It was a great day for the children on the farm when the tin peddler came around. He had a high red wagon, fairly bristling with brooms, mop-handles, washtubs, water-pails, and brushes. When he opened his mysterious drawers and caverns, the sunshine flashed upon tin pans, dippers, dustpans, and basins. Put away rather more choicely were wooden-handled knives, two-tined forks, and dishes of glass and china; and sometimes little tin cups painted red or blue and charmingly gilded, or cooky-cutters in the shape of dogs and horses. All these rare and delightful articles he was willing to exchange for rags. Is it any wonder that the thrifty housewife saved her rags with the utmost care, keeping one bag for white clippings and one for colored?

These peddlers were the great dependence of the paper mills, for the finest paper is made from linen and cotton rags. When the rags reach the factory, they are carefully sorted. All day long the sorters sit before tables whose tops are covered with coarse wire screens, and from masses of rags they pick out buttons, hooks and eyes, pins, bits of rubber, and anything else that cannot possibly be made into paper. At the same time they sort the rags carefully into different grades, and with a knife shaped like a small sickle fastened upright to the table they cut them into small pieces. Some of the dust falls through the screen; but to remove the rest of it, the cut-up rags are tossed about in a wire drum. Sometimes they are so dusty that when they come out of the drum they weigh only nine tenths as much as when they go in. The dust is out of them, but not the dirt. To remove that, they are now put into great boilers full of steam; and here they cook and turn over, and turn over and cook for hours. Lime and sometimes soda are put with them to cleanse them and remove the coloring material; but when they are poured out, they look anything but clean, for they are of a particularly dirty brown; and the water that is drained away from them looks even more 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.

There is, however, a method called the "sulphite process," used principally in treating the coniferous woods, by which a much better paper can be made. In all plants there is a substance called "cellulose." This is what gives strength to their stems. The wood is chipped and put into digesters large enough to hold twenty tons, and is steam-cooked together with bisulphite of magnesium or calcium for seven or eight hours. Another method used for cooking such woods as poplar and gum, is to boil the wood in caustic soda, which destroys everything except the cellulose. Wood paper of one kind or another [31] is used for all daily papers and for most books. Whether the best wood paper will last as long as the best rag paper, time only can tell.

The Government of the United States tests paper in several ways before buying it. First, a single sheet is weighed; then a ream is put on the scales to see if it weighs four hundred and eighty times as much. This shows whether the paper runs evenly in weight. Many sheets are folded together and measured to see if the thickness is regular. To test its strength, a sheet is clamped over a hole one square inch in area, and liquid is pressed against it from below to see how much it will stand before bursting. Strips of the paper are pulled in a machine to test its breaking strength. A sheet is folded over and over again to see whether holes will appear at the corners of the folds. It is examined under the microscope to see of what kind of fibers it is made and how much loading has been used in its manufacture. To test blotting paper, strips are also put into water to see how high the water will rise on them.

Besides writing and wrapping papers and the various kinds of board, there are many sorts which are used for special purposes. India paper, for instance, is light, smooth, and strong, so opaque that printing will not show through it, and so lasting that if it is crumpled, it can be ironed out and be as good as new. This is used for books that are expected to have hard wear but must be of light weight. There are tissue papers, crÊpe papers for napkins, and tarred paper to make roofs and even boats water-tight. If tar is brushed on, it may make bubbles which will break afterwards and let water in; but if tar is made a part of the paper itself, it lasts. Paper can easily be waxed or paraffined, and will then keep out air and moisture for some time. Better still, it can be treated with oil and will then make a raincoat that will stand a year's wear, or even, if put on a bamboo frame, make a very good house, as the Japanese found out long ago. Paper coated with powdered gum and tin is used for packing tea and coffee. Transfer or carbon papers so much used in making several copies of an article on the typewriter are made by coating paper with starch, flour, gum, and coloring matter. Paper can be used for shoes and hats, ties, collars, and even for "rubbers." It has been successfully used for sails for light vessels, and is excellent made into light garments for hospital use because it is so cheap that it can be burned after wearing. Wood pulp can be run through fine tubes into water and made so pliable that it can be twisted into cord or spun and woven into "silk." Not only water but also fire can be kept out by paper if it is treated with the proper substances. An object can be covered with a paste of wood pulp, silica, and hemp; and when this is dry, a coat of water-glass will afford considerable protection. There has been some degree of success in making transparent paper films for moving pictures; and if these are coated with water-glass, they will not burn. Paper can be so treated that it will either conduct electricity or become a nonconductor, as may be desired. In Germany, a "sandwich paper" has been made by pressing together four layers—felt, pulp, cotton, pulp—which is cheap and strong and useful for many purposes.

When we come to papier machÉ, there is no end to the kinds of articles that are made of it. The papier machÉ, or paper pulped, is made by kneading old newspapers or wrapping papers with warm water into a pulp. Clay and coloring are added and something of the nature of glue; and it is then put into a mould. Sometimes to make it stronger for large mouldings, bits of canvas or even wire are also used. The best papier machÉ is made of pure wood cellulose. The beautiful boxes and trays covered with lacquer which the Japanese and Chinese make are formed of this; but it has many much humbler uses than these. Paper screws are employed in ornamental wood work, and if a hole is begun for such a screw, it will twist its way into soft wood as well as steel would do. Barrels of paper reinforced with wire are common. Gear wheels and belt pulleys are made of papier machÉ, and even the wheels of railroad coaches; at least the body of the wheels is made of it, although the tire, hub, and axle are of cast-steel. Circular saws of pulp are in use which cut thin slices of veneer so smoothly that they can be used without planing. Papier machÉ is used for water pipes, the bodies of carriages, hencoops, and garages. Indeed, it is quite possible to build a house, shingle it, decorate it with elaborate mouldings and cornices, finish it with panels, wainscoting, imitation tiling, and furnish it with light, comfortable furniture covered with imitation leather, silk, or cloth, and spread on its floors soft, thick carpets or rugs woven in beautiful designs—and all made of wood pulp. Even the window panes could be made of pulp; and if they were not perfectly transparent, they would at least let in a soft, agreeable light, and they would not break. Pails, washtubs, bathtubs, and even dishes of paper can be easily found. There are not only the paper cups provided on railroad trains and the cheap picnic plates and saucers, but some that are really pretty. Ice cream is sometimes served in paper dishes and eaten with paper spoons. Milk bottles are successfully made of paper, with a long strip of some transparent material running up and down the side to show how much—or how little—cream is within. Napkins and tablecloths made of paper thread woven into "cloth" are cheaper than linen and can be washed as easily. Paper towels and dishcloths are already common; but when paper shall fully come to its own, it is quite possible that there will be little washing of dishes. They can be as pretty as any one could wish, but so cheap that after each meal they can be dropped into the fire. Indeed, there are few things in a house, except a stove, that cannot be made of some form of paper,—and perhaps that too will be some day.