Embroidered sampler

In the pictureA border of red flowering vines runs around pale linen, and inside it a four-line poem is embroidered. Below are a large tree, a red-roofed house, a cow and a dog, and a man and woman out for a walk, and at the very bottom the name and date "Anne Fazackerley 1824." The thread is silk and chenille, and the leaves of the tree are raised and plump.

BackgroundIn early 19th-century England, the sampler went beyond alphabet practice to become a small picture holding poems and landscapes. The poem is a moral verse beginning "Virtue is the chief beauty of the mind," showing that girls learned reading and morals along with needlework. Anne Fazackerley was born in 1811, so she was thirteen when she made this sampler. The arrangement of house and animals is not a real landscape but a standard sampler pattern of the time.

Puzzle tipThe puzzle divides into four zones: the outer red vine border, the band of lettering in the middle, the house and tree scene below, and the name line at the very bottom. Run the border pieces around first, and judge the lettering pieces top from bottom by the spacing between lines. The green pieces of the tree and the red pieces of the house have distinct shapes and are easy.