ely and circumstantially
that I accepted the statement as truth. In fact, what did it matter? It
was an interesting lie or an interesting truth, whichever one might
consider it, and the needle looked quite capable of sustaining another
century or so of family use. Its eye was a polished triangular hole made
to carry strips of beaten metal, exactly such as we read of in the Bible
as beaten and cut into strips for embroidery upon linen, such
embroidery, in fact, as has often been burned in order to sift the pure
gold from its ashes.

Not only the history, but the poetry and song of all periods are starred
with real and ideal embroideries--noble and beautiful ladies, whose
chief occupations seem to have been the medicining of wounds received in
their honor or defense, or the broidering of scarfs and sleeves with
which to bind the helmets of their knights as they went forth to
tourney or to battle. In these old chronicles the knights fought or made
music with harp or voice, and the women ministered or made embroidery,
and so pictured lives which were lived in the days of knights and ladies
drifted on. The sword and the needle expressed the duties, the spirit,
and the essence of their several lives. The men were militant, the women
domestic, and wherever in castle or house or nunnery the lives of women
were made safe by the use of the sword the needle was devoting itself to
comforts of clothing for the poor and dependent, or luxuries of
adornment for the rich and powerful. So the needle lived on through all
the civilizations of the old world, in the various forms which they
developed, until it was finally inherited by pilgrims to a new world,
and was brought with them to the wilderness of America.

CHAPTER I -- BEGINNINGS IN THE NEW WORLD

The history of embroidery in America would naturally begin with the
advent of the Pilgrim Mothers, if one ignored the work of native
Indians. This, however, would be unfair to a primitive art, which
accomplished, with perfect appropriateness to use and remarkable
adaptation of circumstance and material, the ornamentation of personal
apparel.

The porcupine quill embroidery of American Indian women is unique among
the productions of primitive peoples, and some of the dresses, deerskin
shirts, and moccasins with borders and flying designs in black, red,
blue, and shining white quills, and edged with fringes hung with the
teeth and claws of game, or with beautiful small shells, ar