iters
digress to emphasise their richness with long descriptions that could
not possibly have assisted the cause of their religion.

The stitch made by the modern loom is the same as that made by the
looms of the furthermost-back Egyptian, by the Greeks, by the Chinese,
of primitive peoples everywhere, by the people of the East in the
familiar Khelim rugs, and by the aborigines of the two Americas. There
is nothing new, nothing obscure about it, being a simple weaving of
warp and woof. Penelope's loom was the same almost as that in use
to-day at the Gobelins factory in Paris. Archeologists have discovered
pictures of the ancient Egyptian loom, and of Penelope's, and there is
but little change from the times of these ladies to our days.

The fact is, the work is hand-work, must always be so, and the loom is
but a tool for its working, a tool which keeps in place the threads
set by hand. That is why tapestry must always be valuable and original
and no more possible to copy by machine than is a painting.

High warp and low warp are the terms so often used as to seem a
shibboleth. _Haute lisse_ and _basse lisse_ are their French
equivalents. They describe the two kinds of looms, the former
signifying the loom which stands upright, or high; the latter
indicating the loom which is extended horizontally or low. On the high
loom, the instrument which holds the thread is called the _broche_,
and on the low loom it is called the _flute_.

The stitch produced by the two is the same. The manner of producing
it varies in convenience to the operators, the low-warp being the
easier, or at least the more convenient and therefore the quicker
method.

The cynic is ever ready to say that the tyrant living within a man
declares only for those things which represent great sacrifice of time
and effort on the part of other men. Perhaps it is true, and that
therein lies the preference of the connoisseur in tapestry for the
works of the high-warp loom. Even the wisest experts cannot always
tell by an examination of a fabric, on which sort of loom it was
woven, high warp or low, other evidence being excluded.

The high loom has, then, the threads of its warp hung like a weighted
veil, from the top of the loom to the floor, with a huge wooden roller
to receive the finished fabric at the bottom and one at the top for
the yet unneeded threads. Each thread of the warp is caught by a loop,
which in turn is fastened to a movable bar, and by mea