quantities. The making of rubber tires for automobiles and carriages is an important industry. The enormous and increasing use of electricity requires much use of rubber as an insulator. Rubber gloves will protect an electrical workman from shock and a surgeon from infection. Rubber beds and cushions filled with air are a great comfort in illness. Rubber has great and important uses; but we should perhaps miss quite as much the little comforts and conveniences which it has made possible.

Rubber and gutta-percha are not the same substance by any means. Both of them are made of the milky juice of trees, but of entirely different trees.

The gutta-percha milk is collected in an absurdly wasteful manner, namely, by cutting down the trees and scraping up the juice. When this juice reaches the market, it is in large reddish lumps which look like cork and smell like cheese. It has to be cleaned, passed through a machine that tears it into bits, then between rollers before it is ready to be manufactured. It is not elastic like rubber; it may be stretched; but it will not snap back again as rubber does. It is a remarkably good nonconductor of electricity, and therefore it has been generally used to protect ocean cables, though recently rubber has been taking its place. It makes particularly excellent casts, for when it is warm it is not sticky, but softens so perfectly that it will show the tiniest indentation of a mould. It is the best kind of splint for a broken bone. If a boy breaks his arm, a surgeon can put a piece of gutta-percha into hot water, set the bone, bind on the softened gutta-percha for a splint, and in a few minutes it will be moulded to the exact shape of the arm, but so stiff as to keep the bone in place. Another good service which gutta-percha renders to the physician results from its willingness to dissolve in chloroform. If the skin is torn off, leaving a raw surface, this dissolved gutta-percha can be poured over it, and soon it is protected by an artificial skin which keeps the air from the raw flesh and gives the real skin an opportunity to grow again.

III

"KID" GLOVES

There is an old proverb which says, "For a good glove, Spain must dress the leather, France must cut it, and England must sew it." Many pairs of most excellent gloves have never seen any one of these countries, but the moral of the proverb remains, namely, that it takes considerable work and care to make a really good glove.

The first gloves made in the United States were of thick buckskin, for there was much heavy work to be done in the forest and on the land. The skin was tanned in Indian fashion, by rubbing into the flesh side the brains of the deer—though how the Indians ever thought of using them is a mystery. Later, the white folk tried to tan with pigs' brains; but however valuable the brains of a pig may be to himself, they do not contain the properties of soda ash which made those of the deer useful for this purpose.

CUTTING HIDES INTO GLOVES

The hides are kept in racks, and before cutting are stretched by hand. Then the steel die cuts out the shape of the glove. Notice the curiously shaped cut for the thumb.

Years ago, when a man set out to manufacture gloves, usually only a few dozen pairs, he cut out a pattern from a shingle or a piece of pasteboard, laid it upon a skin, marked around it, and cut it out with shears. Pencils were not common, but the glovemaker was fully equal to making his own. He melted some lead, ran it into a crack in the kitchen floor—and cracks were plentiful—and then used

[17]

this "plummet," as it was called, for a marker. After cutting the large piece for the front and back of the glove, he cut out from the scraps remaining the "fourchettes," or forks; that is, the narrow strips that make the sides of the fingers. Smaller scraps were put in to welt the seams; and all this went off in great bundles to farmhouses to be sewed by the farmers' wives and daughters for the earning of pin-money. If the gloves were to be the most genteel members of the buckskin race, there was added to the bundle a skein of silk, with which a slender vine was to be worked on the back of the hand. The sewing was done with a needle three-sided at the point, and a stout waxed thread was used. A needle of this sort went in more easily than a round one, but even then it was rather wearisome to push it through three thicknesses of stout buckskin. Moreover, if the sewer happened to take hold of the needle too near the point, the sharp edges were likely to make little cuts in her fingers.

After a while sewing machines were invented, and factories were built, and now in a single county of the State of New York many thousand people are at work making various kinds of leather coverings for their own hands and those of other folk. Better methods of tanning have been discovered, and many sorts of leather are now used, especially for the heavier gloves. Deer are not so common as they used to be, and a "buckskin" glove is quite likely to have been made of the hide of a cow or a horse.

"Kid" generally comes from the body of a sheep instead of that of a young goat. Our best real kidskin comes from a certain part of France, where the climate seems to be just suited to the young kids, there is plenty of the food that they like, and, what is fully as important, they receive the best of care. It is said that to produce the very finest kidskin, the kids are fed on nothing but milk, are treated with the utmost gentleness, and are kept in coops or pens carefully made so that there shall be nothing to scratch their tender skins.

Glovemakers are always on the lookout for new kinds of material, and when, not many years ago, there came from Arabia with a shipment of Mocha coffee two bales of an unknown sort of skin, they were eager to try it. It tanned well and made a glove that has been a favorite from the first. The skin was found to come from a sheep living in Arabia, Abyssinia, and near the headwaters of the river Nile. It was named Mocha from the coffee with which it came, and Mocha it has been ever since. The Suède glove has a surface much like that of the Mocha. Its name came from "Swede," because the Swedes were the first to use the skin with the outside in.

Most of our thinner "kid" gloves are made of lambskin; but dressing the skins is now done so skillfully in this country that "homemade" gloves are in many respects fully as good as the imported; indeed, some judges declare that in shape and stitching certain grades are better. When sheepskins and lambskins

come to market from a distance, they are salted. They have to be soaked in water, all bits of flesh scraped off, and the hair removed, generally by the use of lime. After another washing, they are put into alum and salt for a few minutes; and after washing this off, they are dried, stretched, and then are ready for the softening. Nothing has been found that will soften the skins so perfectly as a mixture of flour, salt, and the yolk of eggs—"custard," as the workmen call it. The custard and the skins are tumbled together into a great iron drum which revolves till the custard has been absorbed and the skins are soft and yielding.