kept the secret of the
dye, when rose pink was the unattainable want of feminine New England.
She died without revealing it, and as in those days there were no
chemists to boil up her rags and test them for the secret, the "Windham
pink," so said my grandmother, "made people sorry for her death,
although she did not deserve it." This little neighborly fling passed
down two generations before it came to me from the later days of the
colony.

Yellows of different complexions were discovered in mayweed, goldenrod
and sumac, and the little-girl Faiths and Hopes and Harmonys came in
with fingers pink from the handling of pokeberries and purple from
blackberry stain, tempting the sight with evanescent dyes which would
not keep their color even when stayed with alum and fortified with salt.
All this made Mistress Windham's memory the more sad. A good reliable
rose red was always wanting. Madder could be purchased, for it was
raised in the Southern colonies, but the madder was a brown red. Finally
some enterprising merchantman introduced cochineal, and the vacuum was
filled. With a judicious addition of logwood, rose red, wine red and
deep claret were achieved.

The dye of dyes was indigo, for the blue of heaven, or the paler blue of
snow shadows, to a blue which was black or a black which was blue, was
within its capacity. And the convenience of it! The indigo tub was
everywhere an adjunct to all home manufactures. It dyed the yarn for the
universal knitting, and the wool which was a part of the blue-gray
homespun for the wear of the men of the household. "One-third of white
wool, one-third of indigo-dyed wool, and one-third of black sheep's
wool," was the formula for this universal texture. Perhaps it was not
too much to say that the gray days of the Pilgrim mother's life were
enriched by this royal color.

The soft yarns, carefully spun from selected wool, took kindly to the
natural dyes, and our friend, the Puritan housewife, soon found herself
in possession of a stock of home-manufactured material, soft and
flexible in quality, and quite as good in color as that of the lamented
English crewels. The homespun and woven linens with which her chests
were stocked were exactly the ground for decorative needlework of the
kind which she had known in her English childhood, long before questions
of conscience had come to trouble her, or the boy who had grown up to be
her husband had been wakened from a comfortable existence by th