difference in the race feeling for art, and especially for color.

[Illustration: DETAIL of linen coverlet worked in colored wool.

_Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum_]

[Illustration: LINEN COVERLET embroidered in Kensington stitch with
colored wool.

_Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum_]

It seems to me, after the observation and intimacy of years with the
growing art of decoration in this country, that the color gift is a race
gift with us. English art-work is nearly always characterized by subdued
and modified harmony, while that of America has vivid and striking notes
which play upon a higher key, and still melt as softly into each
other as the perfect modulations of the best English art. I was very
conscious of this during the year of my directorship of the Woman's
Building and exhibits in the World's Columbian Fair at Chicago, that
place of wonderful comparisons of the art-work of the world. I could
nearly always recognize work of American origin by its singing
color-quality, as different from the sharp semibarbaric notes of
Oriental art as from the minor cadences of English decorative work. But
to return to the effect of the English exhibit at the Philadelphia
Centennial: it was followed by the immediate formation of the Society of
Decorative Art in New York City, which became the parent of like
societies in every considerable city or town in the United States. By
its good fortune in having a president who belonged by right of birth,
and certainly of ability and achievement, to the best of New York
society, the movement enlisted the sympathy and interest of the
influential class of New York women, while there was waiting in the
shadow a troop of able women who were shut out from the costly gayeties
of society by comparative poverty, but connected with it by friendships
and associations, often, indeed, by ties of blood.

Embroidery became once more the most facile and successful of pursuits.
Graduates from the Kensington School were employed as teachers in nearly
all of the different societies, and in this way every city became the
center of this new-old form of embroidery, for what is called
"Kensington Embroidery" is in fact a far-away repetition of old triumphs
of the British needle. I use the word "British" advisedly, for it was
when England was known as Britain among the nations that her embroidery
was a thing of almost priceless value. In modern English embroidery, the
days of Queen Anne have been the limit of ba