sacrifice of the ancient hangings wherever they are found; and after
that it is their restoration and preservation. This is the reason for
recent high prices and the reason, too, for the establishment of
ateliers of repair, which are found in all large centres in Europe as
well as wherever any important museum exists in America.

It would not be possible nor profitable to dwell on the tapestry
repair shops of Europe. They have always been; the industry is one
that has existed since the Burgundian dukes tore holes in their
magnificent tapestries by dragging them over the face of Europe, and
since Henry the Eighth, in eager imitation of the continentals,
established in the royal household a supervisor of tapestry repairs.
Paris is full of repairers, and in the little streets on the other
side of the Seine old women sit in doorways on a sunny day, defeating
the efforts of time to destroy the loved _toiles peintes_. But this
haphazard repair, done on the knee, as a garment might be mended, is
not comparable to the careful, exact work of the restorer at her
frame. One ranks as woman's natural task of nine stitches, while the
other is the work of intelligent patience and skilled endeavour.

Wherever looms are set up, a department of repair is the logical
accompaniment. As every tapestry taken from the loom appears punctured
with tiny slits, places left open in the weaving, and as all of these
need careful sewing before the tapestry is finished, a corps of
needlewomen is a part of a loom's equipment. This is true in all but
the ateliers of the Merton Abbey factory, of which we shall speak
later.

Apart from repairs, what is being done in the present day? So little
that historians of the future are going to find scant pickings for
their record.

FRANCE

The Gobelins factory being the last one to make a permanent
contribution to art, the impulse is to ask what it is doing now. That
is easily answered, but there is no man so optimistic that he can find
therein matter for hope.

France is commendably determined not to let the great industry die. It
would seem a loss of ancient glory to shut down the Gobelins. Yet why
does it live? It lives because a body of men have the patriotic pride
to keep it alive. But as for its products, they are without
inspiration, without beauty to the eye trained to higher expressions
of art.

The Gobelins to-day is almost purely a museum, not only in the
treasures it exposes in its collecti