[Illustration: WOMAN WITH HETCHEL. 15TH-CENTURY]
After the first hackle, six other finer ones were frequently applied, and the amount of good fibre left after all this hackling, even from a huge mass of raw material, was very small; but a very large quantity of linen thread could be spun from this small amount. The fibres were then sorted according to fineness by a process called “spreading and drawing.” Now at last the flax was ready for the wheel, and was wrapped around the distaff; the spinner seated herself at this familiar implement and spun out a long, even thread from the mass of fibre on the distaff. This thread she wound on bobbins as she spun it, and when the bobbins were full, she wound it off on a reel into knots and skeins. This was the clock-reel, which ticked when a certain number of strands had been wound in a “knot”; then the spinner would pause and tie the knot, and if at that moment some ardent admirer were watching this pretty and graceful occupation, it is not at all likely that the busy spinster could escape a more tangible proof of his admiration, for it is written that “He kissed Mistress Polly when the clock-reel ticked.”
Doubtless John Alden improved his opportunities when he was told to speak for himself; at least, let us hope that Priscilla did not have to hint about everything.
It was a good day’s work to spin two skeins of twenty knots each, every knot having usually forty threads. For this work a woman earned eight cents a day and her keep. In the valley of Wyoming, where so many Connecticut families emigrated to meet their terrible doom later on at the hands of the Indians, a woman was paid six shillings a week for her labor at spinning.
Before the threads could be woven they had still to pass through a long and laborious process of bleaching by soaking them in many waters, then with hot water and ashes over and over again, then in clear water again for a week, then a final seething, rinsing, beating, washing, drying, and winding on bobbins, when they were at last ready for the loom.
Such was the far from simple process of flax-culture and spinning on the farm: when we remember that wool culture and spinning was scarcely less laborious, and that the home weaving of both kinds of thread has not yet been taken into the account, we shall begin to realize what it meant to the women of ’76 when they voluntarily took oath to wear naught but homespun, they and their sons and their daughters.