Three hundred miles from here, in the Alleghanies, people still can be found spinning and weaving and wearing homespun as in colonial days.
It was as though a black shadow stood at his elbow and urged him to go forward; and there were only weaving circles and floating pin-dots before his eyes.
And round the house sat fifty maid servants, some grinding the meal in the mill, some turning the spindle, some weaving at the loom, while their hands twinkled as they passed the shuttle, like quivering aspen leaves.
With a great crowd of select followers, amongst whom were both the worthy statesmen who had already been there before, he went to the cunning impostors, who were now weaving with all their might, but without fibre or thread.
The industrial changes in England at the end of the eighteenth century on the contrary were due mainly to great mechanical inventions. The development of the textile machines for cotton and wool spinning and weaving mark the beginning of the movement.
All alone during the stillness of the tropical mid-day, he would pursue his quiet work, sitting in the shade and weaving together the leaflets of his cocoanut branches, or rolling upon his knee the twisted fibres of bark to form the cords with which he tied together the thatching of his tiny house.
It is a life full of all kinds of exciting adventure, from weaving nests to crawling about in the sun and catching insect larvæ and crustaceans. The newt's day is practically never done, largely because the insect larvæ multiply three million times as fast as the newt can possibly catch and eat them.