every bed.
Half the rooms are adorned with a kind of _sutile pictures_, which
imitate tapestry. But all their work is not set out to show; she has
boxes filled with knit garters and braided shoes. She has twenty covers
for side-saddles embroidered with silver flowers, and has curtains
wrought with gold in various figures, which she resolves some time or
other to hang up. All these she displays to her company whenever she is
elate with merit, and eager for praise; and amidst the praises which her
friends and herself bestow upon her merit, she never fails to turn to
me, and ask what all these would cost, if I had been to buy them.

I sometimes venture to tell her, that many of the ornaments are
superfluous; that what is done with so much labour might have been
supplied by a very easy purchase; that the work is not always worth the
materials; and that I know not why the children should be persecuted
with useless tasks, or obliged to make shoes that are never worn. She
answers with a look of contempt, that men never care how money goes, and
proceeds to tell of a dozen new chairs for which she is contriving
covers, and of a couch which she intends to stand as a monument of
needle-work.

In the mean time, the girls grow up in total ignorance of every thing
past, present, and future. Molly asked me the other day, whether Ireland
was in France, and was ordered by her mother to mend her hem. Kitty
knows not, at sixteen, the difference between a Protestant and a Papist,
because she has been employed three years in filling the side of a
closet with a hanging that is to represent Cranmer in the flames. And
Dolly, my eldest girl, is now unable to read a chapter in the Bible,
having spent all the time, which other children pass at school, in
working the interview between Solomon and the queen of Sheba.

About a month ago, Tent and Turkey-stitch seemed at a stand; my wife
knew not what new work to introduce; I ventured to propose that the
girls should now learn to read and write, and mentioned the necessity of
a little arithmetick; but, unhappily, my wife has discovered that linen
wears out, and has bought the girls three little wheels, that they may
spin huckaback for the servants' table. I remonstrated, that with larger
wheels they might despatch in an hour what must now cost them a day; but
she told me, with irresistible authority, that any business is better
than idleness; that when these wheels are set upon a table, with mats