ead, which the cottager took by a
more direct and natural process from her own mouth. I remember two such
elegant little wheels in our own family.

It may be observed that this hand-spinning is the most primitive of
female accomplishments, and can be traced back to the earliest times.
Ballad poetry and fairy tales are full of allusions to it. The term
'spinster' still testifies to its having been the ordinary employment of
the English young woman. It was the labour assigned to the ejected nuns
by the rough earl who said, 'Go spin, ye jades, go spin.' It was the
employment at which Roman matrons and Grecian princesses presided amongst
their handmaids. Heathen mythology celebrated it in the three Fates
spinning and measuring out the thread of human life. Holy Scripture
honours it in those 'wise-hearted women' who 'did spin with their hands,
and brought that which they had spun' for the construction of the
Tabernacle in the wilderness: and an old English proverb carries it still
farther back to the time 'when Adam delved and Eve span.' But, at last,
this time-honoured domestic manufacture is quite extinct amongst
us--crushed by the power of steam, overborne by a countless host of
spinning jennies, and I can only just remember some of its last struggles
for existence in the Steventon cottages.

CHAPTER III.

_Early Compositions--Friends at Ashe--A very old Letter--Lines on the
Death of Mrs. Lefroy--Observations on Jane Austen's
Letter-writing--Letters_.

I know little of Jane Austen's childhood. Her mother followed a custom,
not unusual in those days, though it seems strange to us, of putting out
her babies to be nursed in a cottage in the village. The infant was
daily visited by one or both of its parents, and frequently brought to
them at the parsonage, but the cottage was its home, and must have
remained so till it was old enough to run about and talk; for I know that
one of them, in after life, used to speak of his foster mother as
'Movie,' the name by which he had called her in his infancy. It may be
that the contrast between the parsonage house and the best class of
cottages was not quite so extreme then as it would be now, that the one
was somewhat less luxurious, and the other less squalid. It would
certainly seem from the results that it was a wholesome and invigorating
system, for the children were all strong and healthy. Jane was probably
treated like the rest in this respect. In childhoo