king would be hung along a pole, to be dipped into the melted fat
again and again as fast as the grease would cool on the strings and thus
increase with every dipping the size of the slender tapering candle.
Between the intervals of dipping, the little mother would hurry back to
her chair and there sit and cut long strips of cloth and sew them
together into carpet rags. When the piles on the floor at her side would
be high enough, she would run them off around her elbow into a hank
ready to be colored. The little girls in the family would have peeled
bark from the butternut trees and gathered golden rod and other herbs
and these would have been steeped thoroughly for the magical liquors
which would be standing ready in crocks full of dyes to give the brown
and yellow and green and blue tint to these hanks of rag-cord. Then the
weaving loom would be got ready in the attic and the shuttle would fly
back and forth and the rags would soon be transformed into a smooth,
well-striped carpet, which would come off in pieces several yards long.
Later on these would be sewed together into a beautiful floor covering
to be used for the parlor first, afterward, when the freshness was
somewhat worn off, for the living-room; later for some hallway, and last
of all, what remained from many footsteps would be made into little rugs
to be put down extra in such places as needed special protection.

The craftswoman who did all this was equally gifted in making the
cross-stitch initials for the corner of the bolster and the knitted lace
for its edge. She was master of all tricks with the needle as well as
with the shuttle and the wooden spoon. Moreover, that grandmother was
the mother of fifteen children, and there was nobody but herself to
make mittens and stockings for all of them for both winter and summer.
So her knitting-needles simply had to fly in all the interstices between
tasks of weaving and spinning and dyeing and soap-making and
candle-making and other work. All this was to be done besides what the
average women of to-day have to do and think pretty hard for them.

Edith Abbott in her book, _Woman in Industry_, mentions forty-nine
different processes in the factory of to-day that now take the place of
the work of one woman as she stitched a pair of shoes in her home, as
women often did in the middle New England pioneering era, to accomplish
the detail of all the industries that passed through the hands of that
capable little gra