ur own toddling America.
Directly we scratch the surface and look for the beginning of applied
arts, the lead takes us inevitably to the oldest civilisation. It
would seem that in a study of fabrics which are made in modern Europe,
it were enough to find their roots in the mediaeval shades of the dark
ages; but no, back we must go to the beginning of history where man
leaped from the ambling dinosaur, which then modestly became extinct,
and looking upon the lands of the Nile and the Yangtsi-kiang found
them good, and proceeded to pre-empt all the ground of applied arts,
so that from that time forward all the nations of the earth were and
are obliged to acknowledge that there is nothing new under the sun.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a bit of tapestry,
Coptic, that period where Greek and Egyptian drawing were intermixed,
a woman's head adorned with much vanity of head-dress, woven two or
three centuries after Christ. (Plate facing page 15.) In the Boston
Museum of Fine Arts are other rare specimens of this same time.
(Plates facing pages 16 and 17.) Looking further back, an ancient
decoration shows Penelope at her high loom, four hundred years before
the Christian era; and one, still older, shows the Egyptians weaving
similarly three thousand years before that epoch.

It is not altogether thrilling to read that civilised people of
ancient times wove fabrics for dress and decoration, but it certainly
is interesting to learn that they were masters of an art which we
carelessly attribute to Europe of six centuries back, and to find that
the weaving apparatus and the mode of work were almost identical. The
Coptic tapestry of the Third Century is woven in the same manner as
the tapestries that come to us from Europe as the flower of
comparatively recent times, and its dyes and treatment of shading are
identical with the Gothic times. Penelope's loom as pictured on an
ancient vase, is the same in principle as the modern high-warp loom,
although lacking a bit in convenience to the weaver; and so we can
easily imagine the lovely lady at work on her famous web, "playing for
time," during Ulysses' absence, when she sat up o' nights undoing her
lovely stint of the day.

And the Egyptian loom shown in ancient pictures--that is even more
modern than Penelope's, although it was set up three thousand years
before, a last guide-post on the backward way to the misty land called
prehistoric.

But as there is real