter," sighed the Queen, "So white as snow, so red as blood and so black-haired ay the ebony' of the window frame." Soon thereafter became she a daughterling, and The temptation to render the German literally is irresistible. But it all shows the importance of sewing and the exquisite tale we should have lost without it, We forget whether Penelope used needle and thread, but she was certainly a great weaver. Her hobby suggested a trick which enabled her td stave off the importunate suite allowing time for Odysseus to get safely home again to Ithaca and shoot down his rivals with the bow that none but he could bend. And again how would astronomers of to-day have Known that Halley's Comet appeared in Norman times, if it were not for its being depicted in the Bayeux tapestry? It may be objected that this tapestry was the work of men, but we do not believe it. In those days any man who was not a soldier or a hind became a monk or a clerk. And we know that William the Conqueror's mother was a sempstress of Falaise, a fact which perhaps helps to explain his strong common sense and strength of character, This article is certainly not, as the immortal Topsy would phrase it, a hoot at the modern girl, who no more deserves to be hooted at than the modern girl of every generation back to the days of Lilith. Times have vastly improved since Mrs. Sherwood (who went with her jer husband to India in the year of Trafalgar, produced eight chi what is better remembered, "The Fair-child Family") could record that never in her life did she sit down in her parents' presence, nor speak to them until they had first spoken to her. Elizabeth Bennet set a new standard for girls in her dealings with her father, but clearly she is depicted as something of a revolutionary. By this time we have learnt that it is much nicer to be tyrannized over by our daughters than to tyrannize over them; and if the modern girl deserved praise for nothing else, she would deserve it for having rid the "world of that appalling figure of the Dombey Son era, the domestic despot. But in her own interest one would urge her not to forsake needle and thread, Even men have known the uses and charms of sewing, no less a man indeed than Richard Cur de Lion. And it is one of A. E. W. Mason's heroines, we think, a thoroughly up-to-date young lady, who during a Period of stress takes to sewing "the traditional sedan tive of her sex" and finds it wonderfully restful. To settle down for a little sewing, with and muting to match, after a day with the guns, should recommend itself if only by force (Continued on Page 4.)
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.