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238 lecture on dyeing to the workmen was really a success."

This lecture was one of a series given to working men by experts on the principles and practice of their crafts. The others were given by Mr. Crane, Mr. Emery Walker, and Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, all of them either declared Socialists or in full sympathy with Socialism. "On the whole the working men were good and attentive," Morris says, "and stood our Socialism well, in fact seemed to relish it."

"I have finished my book (last night)," he writes to Kelmscott on the 10th of October, "and there will not be many more proofs I think. I have a mind to begin a short story again soon; but shall say no more about it till it is under way. I have been to Oxford Street and Merton, and find business good: the girls were hard at work on the yellow carpet, but had not done very much to it yet. I was busy at pointing all the day. The tapestry is going on well, though not very fast. We have sold the 'Peace' exhibited at the Arts and Crafts for £160, which I am glad of. As for the Exhibition, I think it will be a success: the rooms look very pretty; and there are a good many interesting works there. The visitors come pretty well: these first three days they have taken more than double than they did in the same time last year; so this looks good."

"The Roots of the Mountains" was published in the middle of November. The study of typography as a fine art, which had been begun in "The House of the Wolfings," was here carried out much more fully, and the result was a page of great beauty. "I am so pleased with my book," Morris said soon after it was published, "—typography, binding, and must I say it, literary matter—that I am any day to be seen huggling it up, and am become a spectacle to Gods