Art and Handcraft in the Woman's Building
of the World's Columbian Exposition

IN THE WOMAN’S BUILDING. 207 of the needle in Great Britain, lias extended its potent influence throughout the United States, and that the leading- schools of needlework in this country acknowledge that they owe their very existence to the Kensington school. In music we are not behind. Virginia Gabriel’s songs have had a wide and well-deserved popularity, shared by the compositions of Elizabeth Philp. Among our younger composers, two of the most eminent, Rosalind Ellicott and Ethel Smythe, have contributed manuscript copies of some of their best-known works. In commerce woman is taking every day a more prominent place. In the old days, the only refuge for a reduced gentlewoman was the profession of a governess or companion, but to-day we find many women of good family who find in trade an excellent and dignified means of self-support. Several ladies of rank, as is very well known, have opened millinery and dressmaking estab- lishments. In philanthropic work Englishwomen have long been prominent, while in literature they have maintained the high position won for them by Maria Edgeworth, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Brown- ing, and the Brönte sisters. Among our most popular novelists to- day are Miss Braddon, Ouida, Rhoda Broughton, Mrs. Lynn Linton, Mrs. Alexander, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, and the late Miss Edwards, whose fame as an archaeologist has almost eclipsed her work in literature. Frances Power Cobb is a name worthy to close this very imperfect survey of the women who to-day are among the leading spirits in the fields of intellectual labor. The work of women may be likened to the labor of the coral insects who for centuries toil unseen and unnoticed beneath the ocean of oblivion. At last a day comes when the winds and the waves bring their tribute of soil, the passing birds drop the seeds of tree and flower, and of a sudden a fair island-rises from the sea, with fruit and foliage and pleasant streams. The navigator discovers the new land and writes it down on his chart, and the patient toil of the untold myriads of insects is at last rewarded. E. Crawford. Mrs. Crawford, the writer of this paper, exhibits one of the most striking pict- ures in the Hall of Honor, a large water-color painting of a Roman scene, a nun passing up a marble stairway, and looking back at a cheerful young peasant woman leading a rosy child and carrying a funeral wreath. The colors used in this v oik are of a new manufacture, and attention is called to the reds, which have pioved very satisfactory.—Ed.