it entails, there continues ~ power in those hills to attract and enfold the people, for many who wander away return again from the luxuriousness of the cities, or look back with yearning to the simple, hard life among the hills. Something pathetic there is in all this, yet of great virtue, and .in those days when there is general lament over the depopulation of rural districts, and our teachers cry for a return to country-life, the feeling is surely one to be encouraged. Yet who would ·~xtol a life of such deplorable poverty as dependence on the soil among those highlands affords, and if we would have people in the rural districts, we must ensure them there higher comfort and easier access to the better things of life than can be snatched by slavish worming of a livelihood from 'Utter barrenness. And there lies the problem : a people deeply attached to a la:nd which is incapable of supporting them by ordinary means, for, after all, romance 1and poetry are but thin stuff for the stomach, and they ,have to dig from the bog or scratch from rock the fuel to keep the fire a-burning.. To one going fresh among such a people, this work seems an enormous waste of human energy. One stroke of a M'Cormick machine in Colorada will reap more harvest than a Celt with his spade in a round year. Those rough, rumbling hills were never meant to be tilled, and the' idea :at once strikes a stranger,-Is ~h·ere nothing else these people can give, in order to draw in, in exchange, some of the bountifulness of the outside world! What ·of the .sharp wits of the Celts, and the hundredand-one fine qualities that tradition giveB him by birthy-right? What of that ability and nimbleness that are never without their outstanding examples in high quarters, and which seem to gleam from the ordinary Irishman under the commonest conditions? Surely the world has uses for those ! "Some such ideas occur to all visitors to those parts, but some eighteen months ~go the fact so caught hold of certain manufacturers of artistic textiles, touring there, that they resolved to make a priactical experiment, especially as they were on the outlook at the time for districts where they could work a certain hand-industry that would employ large numbers of girls and boys. · This resulted in their establishing, just a year ago next month, a place for the making ·Of Hand-Tufted Carpets. of the descriptic;m known as Turkish or Persian. The peculiarity of this fabric is that from its nature it must be a hand-production. The tufts, or "mosaics of small woollen squares", as \Villiam Morris calls them, are tied by the fingers in klnots into longitudinal warps which are stretched between two long parallel beams. The. Carpets are made to the size and shape of any room. The design is placed in front, and the girls, from three to a dozen according to the size of the Carpet, select the colours indic.ated row by row, which are tied, then bound down :by "shoots" of woollen weft d~awn across the·. entire width, and beaten firm by small iron~toothed hammers. '.rhere is interesting variety and
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