Belletonte, Pa., September 22, 1916.
THE UNFINISHED PRAYER.
“Now I lay me—say it, darling.”
. “Lay me,” lisped the tiny lips
Of my daughter, kneeling, bending,
O’er her folded finger-tips.
“Down to sleep,” “to s’eep,” she mur-
mured ;
And the curly head bent low.
“I pray the Lord,” I gently added—
“You can say it all, I know.”
“Pay de Lord,” the words came faintly—
Fainter still, “my soul to teep.”
Then the tired head fairly nodded,
* And my child was fast asleep.
But the dewy eyes half opened
When I clasped her to my breast,
And the dear voice gently whispered—
“Mamma, Dod knows all de yest.”
«Oh! the trusting, sweet confiding
Of the child-heart! Would that I
Thus might trust my Heavenly Father,
He who hears my feeblest cry!
—Selected.
Of course some strain of insanity
was in her veins but it had not ap-
peared till her sixteenth year. Yes,
mother died, if not mad, yet certainly
possessed of an insane idea—she, a
child of the South, passionately de-
voted to her husband; and one day
her great black eyes saw his languid
smile kindle at sight of a fair-faced,
blue-eyed stranger from the North,
and her heart burned within her.
Presently Jacques was speaking
with the stranger. And presently
again they walked together, and on
parting he offered her a rose, and she
pinned it on her bosom. How offend-
ed, how insulted, how hurt was the
wife! It was not the chance giving of
a flower, she felt; it was the evidence
of a new love. She saw hreself neg-
lected, forgotten, cast off; and the
rose became the symbol of all the old
love and joy, and as she longed for
that love and joy again she longed
for that rose.
It was all in a momemt. Her eyes
flashed she took a step forward and
would have torn it off had not her
husband put out an intervening arm.’
“What would you?” he said. “A
mere courtesy.”
But it did not avail. The rose—
that rose—she must have it.
“Give me that rose!” she said to
the frightened girl. “It is mine!”
Her husband took her by the hand
and led her away. “Are you mad?”
he said, as she hung back with avert-
ed head. -
“The rose! The rose!” she said.
And it was all she ever said till
some little time later, her child was
born. Just before she died she look-
ed up at her husband bending over
her and murmured: “The rose I
grew. Its great leaves blotted out
heaven and you. Yes, I have been
mad. But now I know. The rose is
dust, but love is immortal.”
The father became a conscript, and
he fell on the field of battle. The child
was left tc unkind fate. She grew
np by one hand and another of indif-
ferent and grudging relatives, who
worked hard for their daily bread, a
lovely creature, violet-eyed -and sun-
ny-haired, without eduaction, but
with the sweet manners of gentle in-
stinct, and with facile fingers for all
delicate intricacy of work, loving her
needle, and on everything che
wrought embroidering roses. She wa«
named Aimee, but she was usually
called the girl, or that bird there, th»
papillon. Various vouths would have
paid court to her, but she seemed to
look through them as if they did not
exist. Yet she loved to deck herself
out in her rose-embroidered gown,
coarse cotton though it was, and hang
long garlands of rose-boughs over
her shoulders to her knees. She was
most gentle in her ways and words;
every one loved her; but the oider
people began to say that she was
folle.
There was one of the youths who
loved her better than the others did.
He was called Francois, having no
other name—a dark young fellow
with a beaming eye. He had a little
shop where he sold ribbons. They
often walked together in the twilight,
work being over. Sometimes he
brought her roses, since she loved
them so; she took them with a rap-
ture that could have been mistaken
for delight in himself if he had not
understood her. Soon she was never
without roses, ir her hair, on her
breast, wreathing her arms. She
never had a seu in her life—how did
she come by these flowers?
She was not quite seventeen when
they heard her telling strange tales
of her roses. “They are mine,” she
said. “All the roses on the earth.”
They accused her of rifling gardens.
“The roses love me,” she said. “They
wish to be about me, and they break
their stems to come to me. You may
see them, the.single blossoms, gliding
through the air to me. Ihave but to
think of a rose and it is here. They
have a spirit—oh, undoubtedly. ‘You
are a rose yourself,” they say. They
tell me to look at the sunrise when I
go to the silk-mill, at the sunset on
the river—all the world is a rose.
The floor of heaven is paved with
roses. I keep the leaves, that I may
make from them an attar for the
priest in the last sacrament. There is
one climbing over the wall of the
queen’s garden to see the world go
by; it begs me tc come for it, in a
whisper as soft—oh, as soft as its
breath. It is a rose of perfection.
