Woodruff!_--I wonder where she is now?--sat next to me in my
sampler days, and her canvas was white, while mine was yellow. Her
border was worked with blue, and mine with green. With a child's
inscrutable and wonderful awareness of underlying facts, I knew that
Sarah Woodruff's father was richer than mine, and that the white canvas
and blue border, which the teacher said "went with it," was an
indication of it. I have it now, the little faded yellow parallelogram
of canvas, on which the germ of the very fingers with which I am now
writing wrought with painstaking care--"Executed by Candace Thurber, her
age six years." They have since had various fortunes and experiences,
these fingers, and have wrought to the satisfaction, I hope, of their
foregone line of Puritan ancestors.

The sampler has special claims upon the world, because it is probable
that all forms of textile design originated with it. In fact, design for
needlework began with small squares formed by crossing stitches at the
junction of textile fiber.

In sequences these squares formed lines, blocks, and corner, and in
double-line juxtaposition made the form of border probably the oldest
ornamental decoration in the world, generally known as a Roman border.
This decoration escaped from textiles into stone and building materials,
and in fact appeared in the elaboration of all materials, from the
fronts of temples to the ornamentation of a crown. The most ancient
examples of design are founded upon a square, and this points inevitably
to the stitch covering the crossing of threads, the cross-stitch, which
preceded all others and remained the only decorative stitch until
weaving sprang into so fine an art that interstices between threads are
unnoticeable. Then, and not until then, the long over-stitch, the _opus
plumarium_, which we call "Kensington," was invented, and served to make
English embroidery famous in early English history. This was the stitch
used by the Pilgrim mothers in their crewel embroidery, as we use it
to-day in most of our decorative presentations.

[Illustration: SAMPLER worked by Adeline Bryant in 1826, now in the
possession of Anna D. Trowbridge, Hackensack, N. J.]

In spite of the achievements of the _opus plumarium_, we are indebted
to simple cross-stitch, to the obligations of the mathematical square of
hand weavings, for all the wonderful borderings which have been evolved
by ages of the use of the needle, since decoration began. W