o produce, and although we took account of the
delight of their creation and put it on the credit side of our books,
along with the fact that the weekly pay roll of the tapestry room went
for the comfort and maintenance of the students whom we loved and
cherished, I soon realized the fact that a commercial firm could not be
burdened with the fads of any one member. Before I had carried this
conclusion to its logical end, we had opportunities of using our skill
worthily in several of the new great houses of the time. When the
Cornelius Vanderbilt house was erected on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh
Street we received an order for a set of tapestries for the drawing-room
walls. These were executed from ideal subjects and of single figures. I
remember the "Winged Moon" among them, which was an ideal figure of the
new moon lying in a cradle of her own wings. This was but one of the
set, one or two of which we afterward made in replica for an exhibit in
London. There was no lack of subjects in our background of American
history. The legends and beliefs of our North American Indians were full
of them, and one of the first we selected was the lovely story of
"Minnehaha, Laughing Water," from Longfellow's "Hiawatha." The sketch
had been sent to us by Miss Dora Wheeler, as the prize composition of
the Saturday Composition Class at Julien's Studio in Paris.

The literary past of the country furnished subjects enough and to spare,
and if we wished to walk into the shadowy realms of legend and fiction,
there were the picturesque legends of the American Indian from which to
choose. Our subjects were often one-figure designs, as such pieces were
suitable in size to wall spaces and door openings. Of course commercial
considerations could not be lost sight of in our enthusiasm for progress
in textile art. Potter Palmer, the multimillionaire of Chicago, was
building at the time a palace home on the Lake Shore, and one auspicious
day Mrs. Palmer bestowed her beautiful presence upon us, and was
mightily taken with our tapestries. Her clever mind was attracted by the
"bookishness" of some of the panels of incidents from American
literature, and several of them went to beautify the great house on the
Lake Shore, in the form of several panels of portraits. Mrs. Palmer was
a delightful patron, her own enjoyment of art, in any of its forms,
amounted to enthusiasm, and her great physical beauty, to a beauty
lover, made every visit from her an epo