CLUMSY FINCERS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 5, 30 January 1892, Page 113

CLUMSY FINCERS.

* It is of no use my trying to sew,' said a girl in her late teens ; *lam so clumsy with a needle. My stitches are an inch long ! Mamma does my mending. She says when I do it myself my things look so that she is ashamed to let me wear them.' But if the mother were less self sacrificing, it is probable that a few hours' practice under her direction would easily reduce those clumsy stitches to a res|>ectably small fraction of an inch in length. Another young lady admitted the other day, with a laugh, that she always darned her stockings by drawing the edges of the holes together with the thread, because weaving it in and out as her mother did took so much more time and care. Girls of this sort belong to the untrained or the lazy class. But the careless are quite as common, and perhaps more exasperating. ‘ Oh, I’m very sorry ; but you know I always was a butter fingers,' explains calmly 7 the dreamy young person who spills gravy in a lady’s lap at dinner, because she is passing the gravy-boat with her mind on the last chapter of a story, and does not notice that she is tipping it. Presently she helps to butter, with the same vague expression in her eyes, and sends the bit, which she attempts to cut from the hard pat without looking at it. Hying across the table. ‘Did it spot your dress?’ she asks her sister ; ‘ I hope not; but, of course, I couldn’t help its Hying off'. I’m very sorry.’ But the trouble is precisely that she is not very sorry ; at least, not sorry enough to prevent the same thing from happening again. It is worth while to remember that there is such a thing as being stupid with one’s fingers. There should lie direct communication between the hand and the brain : but some people, with otherwise excellent brains, do not seem to realise this fact, and allow their hands a kind of helpless liberty which works disaster among bric-a-brac, and makes many simple tasks absurdly formidable.