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regions might have been the workshop of the Cyclops.
Away in there I fancied them forging the strange,
cruel-looking iron things that the men were using,
and those ponderous iron doors which shut from sight
the fires seven times heated. They were like the
doors of ovens, that might have been a bakery for
Titans; and in the cavernous depths hidden by the
knobbed and massive doors, who could say but their
baked meats were sissling and browning?
Meanwhile, the odor was not of flesh or fowl,
plum pudding or good wheaten loaf; but a mingling
of cotton factory, machine oi] and lime water, tem-
pered by the chloride of lime and alum, which gave a
chemical flavor and taste to the universal atmosphere.
When we left that place where the fires never go
out, as one might almost say, for the machinery of the
mill never stops until midnight Saturday, we ascended
to the bleaching room. Up to it the lime-cleansed
rags are conveyed in little cars, the
full ones going up through a
trap door by a broad band,
and the empty ones coming

  

Catting aad fotge

There several tanks, huge enough to be bath tubs
for those same giants, are ready to receive them, and
men stand waiting with horrible tongs to clutch and
toss them in. Those tongs are like instruments of
torture; they must have been invented in the days of
the Spanish Inquisition.

A DAY WITH RAGS,

 
  
   
 
 
 
 
   

TATTERS & CO.

In each vat is a washing engine, which keeps a
stream of clean water all the time running through
that mess which is like a cauldron of witches’ soup;
washing, washing, while the foul water goes pouring
out through a great pipe, and is carried off into the
river below. A screen of fine wire keeps the stock
from washing away ; and in out of sight is machinery
that grinds the rags, and there are sets of knives and
zigzag knives which tear them without hurting the
fibre; and there they are ground and dismembered
and tormented for five hours or less, according to
their state of soil and oiliness when they are put in.
Then the water is let off, a curious little trap which
catches the buttons that have managed to accompany
the rags so far on the way to being paper, is opened,
the buttons scraped down towards their final place of
deposit in the river, and the chloride of lime and
alum are next in order. We happened to be
on the spot just after these things were put
in, and we were standing near and intently
looking down into the tub or vat or tank
(either name is well enough, though I am
pretty sure the men said “ tub”), when of a
sudden the whole company of us set to
crying and laughing together, and had to

 

retreat, the fumes were so overpowering, and the
faces of all the workmen were one broad grin at the
sight.

After the bleaching powders are in, the whole
mass begins to churn into foam, and is kept churning
and churning for three quarters of an hour, and the