Note 7 — LETTER XL.

“That is a pleasant evening in our family when we read and discuss the subjects of ‘Fors Clavigera,’ and we frequently reperuse them, as for instance, within a few days, your August letter. In page 16 I was much struck by the notice of the now exploded use of the spinning wheel. My mother, a Cumberland woman, was a spinner, and the whole process, from the fine thread that passed through her notable fingers, and the weaving into linen by an old cottager—a very ‘Silas Marner,’—to the bleaching on the orchard grass, was well known to my sister7 and myself, when children.