it would be supplied her?

[Illustration: THREE SCENES FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY]

So, when the question of this web is disposed of, we wonder who drew all
these figures of men and horses, for Queen Matilda and her ladies to
overlay with stitchery, and why his name has not come down to us. We
decide within our minds, for it never occurs to us to impute such
ability in drawing to the Queen or her ladies, that it was the work of
some monkish brother who varied his illuminating labor upon missals
and copies of the Scripture by doing these worldly and interesting
things.

We think of the never to be forgotten Gerard in _The Cloister and the
Hearth_, and wonder if it was some monastery-trained youth like him who
rested from the creation of saints and angels upon vellum, to draw
fighting knights upon linen, and whether, perchance, his hushed heart
burned within him at the stir and valor of the deeds he portrayed. And
then some one, better informed than we, points out the figure of a
dwarf, nicely labeled as Turold--for many of the actors in this
embroidered story are labeled in delicate stitches--and tells us that
his was the hand that set the copy for all the happy and beloved maids
of the Queen, and the hapless and perhaps equally beloved Saxon maids.
We wonder, again, how these skillful and noble Saxons like to find
themselves thus writing their own infelicities and humiliations for all
the world to see, and then--for so does the human mind go groping into
motives and springs of action--we wonder if their famous skill in
needlework, of which the wide-awake Matilda must surely have known, put
it into her head to make this curious life-record of her great lord,
and we reflect that if it were so, it would only be another facet of her
many-sided ability.

But that was underneath the surface. Outside was the queenly
magnificence and wifely glorification of her lot, a smooth current of
irresistible prosperity. Underneath was the whirling and buzzing of the
wheels of thought, the springs of motion which governed the great
current.

In truth, two such clever thought centers as William of Normandy and
Matilda of Flanders seldom in the world have made a conjunction, or we
would have had more great conquests to record. We may fancy what we will
in the far background which this slender length of linen reaches, all
the byplay which accompanied the guarded life of the castle, the
religious life of the cathedral and monastery, the