Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/347

326 "The yarns dyed," Mr. George Wardle informs me, "were used for the pile carpets, for he began this business about the same time in Queen Square." The first of his carpet-looms was set up in the top story, and a carpet-knotter was got from Glasgow to teach the girls the method of working; she stayed a few weeks, by the end of which time the girls had learned all that she could teach. The first of his silk-looms, of which there will be more to say hereafter, was set up in Ormond Yard, a year or two later. It was not, however, till he was able to arrange a complete set of dye-shops and bleaching-grounds of his own at Merton Abbey that either carpet or silk weaving could be carried on by him except on a small and experimental scale.

What he worked at most assiduously at Leek was the lost art of indigo-dyeing. In itself this is one of the most delicate and uncertain vats in its due preparation and maturing. The experienced indigo-dyer is said to know when the fermentation has reached its proper point by an acute sense of smell, where no more scientific tests are found to answer. If the proper moment is not seized, the vat becomes useless. Even when the three days' preparation of the vat has been brought to a successful issue, the proper dipping of the yarn, so as to take the dye evenly, and not let any part of it touch the air for a moment, is a matter of the most delicate and accurate handling. "The setting of the blue-vat," Morris says in the essay on Dyeing, "is a ticklish job, and requires, I should say, more experience than any dyeing process." The decay of European indigo-dyeing, itself an art of late importation and not practised in Europe till the end of the sixteenth century, and its replacement by the so-called Prussian blue (ferro-cyanide of potassium, dyed on an iron basis) early in this century, and long