I remember two such
elegant little wheels in our own family.
It may be observed that this hand-spinning is the most primitive of
female accomplishments, and can be traced back to the earliest times.
Ballad poetry and fairy tales are full of allusions to it. The term
'spinster' still testifies to its having been the ordinary employment of
the English young woman. It was the labour assigned to the ejected nuns
by the rough earl who said, 'Go spin, ye jades, go spin.' It was the
employment at which Roman matrons and Grecian princesses presided amongst
their handmaids. Heathen mythology celebrated it in the three Fates
spinning and measuring out the thread of human life. Holy Scripture
honours it in those 'wise-hearted women' who 'did spin with their hands,
and brought that which they had spun' for the construction of the
Tabernacle in the wilderness: and an old English proverb carries it still
farther back to the time 'when Adam delved and Eve span.' But, at last,
this time-honoured domestic manufacture is quite extinct amongst
us--crushed by the power of steam, overborne by a countless host of
spinning jennies, and I can only just remember some of its last struggles
for existence in the Steventon cottages.
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