t unfinished at her death.

_Courtesy of Essex Institute, Salem, Mass._]

The learning to do an A or a B in cross-stitch was the beginning of
household doing, which is the business of woman's life. The decorative
and the useful were evenly balanced in sampler making. All this skill in
lettering could be applied to the stores of household linen in the way
of marking, for cross-stitch letters, done in colored threads, were a
part of the finish of sheets and pillowcases and fine toweling which
made so important a part of the riches of the household, and it led by
easy grades of familiarity to more comprehensive methods of decoration.
In truth, the letters first practiced in cross-stitch opened the door to
all future elaborations, and were the vehicle of moral instruction as
well; for little Puritans took their first doses of Bible history in
carefully embroidered text, and their notions of pictorial art from
cross-stitch illustrations. One finds upon some of the early examples
pictures of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, with the ever present
author of sin, climbing the stem of the tree of life, or Jacob's dream
of angels ascending and descending a ladder, intersecting clouds of
blue and smoke-colored stitches.

These pictorial samplers are certainly interesting, but those which
confine themselves to simple cross-stitch with borders, and the name of
the little child who wrought them, touch a note of domestic life which
is more than interesting.

The sampler was purely English in its derivation and followed the
English with great fidelity, although redolent of Puritan life and
thought. Sometimes, indeed, it carried cross-stitch to the very limit of
its capability in an attempt to render Bible scenes pictorially, but for
the most part it was confined to the practice of various styles of
lettering consolidated into text or verse.

The material upon which they were worked was generally of canvas, either
white or yellow, and this was of English manufacture. As all
manufactures were things of price, later samplers were often worked upon
coarse homespun linens, which, barring the variations in the size of the
threads inevitable in hand-spinning, made a fairly good material for
cross-stitch.

[Illustration: _Left_--SAMPLER worked by Christiana Baird. Late
eighteenth century American.

_Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York_

_Right_--MEMORIAL PIECE worked in silks, on white satin. Sacred to the
memory of Major