A literary essay by Mary Austin portraying Seyavi, a Paiute basket maker of the Owens Valley in California. It recounts her widowhood, her survival after the Paiute defeat, her bowls decorated with a quail-plume design in colored bark, and her old age and blindness. Basketry appears as an expression of the maker's character and landscape rather than as a technical subject; there are no construction instructions.

A short story, "A Loom-Master of Iran," about an orphan boy from the Persian village of Sofian who is taken in by the caravan merchant Sadak and chooses to become a weaver rather than a farmer, shepherd or merchant. In a carpet factory in Azerbaijan he is made master of the loom on which a copy of the famous Ardebil mosque carpet is woven under an American superintendent. He finishes the carpet while plague spreads through the city, and dies on it. The text is fiction and contains no weaving instruction or drafts, but it gives a romanticized picture of child weavers, knotted-pile carpet work, tools and a bazaar workshop in turn-of-the-century Persia.