Note 4 — LETTER LXVIII.

“I want to tell you about an old woman we sometimes go to see here” (Brighton), “who was ninety-one yesterday. She lived in service till her health failed, and since then she has had her own little room, which is always exquisitely clean and neat. The bed-hangings and chair-covers are all of white dimity, embroidered by her in patterns of her own designing, with the ravellings of old carpets. She has made herself two sets. Her carpet is made in the same way, on coarse holland covered close with embroidery, which, as she says proudly, never wears out. She is still able to work, though her arrangement of colours isn’t quite as good as it used to be. The contrast came into my mind between work like that, and something I was told the other day,4—that it takes a workwoman a week to make one inch of the finest Valenciennes lace, and that she has to do it, sitting in a dark cellar, with the light only admitted through a narrow slit, to concentrate it on the work. It’s enough to make one give up wearing Valenciennes at all!”