My pattern of to-day had always pleased me, for we had woven many yards of it before,—­the machines and I. There were rich green leaves and flowers, gay flowers that shone in light and hid themselves in shade, and I had always admired their grace and coloring.  To-day they had seemed to me cold and dusky.  All my ideas that I had gained from conventional carpet-flowers, which, woven almost beneath my hand, had seemed to rival Nature’s, all these ideas had been suddenly swept away.  My eyes had opened upon real flowers waving in real sunshine; and my head grew heavy at the sound of the clanking machine weaving out yards of unsunned flowers.  If only that sunshine, I thought, would light up these green leaves, put a glow on these brilliant flowers, instead of this poor coloring which tries to look like sunshine, we might rival Nature.  But the moment I was so thinking, the rays of sunlight I have spoken of fell on the gay threads.  They seemed, before my eyes, to seize upon the poor yellow fibres which were trying to imitate their own glow, and, winding themselves round them, I saw the shuttle gather these rays of sunlight into the meshes of its work.  I was to stand there till noon.  So, long before I left, the gleam of sunshine had left the narrow window and was hidden from the rest of the long room by the gray stone-walls of another building which rose up outside.  But as long as they lingered over the machine that I was watching, I saw, as though human fingers were placing them there, rays of sunlight woven in among the green leaves and brilliant flowers.

After that gleam had gone, my work grew dark and dreary, and, for the first time, my walls seemed to me like prison-walls.  I longed for the end of my day’s work, and rejoiced that the sun had not yet set when I was free again.  I was free to go out across the meadows, up the hills, to catch the last rays of sunset.  Then coming home, I stooped to pick the flowers which grew by the wayside in the waning light.

All that June which followed, I passed my leisure hours and leisure days in the open air, in the woods.  I chased the sunshine from the fields in under the deep trees, where it only flickered through the leaves.  I hunted for flowers, too, beginning with the gay ones which shone with color.  I wondered how it was they could drink in so much of the sun’s glow.  Then I fell to studying all the science of color and all the theories which are woven about it.  I plunged into books of chemistry, to try to find out how it was that certain flowers should choose certain colors out from the full beam of light.  After the long days, I sat late into the night, studying all that books could tell me.  I collected prisms, and tried, in scattering the rays, to learn the properties of each several pencil of light.  I grew very wise and learned, but never came nearer the secret I was searching for,—­why it was that the Violet, lying so near the Dandelion, should choose and find such a different dress to wear.  It was