In my foreground sit Meg and Jean and Elspeth playing with thrums and wearing the fruit of David's loom in their gingham frocks.

David himself sits on his wooden bench behind the maze of cords that form the 'loom harness.' The snows of seventy winters powder his hair and beard.

His spectacles are often pushed back on his kindly brow, but no glass could wholly obscure the clear integrity and steadfast purity of his eyes; and as for his smile, I have not the art to paint that! It holds in solution so many sweet though humble virtues of patience, temperance, self-denial, honest endeavour, that my brush falters in the attempt to fix the radiant whole upon the canvas.

Fashions come and go, modern improvements transform the arts and trades, manual skill gives way to the cunning of the machine, but old David Robb, after more than fifty years of toil, still sits at his hand-loom and weaves his winceys for the Pettybaw bairnies.
David has small book-learning, so he tells me; and indeed he had need to tell me, for I should never have discovered it myself,--one misses it so little when the larger things are all present! A certain summer visitor in Pettybaw (a compatriot of ours, by the way) bought a quantity of David's orange-coloured wincey, and finding that it wore like iron, wished to order more.

She used the word 'reproduce' in her telegram, as there was one pattern and one colour she specially liked.