or repairs. At the
Gobelins as many as forty women are thus employed. The malapropos
deduction springs here that the demand for repaired old work is
greater than that for new in the famous factory, for only six or eight
weavers are there occupied.

Repairing is almost an art in itself. The emperor established a small
school at Berlin for training girls in this trade. The studio of the
late Mr. Ffoulke in Florence kept twenty or thirty girls occupied. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has a repair studio under a
graduate of the Berlin school. The factories of Baumgarten and of
Herter, in New York, also conduct repairs; and the museum at Boston as
well.

We cannot make old tapestries, but we can restore and preserve them by
skilled labour in special ateliers. Restoration by the needle is the
only perfect restoration, and this is as yet but little done here,
although the method is so well known in Europe. We deplore the quicker
way, to use the loom for weaving large sections of border or large
bits which have gone into hopeless shreds, or have disappeared
altogether by reason of the bitter years when tapestries had fallen
into neglect. But the quicker way is the poorer, with these great
claimants for time. The woven figures are relentless in this, that
they claim of the living man a lion's share of his precious days. His
reward is that they outlast him. Food for cynics lies there.

The careful worker looks close and sees the warp exposed like fiddle
strings here and there. She matches the colour of silk and wool to the
elusive shades and covers stitch by stitch the bare threads, in
perfect imitation of the loom's way.

Sometimes the warp is gone. Then the work tests the best skill. The
threads, the _chaine_, must be picked up, one by one, and united
invisibly to the new, and then the pattern woven over with the needle.
It happens that large holes remain to be filled entirely, the pattern
matched, the design caught or imagined from some other part of the
fabric. That takes skill indeed. But it is done, and so well, that the
repairer is called not that, but a restorer.

The two factories in New York, the Baumgarten and Herter ateliers,
have certain employes always busy with repairs and restorations. Given
even a fragment, the rest is supplied to make a perfect whole, in
these studios where the manner of the old workers is so closely
studied. For big repairs a drawing is made, a cartoon on the same
principle a