Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/250

240 background of clouds, and sky, and silence; some times with an equally misty one of the heads and faces and voices of people; but all this, merely as background, frame-work for the one vivid, gleaming picture of Ally in her marvelous attire. Never before was woman so clothed. Her passionate, artistic sense, spent and wrought itself in the fashioning of every garment she wore. She would not allow Jim to send her any gowns except of plain colors, and made in absolute simplicity of style. Then she herself, with silks and flosses of the most exquisite hues, wrought upon each gown its chosen ornament. Embroidery was to her as inevitable an expression as verse to a poet. It was like no other embroidery ever seen, except in some of the rarest Japanese tapestries. How into the heart of this lonely little girl, in Maine, entered the conception of thus repeating and rendering nature, by simple stitches of silk, is one of the secrets of divine births which no common law explains. No one taught her. No one could learn from her. She copied a grass, a flower, a bird, with her needle, rapidly, as another artist might with a pencil. The stitches were strokes of color. That was all. They were long and massive, or they were light and fine, as need was; looked at closely they were meaningless, and seemed chaotic; but at the right distance the picture was perfect,—perfect because copied from nature, with that ineffable blending of accuracy and inspiration which marks the true artist.