der the apple boughs and waited for the call of the Lord.

The long ministry of the needle to the wants of mankind proves it to
have been among the first of man's inventions. When Eve sewed fig leaves
she probably improvised some implement for the process, and every
daughter of Eve, from Eden to the present time, has been indebted to
that little implement for expression of herself in love and duty and
art. For this we must thank the man who, the Bible relates, was "the
father of all such as worked in metals, and made needles and gave them
to his household." He is the first "handy man" mentioned in
history--blest be his memory!

If the day should ever come, not, let us hope, in our time or that of
our children, when the manufacturer shall find that it no longer pays to
make needles, what value will attach to individual specimens! If they
were only to be found in occasional bric-a-brac shops or in the
collections of some far-seeing hoarder of rarities, it would be
difficult to overrate the interest which might attach to them. How, from
the prodigal disregard of ages and the mysteries of the past, would
emerge, one after another, recovered specimens, to be examined and
judged and classified and arranged!

Perhaps collections of them will be found in future museums under
different headings, such as:

"Needles of Consolation," under which might come those which Mary Stuart
and her maids wrought their dismal hours into pathetic bits of
embroidery during the long days of captivity, or the daughter of the
sorrowful Marie Antoinette mended the dilapidations of the pitiful and
ragged Dauphin; or:

"Needles of Devotion," wielded by canonized and uncanonized saints in
and out of nunneries; or:

"Needles of History," like those with which Matilda stitched the prowess
of William the Conqueror into breadths of woven flax.

Possibly there may arise needle experts who, upon microscopic
examination and scientific test, will refer all specimens to positive
date and peculiar function, and by so doing let in floods of light upon
ancient customs and habits. It is idle to speculate upon a condition
which does not yet exist, for, happily, needles for actual hand sewing
are yet in sufficient demand to allow us to indulge in their purchase
quite ungrudgingly.

I was once shown a needle--it was in Constantinople--which the
dark-skinned owner declared had been treasured for three hundred years
in his family, and he affirmed it so positiv