for a guinea and a half; and after riding him with great success for two seasons, sold him for a guinea more.  One

may wonder how the child could have so much money, and how the animal could have been obtained for so little.  The same authority informs me that his first cloth suit was made from a scarlet habit, which, according to the fashion of the times, had been his mother’s usual morning dress.  If all this is true, the future admiral of the British Fleet must have cut a conspicuous figure in the hunting-field.  The other peculiarity was that, when the roads were dirty, the sisters took long walks in pattens.  This defence against wet and dirt is now seldom seen.  The few that remain are banished from good society, and employed only in menial work; but a hundred and fifty years ago they were celebrated in poetry, and considered so clever a contrivance that Gay, in his ‘Trivia,’ ascribes the invention to a god stimulated by his passion for a mortal damsel, and derives the name ‘Patten’ from ‘Patty.’

The patten now supports each frugal dame,
Which from the blue-eyed Patty takes the name.

But mortal damsels have long ago discarded the clumsy implement.  First it dropped its iron ring and became a clog; afterwards it was fined down into the pliant galoshe—lighter to wear and more effectual to protect—a no less manifest instance of gradual improvement than Cowper indicates when he traces through eighty lines of poetry his ‘accomplished sofa’ back to the original three-legged stool.

As an illustration of the purposes which a patten was intended to serve, I add the following epigram,

written by Jane Austen’s uncle, Mr. Leigh Perrot, on reading in a newspaper the marriage of Captain Foote to Miss Patten:—

Through the rough paths of life, with a patten your guard,
   May you safely and pleasantly jog;
May the knot never slip, nor the ring press too hard,
   Nor the Foot find the Patten a clog.

At the time when Jane Austen lived at Steventon, a work was carried on in the neighbouring cottages which ought to be recorded, because it has long ceased to exist.

Up to the beginning of the present century, poor women found profitable employment in spinning flax or wool.  This was a better occupation for them than straw plaiting, inasmuch as it was carried on at the family hearth, and did not admit of gadding and gossiping about the village.  The implement used was a long narrow machine of wood, raised on legs, furnished at one end with a large wheel, and at the other with a spindle on which the flax or wool was loosely wrapped, connected together by a loop of string.  One hand turned the wheel, while the other formed the thread.  The outstretched arms, the advanced foot, the sway of the whole figure backwards and forwards, produced picturesque attitudes, and displayed whatever of grace or beauty the work-woman might possess. {41}  Some ladies were fond of spinning, but they worked in a quieter manner, sitting at a neat little machine

of varnished wood, like Tunbridge ware, generally turned by the foot, with a basin of water at hand to supply the moisture required for forming the thread, which the cottager took by a more direct and natural process from her own mouth.  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.