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Updated: June 4, 2025
It was in full sight from the door of the little shanty in which Aunt Ri's carpet-loom stood. As she sat there hour after hour, sometimes seven hours to the day, working the heavy treadle, and slipping the shuttle back and forth, she gazed with tender yearnings at the solemn, shining summit. When sunset colors smote it, it glowed like fire; on cloudy days, it was lost in the clouds.
Or it was done by the low wheel, which was kept whirling continuously by the use of a treadle worked by the foot, while the material was being drawn out all the time by the two hands, and twisted and wound continuously by the horseshoe-shaped device known as the "flyer."
The anxiety was burning her heart away; it would be burnt as dry as ashes soon. And she had been born a woman a weak woman a thing meant to sit at home with her foot on the treadle of her poor little wheel, while dear lives were risked and lost elsewhere. Rotha was a changed being. She was no longer the heartsome lassie who had taken captive the stoical fancy of old Angus.
"But Priscilla, I am sent to thee with a proffer of marriage, and if thou 'rt already bespoke 't is not fitting that thou shouldst hear it." "Thou 'rt sent, John Alden!" exclaimed the girl dropping the thread, and pressing her foot upon the treadle until it creaked. "Who sent thee?" "Captain Standish." "Sent thee! Was it too much honor to a poor maid for him to do his own errand?"
"I'm nobody's fool," she said, as she guided the cloth, snapped the thread, and rocked the treadle of the sewing machine; and she sang to herself from morning to evening. As the only songs she knew were from the hymnal, she sang, with a heart overflowing with praise: Ah how shall fallen man Be just before his God? If He contend in righteousness, We sink beneath His rod. Amen.
Inside this partition a Filipina servant worked the señora's loom. Back and forth went the shuttle under the little maid's deft fingers, and up and down went her slender bare foot on the treadle, so that even as we watched the striped red and cream abaca grew under our very eyes.
But his education hadn't run to scale drawings, so I drew it in perspective and repeated the figures with many gestures indicating roundness and thickness and other properties. He began to make the screws, copying the one I had made laboriously by hand. I offered to assist by putting my foot on the treadle, but he said it was not necessary.
One of our greatest school pleasures was to watch Aunt Hannah spinning on her flax-wheel, wetting her thumb and forefinger at her lips to twist the thread, keeping time, meanwhile, to some quaint old tune with her foot upon the treadle. A verse of one of her hymns, which I never heard anybody else sing, resounds in the farthest corner of my memory yet:"
If he saw that Rotha loved Ralph, he must give up forever his one dream of happiness and there an end. It was in this mood that he opened the kitchen door, just as Rotha had put her foot on the treadle and taken the flax in her hand. There the girl sat, side by side with his mother, spinning at the wheel which within his recollection no hand but one had touched.
The passenger's seat now occupied by Hiram was in the center line of the machine, so that, filled or vacant, the lateral balance was not affected. Hiram knew all about the monoplane dummy or the aerocycle with treadle power for practice work which he had operated under old Grimshaw's direction. As to the practical running of a biplane aloft, however, that was something for him to learn.
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