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of wood to the hundred. It has only to furnish a
sample, and the order is filled accordingly. A man
tears one of these sheets into fragments and throws
them into the tub of pulp. The suction draws them

. swiftly within the power of the machine which will

- soon reduce them to a mush, and incorporate them

thoroughly with the other, but not before they have
passed again before our eyes looking like a munifi-
cent dessert of floating island —pale goldy-colored
islands on a frothy white sea.

And now the protracted ordeal is nearly at an end,
and the thin mush, which is a great deal of water
thickened with what is to be paper, is conveyed to
another long room, by means of a complex arrange-
ment of bands and wheels, of whirling and sliding

_ things, the very sight of which dazes the senses of

\

one who does not understand machinery, and is
afraid of it, too. Some way it is to be seen in that
other room, where it is shaken as in a sieve; and
strained as in an endless milk strainer; and pressed,
and compelled into a narrow passage-way where
absorption takes place; it seems to be going over a
dam (or under one), and along a glassy-looking road-
way like a flume; it is now in sight, and now it

is not; now it looks substanceless, but before you’

know how it can have happened, it is going first over

one hot cylinder, and then over another, and if you

follow on you soon come to an endless web of paper
being wound almost smoking hot on a huge roller.

All this our guide, who had conducted us through
the buildings, tried to make us understand—that the

‘sifting and the straining and the constant stream of

- water were to sift out, strain out, and wash out the

last remnants of sand: that the solid rubber bands
running along each side were to regulate the edges
of the paper; and why this thing and that thing
were there. But nothing else was so clear to us as
that it was hot as a fiery furnace and sopping wet,
scarlet wheels were revolving, and a dangerous hum
and whiz were in the air as they went round, and the

A DAY WITH RAGS, TATTERS & CO.

prudent way was to get out of it as quickly as possible.

Finally it is reeled and measured off, sheathed
in strong coverings, labelled, expressed to printing
offices whence it re-appears in your morning Journal,
or your monthly WipE Awake. But, after all, the

poetic and beautiful element of the thing isin another

mill which is not a paper mill at all, but the one
where the wood pulp is prepared, and a tributary to
it, and distinctively named the “pulp mill.” To that
we went. They were working the spruce that day.
The place, with its piles of logs, and spout high in
air, down which they were slid to the dumping-
ground, suggested a saw mill. In the interior, logs
of spruce, fresh enough from the forest to be full
of the fragrant rosin, were ready in four-foot piles.
These were swiftly sawed into short pieces, by two
men——one who fed and one who held the wood
against the dazzling, dangerous, whirling steel; at
another machine the bark was taken off; at a third a
man held the section of log while a guillotine—a
deadly, horrible iron thing — came down with terrible
certainty and cleft it in billets as he offered it.
These were tossed into machines where were lying
in ambush grindstones of tremendous power; and
when next you saw, what a moment before was a
segment of a tree was cream-colored pulp. Then, it
was put through another process, and lo! -thick
blankets a yard square, exquisite in color, luxurious,
ready to be carried over to the paper mill.

The sap of the tree was still in them; the texture
of wood, to which so many summer winds and rains,
and so much sunshine had been tributary. The pale
buff of the lovely fibre was there unchanged. The
compression and transformation had not spoiled that
aroma of the woods. I brought away one of the
cream-tinted, spruce-flavored sheets, inhaling the
lingering balsam. It called up pictures of lone
clearings in the wilderness; of the forest primeval;
of wild deer and moose. I dreamed of Katahdin and

the Adirondacks.