“Laxey, Isle of Man, March 4th, 1876.
“Dear Sir,—In this month’s ‘Fors,’ page 107—‘Affairs of the Master,’—if
you add up the amounts paid out, I think you will find, instead of £360
2s. 0d., the amount should be £370 2s. 3d., and leaves a proper balance
of £225 5s. 6d.
“I hope you will not be offended at me for troubling you with these
trifling errors, of no moment; but I have got a singular habit—that I
can never pass over a column of added figures, no matter what length,
without testing their correctness.
“Yours truly,
“E. Rydings.”
(If only my good correspondent—now a Companion—will indulge himself
constantly in this good habit as respects the Fors accounts, I shall be
much more at ease about them. But his postscript is more important.)
“P.S. You say that the girls of St. George’s Company shall learn to
spin and weave, etc. There is a good deal of hand-spinning done on this
little island, but I am sorry to say that there are no young girls
learning now to spin; and in a few years more, the common spinning
wheel here will be as great a curiosity as it is in Lancashire, where
one is never seen—only at the theatre. I have gone to some little
trouble to ascertain why the young girls are not learning now to spin;
and the principal reason I can gather is that home-spun ‘Manks-made
dresses,’ as they are called, last too long, and therefore do not give
the young women a chance of having four or five new dresses in the
year. I could give you some interesting information about hand-spinning
and weaving here, but must reserve it for another time, and will send
you patterns of cloth, etc. All our blankets, sheets, flannels, skirts,
jacket cloth, stockings, and yarns, have been spun by my wife and her
mother before her. We have now linen sheets in wear, not a hole or a
tear in them, that were spun by my wife’s mother,—and she, poor body,
has been dead twenty-eight or twenty-nine years,—the flax grown on
their own farm. Fine and white they are, and would compare favourably
in fineness with machine-made Irish linen. The daughters of Lord
Auckland, when he was bishop here, used to go every Saturday afternoon
to my wife’s mother’s, (who lived just behind Bishop Court,) to learn
to spin.
“But I must write you a special letter on the subject when I have got
my patterns ready.”