hand and arm, and
brought on the horrid pain which the doctor had called writers' cramp.

"Some doctors are out-and-out fools," murmured the old woman to
herself. "He were a very nice spoke gentleman--tall and genteel, and
he treated me like a lady, which any true man would; but when he said I
had got writers' cramp in this hand, it must have been nonsense. For
there, I never write; ef I spell through a letter once in six months to
my poor sister's only child in Australia, it's the very most that I can
do. Writers' cramp, indeed! Well, it's a comfort to know that he must
be wrong. I wonder how Ally has got on with the work. Poor dear!
I'll have to do more of that feather-stitching than ever, now that Ally
has lost her situation."

Alison looked up and saw her grandmother standing near her. She had,
of course, been taught the feather-stitching. Mrs. Reed had confided
this important secret to her once in a time of serious illness.

"For I may die, and it may go out of the fam'ly," she said. "It was
begun by my grandmother, who got the first notion of it in the sort of
trail of the leaves. My grandmother was a Simpson--most respectable
folk--farmers of the best sort. She had wonderful linen, as fine as
silk. She made it all herself, and then she hemmed it and marked it
and feather-stitched it with them trailing leaves. She taught the
trail to my mother, who married Phipps, and mother had a turn for
needlework, and she gave it that little twist and rise which makes it
so wonderful pretty and neat; but 'twas I popped on the real finish,
quilting it, so to speak, and making it the richest trimming, and the
most dainty you could find. You must learn it, Alison; it would be a
sin and a shame for it to die with me. It must stay in the fam'ly, and
you must 'ave it on yer wedding linen, that you must."

Grannie had taken great pains teaching Alison, and Alison had tried
hard to learn, but, unlike the Phippses and the Simpsons, she had no
real turn for fine needlework. She learned the wonderful stitch, it is
true, but only in a sort of fashion.

Now, the secret of that stitch it is not for me to disclose. It had to
be done with a twist here, and a loop there, and a sudden clever
bringing round of the thread from the left to the right at a critical
moment; then followed a still more clever darting of the needle through
a loop, which suddenly appeared just when it was least expected. The
feather-stitching invol