ster, standing at
the gate of the homestead with outstretched hands and staring eyes.

[Illustration: _Left_--"THE MEETING OF ISAAC AND REBECCA"--Moravian
embroidered picture, an heirloom in the Reichel family of Bethlehem, Pa.
Worked by Sarah Kummer about 1790.

_Courtesy of Elizabeth Lehman Myers_

_Right_--"SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME"--Cross-stitch picture
made about 1825, now in the possession of the Beckel family, Bethlehem,
Pa.

_Courtesy of Elizabeth Lehman Myers_]

The most important picture which I have seen in portrait needlework came
to light at the Baltimore Exhibition, and was a piazza group of five
figures, a burly sea-captain seated in a rocking chair in a nautical
dress and his own grayish hair embroidered above his ruddy face, his
wife in a white satin gown seated beside him, and his three daughters of
appropriately different ages grouped around, while the ship _Constance_
was tied closely to the edge of the blue water which bordered the
foreground of the picture. The composition of this picture was evidently
the work of some experienced artist, for its incongruous elements kept
their places and did not greatly clash. Taken as a whole it was an
astonishing performance, quite too ambitious in its grasp for the novel
art of needlework, and yet a thing to delight the hearts of the
descendants, or even casual possessors.

The Moravian teaching and practice spread the principles of needlework
art so widely that it developed in many different directions. The
wonderful silk embroidery applied to flowers was, like the arts of
drawing and painting, capable of being used in copying all forms of
beauty. It was sometimes, not always, successfully applied to landscape
representation, and grew at last into a scheme of needlework
portraiture, in this form perpetuating family history. It was sometimes
used in conjunction with painting, the faces of a family group being
done in water color upon cardboard by professional painters who were
members of the art guild, who wandered from one social circle to
another, supplying the wants of embroideresses ambitious of distinction
in their accomplishments. The small painted faces were cut from the
cardboard upon which they had been painted and worked around, often with
the actual hair of the original of the portrait. I have seen one picture
of a Southern beauty, where the golden hair had been wound into tiny
curls, and sewn into place, and the lace of the neck