school-books; can it ever come from rags like
these? Is it from such bales of dusty rags,
native and foreign, of every colour and of
every kind, as now environ us, shutting out
the summer air and putting cotton into our
summer ears, that virgin paper, to be written
on, and printed on, proceeds? We shall see
presently. Enough to consider, at present,
what a grave of dress this rag-store is; what a
lesson of vanity it preaches. The coarse blouse
of the Flemish labourer, and the fine cambric
of the Parisian lady, the court dress of the
Austrian jailer, and the miserable garb of the
Italian peasant; the woollen petticoat of
the Bavarian girl, the linen head-dress of the
Neapolitan woman, the priest's vestment,
the player's robe, the Cardinal's hat, and the
ploughman's nightcap; all dwindle down to
this, and bring their littleness or greatness in
fractional portions here. As it is with the worn,
it shall be with the wearers; but there shall
be no dust in our eyes then, though there is
plenty now. Not all the great ones of the
earth will raise a grain of it, and nothing but
the Truth will be.

My conductor leads the way into another
room. I am to go, as the rags go, regularly
and systematically through the Mill. I am
to suppose myself a bale of rags. I am rags.

Here, in another room, are some three-score
women at little tables, each with an awful
scythe-shaped knife standing erect upon it,
and looking like the veritable tooth of time.
I am distributed among these women, and
worried into smaller shreds—torn cross-wise
at the knives. Already I begin to lose
something of my grosser nature. The room is
filled with my finest dust, and, as gratings of
me drop from the knives, they fall through the
perforated surface of the tables into receptacles
beneath. When I am small enough, I am
bundled up, carried away in baskets, and
stowed in immense binns, until they want me
in the Boiling-Room.

The Boiling-Room has enormous cauldrons
in it, each with its own big lid, hanging to
the beams of the roof, and put on by machinery
when it is full. It is a very clean place,
"coddled" by much boiling, like a washer-
woman's fingers, and looks as if the kitchen of
the Parish Union had gone into partnership
with the Church Belfry. Here, I am pressed,
and squeezed, and jammed, a dozen feet deep, I
should think, into my own particular cauldron;
where I simmer, boil, and stew, a long, long
time. Then, I am a dense, tight mass, cut out
in pieces like so much clay—very clean—faint
as to my colour—greatly purified—and
gradually becoming quite ethereal.

In this improved condition, I am taken to
the Cutting-Room. I am very grateful to
the clear fresh water, for the good it has
done me; and I am glad to be put into
some more of it, and subjected to the action
of large rollers filled with transverse knives,
revolving by steam power upon iron beds,
which favour me with no fewer than two
million cuts per minute, though, within the
memory of man, the functions of this machine
were performed by an ordinary pestle and
mortar. Such a drumming and rattling, such
a battering and clattering, such a delight in
cutting and slashing, not even the Austrian
part of me ever witnessed before. This
continues, to my great satisfaction, until I look
like shaving lather; when I am run off into
chambers underneath, to have my friend the
water, from whom I am unwilling to be sepa-
rated, drained out of me.

At this tune, my colour is a light blue, if I
have indigo in me, or a pale fawn, if I am rags
from which the dyes have been expelled. As
it is necessaiy to bleach the fawn-coloured
pulp (the blue being used for paper of that
tint), and as I am fawn-coloured pulp, I am
placed in certain stone chambers, like
catacombs, hermetically sealed, excepting the first
compartment, which communicates with a
gasometer containing manganese, vitriol, and
salt. From these ingredients, a strong gas
(not agreeable, I must say, to the sense of
smell) is generated, and forced through all
the chambers, each of which communicates
with the other. These continue closed, if I
remember right, some four-and-twenty hours,
when a man opens them and takes to his
heels immediately, to avoid the offensive gas
that rushes out. After I have been aired a
little, I am again conveyed (quite white now,
and very spiritual indeed) to some more
obliging rollers upstairs.

At it these grinders go, "Munch, munch,
munch!" like the sailor's wife in MACBETH,
who had chesnuts in her lap. I look, at first, as
if I were the most delicious curds and whey;
presently, I find that I am changed to gruel—
not thin oatmeal gruel, but rich, creamy,
tempting, exalted gruel! As if I had been
made from pearls, which some voluptuous
Mr. Emden had converted into groats!

And now, I am ready to undergo my last
astounding transformation, and be made into
paper by the machine. Oh what can I say
of the wonderful machine, which receives me,
at one end of a long room, gruel, and
dismisses me at the other, paper!

Where is the subtle mind of this Leviathan
lodged? It must be somewhere—in a
cylinder, a pipe, a wheel—or how could it ever do
with me the miracles it does! How could it
receive me on a sheet of wire-gauze, in my
gruel-form, and slide me on, gradually assuming
consistency—gently becoming a little
paper-like, a little more, a little more still,
very paper-like, indeed—clinging to wet
blankets, holding tight by other surfaces,
smoothly ascending Witney hills, lightly
coming down into a woolly open country,
easily rolling over and under a planetary
system of heated cylinders, large and small, and
ever growing, as I proceed, stronger and
more paper-like! How does the power that
fights the wintry waves on the Atlantic, and
cuts and drills adamantine slabs of metal like