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"It's falling to pieces," screamed the bass, and spread out a fin, ready to turn. And now the boards fell off, the box was open, and one could see what it was like inside; and that was the prettiest sight of all. "It's a trap! Don't go too near!" said the eel-mother. "It's a hand-loom!" said the stickleback, who builds a nest for itself and understands the art of weaving.
We have cast behind us the myths and miracles, proven the absurdity of our ancestors' most cherished traditions and brought their idols beneath the iconoclastic hammer. In this general social and intellectual house-cleaning have we consigned virtue to the rubbish heap or at best relegated it to the garret with the spinning-wheel, hand-loom and other out-of-date trumpery?
Our "Spitalfields" poor who fought a long battle with the hand-loom against the loom driven by steam power, might not have been at length utterly ruined if they had had freehold houses and some small garden in a healthy country.
So it happened, oddly enough, that Thomas Edward, a Scotchman of the Scotch, was born close under the big forts of Portsmouth harbour. After Waterloo, however, the Fifeshire regiment was sent home again; and the militia being before long disbanded, John Edward, our hero's father, went to live at Aberdeen, where he plied his poor trade of a hand-loom linen weaver for many years.
He has to weave plain cloth, and finds doing so dullish on the one hand, and on the other that a power-loom will weave the cloth nearly as well as a hand-loom: so, in order to gain more leisure or time for more pleasurable work, he uses a power-loom, and foregoes the small advantage of the little extra art in the cloth.
When there was no longer a market for the produce of the hand-loom these farms had to be given up, and thus it is that the old school is not the only house in our weary glen around which gooseberry and currant bushes, once tended by careful hands, now grow wild.
Kay was a small manufacturer; Hargreaves a hand-loom weaver; Crompton the son of a small farmer; and Arkwright a country barber. Watt, son of a Greenock carpenter, came from the sturdy Scottish stock, ultimately of covenanting ancestry, from which so many eminent men have sprung. The new social class, in which such men were the leaders, held corresponding principles.
"When the class of the Nobility were supplanted in France, they did not amount in number to one-third of us Hand-Loom weavers; yet all Europe went to war to avenge their wrongs, every state subscribed to maintain them in their adversity, and when they were restored to their own country, their own land supplied them with an immense indemnity. Who cares for us? Yet we have lost our estates.
The girls had always plenty to do to spin and knit and sew. The boys, too, learned to knit, so that they could knit their own stockings. There was a hand-loom weaver among the settlers, and from him David learned to weave what his sisters spun. From this time, except a little calico, there was very little in the way of clothing the family had to buy.
The hand-loom weavers kept up a hopeless struggle in the garrets and cellars of the factory towns, while their wages were sinking lower and lower till finally the whole generation died out. The small farmers who lost the support of spinning and other by-industries succumbed in the competition with the larger producers.
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