are no more." The other says bluffly, "Tapestries? You can't
touch 'em. The prices have gone way out of sight, and are going higher
every day." The latter knows but one view, the commercial, yet both
are right, and these two views are at the bottom of the present keen
interest in tapestries in our country. Outside of this, Europe has
collections which we never can equal, and that thought alone is
enough to make us snatch eagerly at any opportunity to secure a piece.
We may begin with our ambition set on museum treasures, but we can
come happily down to the friendly fragments that fit our private
purses and the wall-space by the inglenook.

Tapestries are not to be bought lightly, as one buys a summer coat, to
throw aside at the change of taste or circumstance. They demand more
of the buyer than mere money; they demand that loving understanding
and intimate appreciation that exists between human friends. A
profound knowledge of tapestries benefits in two ways, by giving the
keenest pleasure, and by providing the collector--or the purchaser of
a single piece--with a self-protection that is proof against fraud,
unconscious or deliberate.

The first step toward buying must be a bit of pleasant study which
shall serve in the nature of self-defence. Not by books alone,
however, shall this subject be approached, but by happy jaunts to
sympathetic museums, both at home and abroad, by moments snatched from
the touch-and-go talk of afternoon tea in some friend's salon or
library, or by strolling visits to dealers. These object lessons
supplement the book, as a study of entomology is enlivened by a chase
for butterflies in the flowery meads of June, or as botany is made
endurable by lying on a bank of violets. All work and no play not only
makes Jack a dull boy, but makes dull reading the book he has in hand.

The tale of tapestry itself carries us back to the unfathomable East
which has a trick at dates, making the Christian Era a modern epoch,
and making of us but a newly-sprung civilisation in the history of the
old grey world. After showing us that the East pre-empted originality
for all time, the history of tapestry lightly lifts us over a few
centuries and throws us into the romance of Gothic days, then trails
us along through increasing European civilisation up to the great
awakening, the Renaissance. Then it loiters in the pleasant ways of
the kings of France during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,
and finally