Some day I shall go for it.” Shel:
went; and the gardeners found her in
the queen’s garden, with her lifted
skirt full of the great heavy-headed
damask blooms.
It was in vain that grandam and
Suzanne and Justine pursued the offi-
cers with outery and vociferation
concerning the irresponsibility of the
poor papillon; that Francois followed
with comforting words for her till the
prison gates were closed upon him.
She was tried, and found guilty of
her offense. It was plain theft; she
was seen; the flowers were found in
her possession; it was fortunate that
she was not held for lese majeste. The "as that ’twould cease to be a rcse. point Suzarne to sell for us, the flow- Canada Sent 70 Per Cent.
|
| them felt themselves trembling a mo- | more arresting, with the precision.
queen’s garden, indeed!
She was sentenced to the prison for : they of the roundness, the clear cut? ;
women of all sorts. Yet the worst of
| And behold the petals there! Have
i Fi donc! Make another, Twenty-three,
{ ment before the fair, wondering crea- | And thou, Ninety-nine, try thine own
| ture with the great tears dropping hand now.” And all at once Airee,'’
{ from her lashes as she thought of the | struck with the new idea, laid hola of
roses she had lost. “I shall come
back, Francois,” she said, “and we
i the pink atom of silk, and the deeper
: pink, and cut and snipped, and helu to
| shall have our roses together.” And | the light, and measured with the eve,
| Francois felt the blue sky pitiless, and clustered together, and dropped
i
{
|
the soft wind a mockery.
. | the gum on the green and the brown
They were hard and bad women in jtissue, and secured her wire, and roll-
the prison, sent there for dreadful [ed the stems—and, behold, a rose!
crimes, for all manner of infamies.
What was there abcut this young
girl coming among them that suddeén-
ly made their hearts quiver? = Possi-
bly it was thought of their own girl-
hood before sin cvertook them; she
was so slim, so fair, so like a flower,
so innocent! Perhaps, in spite of
Syerything, it was the mother in them
all.
“It is fcr stealing a rose—a rose!
che is here,” exclaimed Adriane.
“While I have fingers, she shall have
her rose!” And where she. got a bit
of pink tissue-paper only Heaven
knew, and how she pinched it into
petals and found some yellow threads
for stamens only a French-woman
could tell you. It was a rude and rag-
ged thing, but it hore the semblance
of a rose; and when it was thrust
through the grate of her cell and fell
upon the stone floor, the girl, waking
from her day-dream, caught it up, if
not with so much joy as when Fran-
cois had brought her roses fresu with
dew, vet as one embraces a long-lost
friend.
There was hardly a woman in the
prison who by the next nightfall had
not heard of Adriane’s success, had
rot, through the subtle channels thev
knew how to command, obtained
scraps of pink silk, of crimson silk, of
vellow and cream and white, and was
not busy with them.
“Madame sees the little one, the
poor child, la tete legere,” said Ad-
riane to the directress, who had come
to her cell at Adriane’s demand,
trembling herself now—she, the defi-
ant Adriane, who had made nothing
but trouble in the place with her out-
breaks and rebellions since coming
there for her interminable period.
“Doubtless hers is a sin—but so
trifling! The child pines. She will
fade away. She will die!”
“Jt is not to te helped, Twentyv-
three.
ment, Ciel! not for her amusement.”
“Pardon,” said Adriane. “Madame
knows there are new views of inc:r-
ceration. It is for the protection of
society, not the punishment of ‘he of-
fender That, the punishment, is in
the hands of the good God.”
Madame was at once enraged and
amused. But much in Adriane was
everlooked.
“Peste!” said Adriane. “I myself—
I—one calls me meurtriece. But
should this little one here die in her
cell, she will have been mu dure |!'—
It is to madame!” and Adriane made
a mocking obeisance with outstretch-
ed hands, while madame received her
insolence for what it was worth.
So it came about that the wor'en
were allewed to send their floral fail-
ures and successes into the ccll of the
new-comer. The directress, a wise
woman in her way, and with ideas as
to prison reform, having lately been
almost at her wits’ end, and moved
herself by the young girl’s circum-
stances saw in a flash certain great
possibilities. But she could do noth-
ing rashly. Those who were allowed
neither scissors nor needles, nor any
sharp instrument, were not to be
trusted all at once. There had been a
wild revolt in the prison but recently.
The women had broken everything
about them that was breakable, they
had torn their clothes to tatters, and
the air had rung with their ribald
cries and oaths. It was “isvally a
long while before the waters of the
mighty trouble subsided. But to-day
a sweet calm pervaded the place,
broken only by now and then a glad
cry over zome approach to floral
beauty in the work. They pinched
and pulled and Puffed their poor ma-
terial into shape; sometimes they
tore the stuff with their teeth, some-
times they used a surreptitious pin.
