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At present they put up garden seeds, make buckets and tubs, butter-tubs, brooms, dry measures, gather and dry roots and herbs for medicinal use, make maple-sugar in the spring and apple-sauce in the winter; sew shirts for Boston, and keep several knitting-machines busy, making flannel shirts and drawers and socks.
Many improvements followed. Jedediah Strutt produced the "Derby ribbed hose;" then the warp-loom was invented in the last century, and the bobbin-traverse net in 1809. The knitting-machines have been steadily improved, and now hosiery-making is carried on in extensive factories that give an individuality to the town. The rapidity with which stockings are reeled off the machines is astonishing.
Then next, along came the old Countess of Skibbereen, and she was on the hands of the Vandervelts with her scheme of getting knitting-machines for the poor people of Galway. She wasn't getting on a bit, for she was old and queer in her ways, and the Vandervelts were worried over it.
Nunneries here and there have been induced to accept presents of knitting-machines, and people have begun to regard as somehow sacred the words 'technical education. The National Board of Education has also spent a large sum of money in reviving among its teachers the almost forgotten art of making paper boats.
No shells fell among them while I was at the front, and out on the plain where the battle still raged the soixante-quinze batteries were as busy as knitting-machines working some kind of magic which protected that column from tornadoes of the same kind that they themselves were sending. The German artillery, indeed, seemed a little demoralized.
The other modes of making fabrics shown are a machine for making fishing-nets of great width, and a number of knitting-machines, from the stocking-frame of eighty years ago to the small domestic machine, and the larger one with nine hundred needles in the circumference and making a circular seamless fabric eighteen inches in diameter.
And there they sewed for four hours every forenoon for more than four years; and as they sewed some one would often read aloud to them, for Mrs. Martineau believed in education education gotten on the wing. Sewing-machines and knitting-machines have done more to emancipate women than all the preachers.
Knitting-machines of various orders were in use on the Continent, and had been brought into England; but any attempt to employ them here was for a long time unsuccessful. Yarn was spun especially for this purpose, usually with a double thread, and in the year 1698 Martha's Vineyard exported 9,000 pairs.
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