VANISHING CRAFTS.
What a number of charming local crafts are very nearly extinct, though we hope a considerable revival is imminent. One of these is the making of large jugs or miniature casks out of iron-bound oak staves. The secret of the art is now, I believe, left to the members of a single family in the South- West, and likely to pass clean out of memory. Yet some of the work has the same sort of artistic merit as, for example, the product of the oil-jar potters of Italy. One of the charms of thew local crafts is that they are hereditary. It is alleged that the two or three families who practise the beautiful art of Norfolk thatching can trace ancestral thatchers back to the fourteenth century, some say even earlier. How rich the tech- nique is may be seen in the homesteads built for the ex-Service smallholders at Sutton Bridge. In that costly experiment— and yet wise experiment—nothing was better worth imitation than the architectural designs, on which more or less local craftsmen put the finer flourish.
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