angings modesty limits to the border of an imaginary and decorative
scene the monogram of the heroine of history for whose apartments the
tapestry was woven. And so history is given a grace, a delicate
meaning, a warm interest, which is one of the side-gardens of delight
that show from the long path of identification study.

This little book has as its aim the gentle purpose of pointing the way
to a knowledge that shall be a guide in knowing gold from--not from
dross, that is too simple, but gold from gold-plating let us say, for
the mad lover of tapestries will not admit that any hand-woven
tapestry is on the low level of dross. Any work which human hands have
touched and lingered on in execution is deserving of the respect of
the modern whose life must of necessity be lived in hasty execution.
Every chapter, then, is but a caution or a counsel, and this one but a
briefer statement of the same matter. If onto the fringe of the main
thought hangs much of history, it is history inseparable from it, for
history of nations gives the history of great men, and these regulate
the doings of all the lesser ones below them.

Identification, pure and simple, is for the rapt lover of art who
pursues his game in museums and has his quiet delights that others
little dream of. But in general, to the practical yet cultivated
American, it is a means to expend wisely the derided dollars that we
impress upon other nations to the artistic enrichment of our own
country.

CHAPTER XX

BORDERS

If the artists of tapestries had never drawn nor ever woven anything
but the borders that frame them, we would have in that department
alone sufficient matter for happy investigation and acutely refined
pleasure. I even go so far as to think that in certain epochs the
border is the whole matter, and the main design is but an enlargement
of one of the many motives of which it is composed. But that is in one
particularly rich era, and in good time we shall arrive at its joys.

First then--for the orderly mind grows stubborn and confused at any
beginning that begins in the middle--we must hark back to the earliest
tapestries. Tracing the growth of the border is a pleasant pastime, a
game of history in which amorini, grotesques and nymphs are the
personages, and garlands of flowers their perpetual accessories, but
first comes the time when there were no borders, the Middle Ages.

There were none, according to modern parlance, but it was usu