from flax grown in their own gardens. The girls adorn their
cotton gowns with 'compass work,' exact, exquisite. In some places the
men and boys, girls and women, make baskets of hickory reeds and
willows to delight the heart of the collector. But from the cradle to
the grave, the women make quilts. The tiny girl shows you with pride
the completed four patch or nine patch, square piled on square, which
'mammy aims to set up for her ag'inst spring.' The mother tells you
half jesting, half in earnest, 'the young un will have several ag'inst
she has a home of her own.' No bride of the old country has more pride
in her dower chest than the mountain bride in her pile of quilts. The
old woman will show you a stack of quilts from floor to ceiling of her
cabin. One dear old soul told me she had eighty-four, all different,
and 'ever' stitch, piecin', settin' up, quiltin', my own work and
ne'er another finger tetched hit.'"

Patchwork was an important factor in making plain the knotty problems
of existence, as Eliza Calvert Hall clearly shows when she makes "Aunt
Jane of Kentucky" say: "How much piecin' a quilt is like livin' a
life! Many a time I've set and listened to Parson Page preachin' about
predestination and free will, and I've said to myself, 'If I could
jest git up in the pulpit with one of my quilts I could make it a heap
plainer to folks than parson's makin' it with his big words.' You see,
you start out with jest so much caliker; you don't go to the store and
pick it out and buy it, but the neighbours will give you a piece here
and a piece there, and you'll have a piece left over every time you
cut a dress, and you take jest what happens to come. And that's like
predestination. But when it comes to the cuttin' out, why, you're
free to choose your own pattern. You can give the same kind o' pieces
to two persons, and one'll make a 'nine patch' and one'll make a
'wild-goose chase,' and there'll be two quilts made out of the same
kind of pieces, and jest as different as they can be. And that is jest
the way with livin'. The Lord sends us the pieces, but we can cut them
out and put 'em together pretty much to suit ourselves, and there's a
heap more in the cuttin' out and the sewin' than there is in the
caliker."

In the great Central West, from Ohio to the Mississippi, the early
settlers passed through the same cycle of development as did their
ancestors in the beginnings of the original colonies along the
seaboard. The