ill, perhaps nothing is
more widely known than what is called the Bayeux Tapestry. This much
venerated work is not tapestry at all, but a pictorial record in
outline, done with a needle, as simply as though written in ink, at
least according to our present understanding of what is known as
tapestry.

We read of the subject, and the name of William the Conqueror looms
large in the imagination. We think of the tapestry as a great
illustrated page of history, large in proportion not alone to the deeds
it chronicles, but to their importance in the story of one of the
greatest, perhaps, of the modern races; and across this illustrated page
we fancy the prancing of war horses and the prowess of the knight, the
passing of seas and the march of armies, with all the attendant tragedy
of circumstance.

But this is only in one's mind. The reality is a more or less tattered
strip of grayish-white linen, two feet in width and two hundred and
thirty feet long, and along this frail bridge between the past and
present march the actors in the great conquest. It seems but an
inadequate pathway, but it has borne its phalanxes of men, its two
hundred horses, its five hundred and fifty-five dogs and other animals,
its forty-one ships, its numberless castles and trees, its roads and
farms safely through all the intervening years from 1066 to 1919, and it
still holds them.

In truth, we wonder much over this production of the past, and not alone
over the heroes who career so mildly in their armor of colored crewels
on the linen background. We wonder, in the first place, how a continuous
web of over two hundred feet in length could have been woven. Then, we
know that lengths of woven stuffs are limited only by the requirements
of commerce, and that Matilda was of Flanders, and her father had
learned the princely trick of loving and encouraging manufactures, and
had, indeed, taught it to his daughter, and that Flanders was a noted
center of manufacture. Then we decide that if Matilda had called for a
strip of linen two thousand feet long, whereon to write the warlike
history of a spouse who began his gentle part toward her (for so history
avers) by pulling her from her horse and rolling her in the mud because
she refused to marry him, it would have been forthcoming as easily as
two hundred. Should the Queen of England require a stretch of linen as
long as from England to America, whereon to record the successes of her
reign, who doubts that