ck paper, framed and glazed, and given to
friends or bequeathed by will. One old lady is remembered as using her
scissors with extraordinary deftness, and amusing herself and delighting
her friends by occupying the hours of every afternoon visit with cutting
out entirely by her trained eye various pretty and curious designs.
Valentines in exceedingly delicate and appropriate patterns, wreaths and
baskets of varied flowers, marine views, religious symbols, landscapes,
all were accomplished. Coats of arms and escutcheons cut in black paper
and mounted on white were highly prized. Portrait silhouettes were cut
with the aid of a machine which marked and reduced mechanically a sharp
shadow cast by the sitter's profile through candle-light on a sheet of
white paper. Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney wrote in rhyme of a revered friend
of her youth, Mrs. Lathrop, of a period about a century ago:--

"Thy dextrous scissors ready to produce
The flying squirrel or the long-neck'd goose,
Or dancing girls with hands together join'd,
Or tall spruce-trees with wreaths of roses twin'd,
The well-dress'd dolls whose paper form display'd,
Thy penknife's labor and thy pencil's shade."

I once found in an old lacquered box in a cupboard a paper packet
containing all the cut-paper designs mentioned in this rhyme--and many
more. The workmanship of the "spruce-trees with wreaths of roses twin'd"
was specially marvellous. I plainly saw in that design a derivative of
the English Maypole and encircling wreaths. This package was marked with
the name of the paper-cutter, a Revolutionary dame who died at the
beginning of this century. Her home was remote from the Norwich home of
Mrs. Lathrop, and I know she never visited in Connecticut, yet she made
precisely the same designs and indeed all the designs. This is but a
petty proof among many other more decided ones of the fact that even in
those days of scant communication and infrequent and contracted travel,
there were as in our own times waves of feminine fancy work, of attempts
at artistic expression, which flooded every home, and receding, left
behind much decorative silt of varying but nearly universal uselessness
and laborious commonplaceness.

One of the cut-paper landscapes of Madam Deming, a Boston lady who was a
famous "papyrotamist," is here shown. It is now owned by James F. Trott,
Esq., of Niagara Falls. It is a view of Boston streets just previous to
the Revolution. In t