the minds of all sorts of persons who sew
things together to make garments, and do it
by means of the same invention,—of an
instrument which shall pierce the material, and
draw a thread after it, to tie two edges
together! We could not but think, while on the
table-land of Redditch, of the odd places in
which, at intervals of years, we had observed
this process, or the records of it.

In the Lebanon, high up among the defiles
and rocky platforms, which succeed each
other till the celebrated cedars are reached,
there is a village, nestling among mulberry
groves and orchards, called Eden, and believed
by many people in the East to be the real
first home of Adam and Eve. We did not,
when we were there, see anybody sewing
figleaves together; but we mention that place,
not only because it is a wide-spread belief that
the first sewing ever done was done there, but
because we had, a little while before going
there, seen a piece of sewing, of extremely old
date. The work that we saw was a piece of
darning, with the threaded needle still sticking
in it, after the lapse of several thousand
years. The old Egyptians had a custom of
burying in their handsome, roomy rock tombs,
specimens of the works and possessions of
the deceased; and the cotton fabric that we
saw, with the pretty unfinished darn (more
like herring-bone stitch than our ordinary
darning), and the needle sticking in it, was,
no doubt, the property and the handiwork of
the lady in whose tomb it was found. It may
be seen in Dr. Abbott's collection of curiosities
at Cairo. Those old Egyptians seem to
have known the use of steel. They used it
for armour; but not, we suppose, for needles;
for this needle—the one remaining needle
from the world of above five thousand years
ago, is of wood. The wood is hard, and the
needle is made as small, probably, as it can
be, but it is sadly clumsy;—harder to use, no
doubt, than the sail-makers' needles we saw
under the file at Redditch. It is a curious
thing, however, to glance back, through all
those thousands of years, to the Egyptian lady,
sitting in her elegant chair, mending her
muslin garment (whatever it might be), while
surrounded by her children,—one of whom was
playing with her doll (still in mummified existence),
with a face and hair uncommonly like
the Sphinx—and another, a baby, handling—
not a woolly bow-wow dog like those that yelp
in our nurseries—but a little snapping crocodile,
of wood, with a loose under jaw. And then
—what a long step it is over space and time!
—to the place where we have seen another
sort of needle, with its thread—no more to
be compared with the Redditch needles than
the Egyptian one;—the green shores of
Mackinaw, in Lake Michigan, where, in some
of the long row of wigwams, there are, at
this day, Indian women, sewing with a needle
of stout porcupine quill, and thread of the
sinews of the deer. Again, among those
that we have not seen, there are the fish-
bones that the Greenlanders and the South
Sea Islanders use;—the women of the one
race sitting in their snow-burrow, stitching
by the light of their oil-lamps; and the
women of the other race wearing, while at
work, a great palm-leaf on their heads for
shade; and cooling themselves occasionally
by a swim in the calm water within the coral
reefs. Again,—but we must not stop to tell
of all the different kinds of needles used in
the world—though the list would now be a
short one. It would be a short list, because
our English needles of to-day are spreading
all over the known world, wherever exchange
of commodities is going on.

Some of us may feel uncomfortable at this
thought;—uncomfortable at the recollection of
a sad story about that. Do we not know of
certain purchases, made of certain simple Africans
—the purchase-money on our side being needles
—" Whitechapel sharps," duly gilded at the
head,—which were found, after the departure
of the traders, to be without eyes ? It is a
sad story. The Redditch makers, who used
to prepare gilt " Whitechapel sharps" for the
African market, say that they don't believe
it; that the needles were of a coarse and ill-
finished kind; but that they were never
"blind." Yet the testimony is so strong, and
the effects of the cheat were so serious in
damaging our commercial character among
the savages, that we fear there can have
been no mistake. It was, no doubt, a
parallel case with that of the Anglo-Saxons,
who sold a handful of gunpowder for a bale
of furs, to the Red Indians, instructing their
customers to sow the gunpowder in furrows,
to get valuable crops next summer; and with
that of the Dutch traders, who used their own
hands and feet for weight,—the hand for half
a pound, and the foot for a pound, and
eternally astonished the Indians at the quantity
of furs they had to heap up, and squeeze into
the scale, to weigh down the Dutchman's
pound. If we laugh at such stories, it is with
a weeping heart; for tricks like these, done
in any corner where new races are found, are
a grave misfortune to the whole human race.

How is it that " Whitechapel sharps " are,
or were, made at Redditch ? It is supposed
to be because Elias Krause lived in Whitechapel;
giving a good name to needles, which
they long preserved. And who was Elias
Krause? He was a German, who came over
in 1565, and was the first maker of needles in
this country;—that is, of course, of the
modern kind of needle. And who taught the
Germans? The Spaniards,—if we may judge
by the importation of " Spanish needles " into
England and other countries before the
Germans made them. And who taught the
Spaniards? Nobody seems to know; so it is
reported that they invented the true needle,—
made of steel, with a point at one end, and an
eye at the other.

What pains Elias Krause took with his
work, we may judge by what some living