Page:Textile fabrics; a descriptive catalogue of the collection of church-vestments, dresses, silk stuffs, needle-work and tapestries, forming that section of the Museum (IA textilefabricsde00soutrich).pdf/562



the weird sisters may be individually known by her proper name written in white letters near her head. Beginning from the right side of the piece, we have the spinster Clotho, who is figured as a youthful maiden; amid the boughs of a tree just above her is seen a long-billed bird of the snipe-kind; she is gaily dressed in a yellow kirtle, elaborately diapered after a flowery pattern done in green, over which she wears a gown of deep crimson velvet, while from her girdled waist falls a large golden chain ending in a gold pomander. In her left hand she holds a distaff, keeping at the same time between her fingers the thread which she has but just done spinning. Next to Clotho stands Lachesis, almost as young in look; she is not quite so sprightly but yet as elegantly clad as her sister with the distaff; billing and cooing above this feigned manager of individual destiny we behold a pair of turtle-doves; this second of the Fates is clad in robes of a light pink tone nicely and artistically diapered, and with her left hand she takes from Clotho the thread just spun and with her right passes it on to Atropos. This the last, and the most dreaded of the fatal three, looks older than the other two, and is arrayed more matronly. Clothed in deep blue, Atropos wears a large full white kerchief, which, as its name implies, not only covers her head, but falls well down from her shoulders half-way to her broad girdle, upon which is slung a string of beads for prayer—a rosary. Atropos, whose imaginary office was to cut with knife, or scissors, or a pair of shears, the thread of life, uses no such an instrument here; for with her hands she has broken the life-cord, and the spindle, around which it had been wound, lies thrown upon the flowery turf close by the head of the victim of the Fates. At the feet of these three sisters lies, stretched out in all her fullest length, a youthful lady dead. She wears a kerchief on her head, and over her richly-diapered pink gown she has a light crimson mantle thickly powdered with small golden crescents. Her bed seems made of early summer flowers; and alongside of her, and as if just fallen from her outstretched right hand, lies the tall stalk, snapped short off near the lower end, of a blooming white lily. At one side, but lower down, is the half-figure of a monkey; some way to the right, but on the same level, sits in quiet security a large brown hare; while between these two animals, from out a hole in the ground, as if they snuffed their future prey in the dead body, are creeping a weasel and a stoat, just after a large toad that has crawled out before them.
 * where sprinkled with many kinds of flowers, stand the Fates. Each of

This piece of tapestry, valuable alike for its artistic excellence and its good preservation, has a more than common interest about it. In all like