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 in modern dress; adorn our design with living fancy, and rise to the height of our knowledge and capacities.

Doubtless there is danger to the untrained designer in direct resort to Nature. For the tendency in his or her case is to copy outright, to give us pure crude fact and not to design at all. Still there is hope in honest error: none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist. For the unskilled designer there is no training like drawing from an old herbal; for in all old drawing of Nature there is a large element of design. Besides which, the very limitations of the materials used in realising a design in needlework, be it ever so naturally coloured, hinders a too definite presentation of the real.

For the professional stylist, the confirmed conventionalist, an hour in his garden, a stroll in the embroidered 412