uninteresting. Of course the next step is to wash this dirty brown mass; and for at least four hours it is scrubbed in a machine which beats it and rolls it and chops it and tumbles it about until the wonder is that anything is left of it. All this while, the water has been flowing through it, coming in clean and going out dirty; and at length the mass becomes so light a gray that making white paper of it does not seem quite hopeless. It is now bleached with chloride of lime, and washed till it is of a creamy white color and free from the lime, and then beaten again. If you fold a piece of cheap paper and tear it at the fold, it will tear easily; but if you do the same thing with paper made of linen and cotton, you will find it decidedly tough. Moreover, if you look closely at the torn edge of the latter, you will see the fibers clearly. It is because of

the beating that the fibers are so matted together and thus make the paper tough. While the pulp is in the beater, the manufacturer puts in the coloring matter, if he wishes it to be tinted blue or rose or lavender or any other color. No one would guess that this white or creamy or azure liquid had ever been the dirty rags that came into the mill and were sorted on the wire tables. Besides the coloring, a "filler" is usually added at this time, such as kaolin, the fine clay of which china is made. This fills the pores and gives a smoother surface to the finished paper—a good thing if too much is not put in. A little sizing is also added, made of rosin. Save for this sizing, ink would sink into even the finished paper as it does into blotting paper. After this, more water is added to the pulp and it is run into tanks.

Now the preparation is completed, and the pulp is pumped to large and complicated machines which undertake to make it into paper. It first flows through screens which are shaken all the while as if they were trembling. This shaking lets the liquid and the finer fibers through, but holds back the little lumps, if any remain after all the beating and straining and cutting that it has had. The pulp flows upon an endless wire screen. Rubber straps at the sides keep it in, but the extra water drops through the meshes. The pulp is flowing onward, and so the tiny fibers would naturally straighten out and flow with it, like sticks in a river; but the wire screen is kept shaking sideways, and this helps the

fibers to interlace, and the paper becomes nearly as strong one way as the other.

If you hold a sheet of paper up to the light, it will show plainly what is next done to it. Sometimes you can see that it is marked by light parallel lines running across it close together, and crossed by other and stouter lines an inch or two apart. Sometimes the name of the paper or that of the manufacturer is marked in the same way by letters lighter than the rest of the sheet. Sometimes the paper is plain with no markings whatever. This difference is made by what is called the "dandy," a cylinder covered with wire. For the first, or "laid" paper, the small wires run the length of the cylinder and the stouter ones around it. Wherever the wires are, the paper is a little thinner. In some papers this thinness can be seen and felt. For the second kind of paper the design, or "watermark," is formed by wires a little thicker than the rest of the covering. For the third, or "wove" paper, the dandy is covered with plain woven wire like that of the wire cloth; so there are no markings at all. This work can be easily done because at this point the paper is so moist.

The paper is now not in sheets, but in a long web like a web of cloth. It passes between felt-covered rollers to press out all the water possible, then over steam-heated cylinders to be dried, finally going between cold iron rollers to be made smooth, and is wound on a reel, trimmed and cut into sheets of whatever size is desired. The finest note papers are

not finished in this way, but are partly dried, passed through a vat of thin glue, any excess being squeezed off by rollers, then cut into sheets, and hung up to dry thoroughly at their leisure.

Paper made of properly prepared linen and cotton is by far the best, but there are so many new uses for paper that there are not rags enough in the world to make nearly what is needed. There are scores of newspapers and magazines where there used to be one; and as for paper bags and cartons and boxes, there is no limit to their number and variety. A single manufacturer of pens and pencils calls for four thousand different sorts and sizes of boxes. School-children's use of paper instead of slates, the fashion of wrapping Christmas gifts in white tissue, and the invention of the low-priced cameras have increased enormously the amount of paper called for. In the attempt to supply the demand all sorts of materials have been used, such as hemp, old rope, peat, the stems of flax, straw, the Spanish and African esparto grass, and especially wood; but much more paper is made of wood than of all the rest together. Poplar, gum, and chestnut trees, and especially those trees which bear cones, such as the spruce, fir, balsam, and pine are used. There are two methods of manufacturing wood pulp; the mechanical, by grinding up the wood, and the chemical, by treating it chemically. By the mechanical method the wood is pressed against a large grindstone which revolves at a high speed. As fast as the wood is ground off, it is washed away by a

current of water, and strained through a shaking sieve and a revolving screen which drives out part of the water by centrifugal force. In a great vat of pulp a drum covered with wire cloth revolves, and on it a thin sheet of pulp settles. Felting, pressed against this sheet, carries it onward through rolls. The sheets are pressed between coarse sacking. Such paper is very poor stuff. In its manufacture the fiber of the wood is so ground up that it has little strength. It is used for cardboard, cartons, and packing-papers. Unfortunately, it is also used for newspapers; and while it is a good thing for some of them to drop to pieces, it is a great loss not to have the others permanent. When we wish to know what people thought about any event fifty years ago, we can look back to the papers of that time; but when people fifty years from now wish to learn what we thought, many of the newspapers will have fallen to pieces long before that time.