The Spinning-Wheel

       The spinning-wheel is certainly a pretty sight, whether we should see it in a drawing-room or in the moty sunbeam slanting through some old garret; and the little linen-wheel which our great grandmothers used to stand at their knees is a real object for an artist.

       Who can see its slant lines, its lovely curves, see its swift revolving circles, and the fine thread trembling to a mist as it draws out its length, and hear the pleasant hum it makes, without thoughts of sunny mornings, and bees in flowers, and all sweet rural sights and sounds? Few of us in looking at it think of the imprisonment of the spinner, still wetting her broadening thumb as the sunshine fell without, and she longed to be there, too the spinner like her of Mendelssohn's "Song Without Words," who sings her tune to the whirr of the wheel while the birds carol and the bees hum outside.'

       Rude as the spinning-wheel seems to us now, it was as wonderful an advance in its day from the hand-distaff as the jenny and mule and power-loom have been in their turn from the spinning-wheel. The distaff, indeed, made few improvements in itself in all its long career, the only notable changes being that from the time when very primitive people, who had little or no use of metal, loaded its spindle with a perforated stone, and others carried the load at the top instead of at the bottom of the spindle; but save for these simple changes, and the fact that the distaff which princes' daughters used was overlaid with gold, the distaff with which Clotho spun was the same as that which Burns' Jean took to her "rocking on Fasten's Eve" "rock" being the old term for the distaff and spindle. It was the simplest sort of pretty apparatus, not much more inelegant to carry than the modern tatting. No dame or damsel went abroad without it. The good spinner loaded her distaff with the tow at its upper end, and carried it protruding from under her left arm, and as she pulled the thread out between thumb and finger, the weight of the hanging and leaded spindle twisted it round and round still closer, and she wound it measure by measure about the body of the spindle as she twisted.

 How to spin yarn on a spinning wheel.