MOTHER AMBROISINE called Claire. A friend had just come to see her to learn about an embroidery stitch that troubled her. At the request of Jules and Emile, however, Uncle Paul continued. He knew Jules would take pleasure in repeating the conversation to his sister.

“Flax, hemp, and cotton, especially the last-named, have still another use of great importance. First they clothe us; then, when too ragged to use any more, they serve to make paper.”

“Paper!” exclaimed Emile.

“Paper, real paper, that on which we write, of which we make books. The beautiful white sheets of your copybooks, the leaves of a book, even the costliest, gilt-edged and enriched with magnificent pictures, come to us from miserable rags.

“Despicable tatters are collected: some of them are picked up from the filth of the street, some are unspeakably filthy. They are sorted over, these for fine paper, those for coarse. They are thoroughly washed, for they need it. Now machines take them in hand. Scissors cut them, steel claws tear them, wheels make pulp of them and reduce them to shreds. Mill-stones take them and grind them still more, then triturate them in water, and convert them into a sort of soup. The pulp is gray, it must be whitened. Then recourse is had to powerful drugs, which attack everything they touch, and in less than no time make it white as snow. Behold the pulpy mass thoroughly purified. Other machines spread it in thin layers on sieves. Water drips through, and the rag soup forms into felt. Cylinders press this felt, others dry it, others give it a polish. The paper is finished.

“Before it became paper, the first material was rags, or cloth too tattered to use. How many uses has not this cloth served, and what energetic treatments has it not undergone before b............