interesting to know that our modern comet was recorded in China in
the Eleventh Century, and has its portrait on the Bayeux tapestry, and
that it frightened the great Harold into a fit of guilty conscience.

The archeologist gives reason for the faith that is in him concerning
the Bayeux tapestry by reading the language of its details, such as
the style of arms used by its preposterous soldiers; by gestures; by
groupings of its figures; and we are only too glad to believe his
wondrous deductions.

There are in all fifteen hundred and twelve figures in this celebrated
cloth, if one includes birds, beasts, boats, _et cetera_, with the
men; and amidst all this elongated crowd is but one woman. Queen
Matilda, left at home for months, immured with her ladies, probably
had quite enough of women to refrain easily from portraying them.
Needless to say, this one embroidered lady interests poignantly the
archeologist.

Most of the animals are in the border--active little beasts who make a
running accompaniment to the tale they adorn. This excepts the very
wonderful horses ridden by knights of action.

Scenes of the pictured history of William's conquest are divided one
from the other by trees. Possibly the archeologist sees in these
evidences of extinct varieties, for not in all this round, green world
do trees grow like unto those of the Bayeux tapestry. They are dream
trees from the gardens of the Hesperides, and set in useful decoration
to divide event from event and to give sensations to the student of
the tree in ornament.

Such is the Bayeux tapestry, which, as was conscientiously forewarned,
is not a tapestry at all, but the most interesting embroidery of
Europe.

CHAPTER XXIV

TO-DAY

The making of inspired tapestry does not belong to to-day. The _amour
propre_ suffers a distinct pain in this acknowledgment. It were far
more agreeable to foster the feeling that this age is in advance of
any other, that we are at the front of the world's progress.

So we are in many matters, but those matters are all bent toward one
thing--making haste. Economy of time occupies the attention of
scientist, inventor, labourer. Yet a lavish expenditure of time is the
one thing the perfect tapestry inexorably demands, and that is the
fundamental reason why it cannot now enter a brilliant period of
production like those of the past.

It is not that one atelier cannot find enough weavers to devote their
lives to sober, leis