A little girl in Elizabethan costume stands in a room trying to thread a needle. Etching by A. Boulard the younger after Laura Alma Tadema.

An episode in the short story 'Jessy' in 'Le livre de mon ami' by Anatole France. In the London of Queen Elizabeth I, a philosopher called Bog takes in his orphaned niece Jessy. She distracts him from his obsession with a treatise he is writing, which is similar to the Pseudodoxia epidemica of Sir Thomas Browne (not named in the story). The ten volumes of his manuscript are shown in the etching, on a shelf below the window, with a bowl of carnations on the shelf above. "Un jour qu'il méditait sur ce sujet, il trouvait Jessy qui dans sa librairie, enfilait une aiguille devant la fenêtre ou était les oeillets." In preparation for the winter, she is about to repair her uncle's houppelande (man's indoor gown worn in cold weather). Eventually, under her influence he abandons the treatise and turns the volumes over to her for re-use as an herbarium