A DAY WITH RAGS, TATTERS & CO.

161

 

A DAY WITH RAGS, TATTERS & Co.

—_—_—

By Amanpa B. Harris.

 

 

HE thing that was expected of me

one day was to find the picturesque

and romantic side there is to such practical kind of

business as the making of paper—to tell that, and

make the plain facts of the case more attractive. It

looked “oo practical, and I was hopeless, but the
mummies decided it,

What had the mummies to do with it? Just this,
that some of the cloudy, obscurish sort of blue-gray
paper that has been in use was once Egyptian cloth.
T have a very positive impression that blue is the pre-
vailing color worn by the common people in some
of the Eastern countries; it certainly is in China, a
dull blue; and if I mistake not, the Jewish women of
old wore it; and the Egyptians, not only in former
times, but they wear it still.

At any rate, that dingiest, dreariest of blues was
the color of a peculiar kind of cloth, which it gives
you a creepy sort of feeling to touch; woven long,
long ago on the quaint Egyptian looms; worn first-—
who knows ?—and at last wound and wound about
the mummies before they were laid away in their
niches of silence. All the Egyptian dead of by-gone

ages were embalmed and swathed in cloth, whether
they were rich or poor. For the former class the kind of
linen called dyssus was used, as microscopic examina-
tion has proved. For the poorer it was a coarser,
cheaper stuff, looking like hard, firm cotton (I havea
piece of it here); and on some mummies there were
“not less than forty thicknesses of cloth ;” sometimes
more than thirty pounds of bandages on one person,
So that there was opportunity for securing an immense
amount of material for paper, if anybody chose to
engage in such abominable business, '

What sacrilegious, unnatural traffic that was —
unswathing those forms, and sending shiploads of
blue cerements across the ocean as merchandise !
But then, we must bear in mind that, religiously as
the old Egyptians preserved their dead, the modern
ones have always been ready to offer mummies for
sale as curiosities. When we remember this, we
shall feel less surprise that they should sell the
wrappings too!

They were all fumigated at some of those far Med-
iterranean ports, packed in bales and shipped; on
whose responsibility it would be useless to inquire,