e do not stop
to think of the artistic intelligence or gift which made mathematical
spaces express beautiful form, any more than we stop in our reading to
think of the sensitive intelligence which drew a letter and made it the
expression of sound, and yet most of us use the result of some
exceptional intelligence and feel the exaltation of what we call
culture.

The stitch itself is entitled to the greatest respect, as the very first
form of decoration with the needle--an art growing out of and controlled
by the earlier art of weaving. Decorative bands of cross-stitch come to
us on shreds of linen found in the sepulchers of Egypt and the burial
grounds of the prehistoric races of South America. I have seen, in a
collection of textiles found in their ancient burial places, the most
elaborate and beautiful of cross-stitch borders, wrought into the
fabrics which enriched Pizarro's shiploads of loot sent from Vicuna,
Peru, to the court of Spain at the time of the wonderful and barbarous
"Conquest." All of the old "Roman" borders are found in this collection,
the best designs the world has produced, those which architects of the
period used upon the fronts and in the interiors of their first
creations. And here arises the ever recurring question of
thought-sharing between the most widely removed of the earlier human
races. How did early Peruvians and far-off Latins think in the same
forms, and how did they come to select certain ones as the best, and
cleave to them as a common inheritance? But leaving the puzzle of design
and returning to the cross-stitch, which was its first interpretation or
medium, and to the little Puritans who shared its acquaintance and
practice with the women of all ages, we may see how the New England
sampler opened the door of inheritance.

As Eve sewed her garments of leaves in the Garden of Eden, so each one
of these little Puritan Eves, so far removed in the long history of the
race from the first one, was heir to her ingenuities as well as her
failings, from her patching together of small and inadequate things, to
her creative function in the kingdom of the world, as well as to her
attempts to sweeten life, and to her failures and successes.

[Illustration: _Left_--SAMPLER embroidered in colors on ecru linen, by
Mary Ann Marley, aged twelve, August 30, 1820. _From Providence, R. I._

_Right_--SAMPLER embroidered in brown on ecru linen, by Martha Carter
Fitzhugh, of Virginia, in 1793, and lef