And, all done, each waited for the cry
of delight from the cell of Aimee, and
heard her singing her sweet song as
she bound the flowers about her, with
a rapture of their own such as per-
haps they had never felt before in
their, poor lives.
Thus it happened that when Fran-
cois, having timidly begged admit-
tance, was allowed a moment at the
cell’s grille with the one fresh rose he
had brought her, he saw her cell as if
the walls had bloomed in roses of all
colors, a wilderness of roses, and her-
self radiant. He kissed the little fin-
gers she slid through the bars, and
left in them the rose just plucked.
Francios went at once, with Ai-
mee’s glad cry ringing in his ears, to
a man who worked for a milliner, and
he came back next day rich with tiny
retanants of silk and satin and velvet
of all deep or delicate tints in which a
rose and her green leaves are ever
born, with long strips of his own rib-
bons, with wax and wire and gum,
with crystal beads, and even with
scissors. It was against the rules.
But what are rales for except to
break ? . . :
Francois sought the directress, and
told her the simple story. “There is
no wrong in the child,” he said. “She
is innocent as the cherubs who have
only heads 2nd wings in the great
altar-piece. She is but light in the
head, the poor parillon. She has cov-
eted roses—all her life, roses. Now
if she has of them—madame can see
—it may be—a surfeit of the things
Is it possible madame never heard of
a cure?”
Madame never had heard of a cure
after this fashion. But what impo:t?
One does not know ail things. She
would vensider. By and by she herself
took the gift of Francois to Aimee,
and summoned Adriane there. If she
nad not been a woman of courage :he
would not have been in her postion.
She was not afraid of Adriane with
the scissors. “Make a rose,” she com-
manded. And Adriane with great in-
souciance began to form the flower,
leaf by leaf, finishing in a frenzy -of
delight.
“It is not perfect,” said the direct-
ress. “Had a rosé ever such a heart
She is here for her punish-:
| She shrieked with joy, and she turned
i and pinned the rose on the bosom of
| the ‘directress. Even Adriane, th»
{ bold, trembled at the liberty the girl
had taken.
“Adriane,” said the directress, “I
know I can trust thee. But the
others— mom
“Madame.” said Adriane, with erect
dignity, as if she had not been ring-
responsible.”
shapped and delivered,
med—and all for Aimee. In
months’ time that cell was lined with
roses till one couid not see the wall.
At his next call Francois brought a
tiny vial of attar of irvuses. “It is all
they waited for!” Aimee cried; and
she forgot he was there while putting
a tiniest drep on a bunch of the flow-
the vial open among her materials, so
they might say that if they were not
i the rose, they had been with the rose.
+ And surely never along prison ccr-
ridors before was wafted such gales
of sweetness, as if whole gardens had
bloomed close at hand.
It was not too often that the regu-
lations allowed his visits. When he
came again and saw through the grat-
‘ling the blooming bower of her cell,
Francois felt that Aimee must be in
possession of all she longed for. But
she was sitting on her bench, her
hands hanging before her, in a pos-
ture of deep dejection. She wore no
flowers; but the window, through
which one had sight of a strip of blue
sky or a snowy cloud, was garlanded
with them. The window was so high
up that it caught a sclitary sunbeam
that touched the girl’s fair hair to a
I shining aureole for the instant of its
stay, and made Francois think of
some saint. He twisted a gar-
denia in his fingers. She smiled
then, looking at it. “The lovely
straightway she began to make a gar-
denia.. At another time he brought
her sweet-veas tc copy, and vet again
forget-me-nots, and in their season
apple-blows and buttercups. Those
others copied them, too; Adriane mov-
ing among them, the dark-browed
Adriane, like an angel of mercy as
she brought the women the new flow-
er. .
But one time Francois came and
found Aimee in a cell on another cor-
ridor. She had begged to be transfer-
red, as the fragrance of the attar had
become oppressive to her. But she
was making a fleur-de-lis, most deli-
cately and exquisitely, and singing
softly to herself as her slender fingers
twinkled in among the vetals. She
looked up at him brightly.
“I have been in a far country, Fran-
cois,” she said. “But I have returned
It was ‘a world of roses. Now a rose
is to me no more than a mallow. Iam
cured, my Francois. And when am I
10 go away? Certainly I am not here |
forever. And where, where am I to
20?” ’
| “Thou wilt come with me,”
{ Francois.
i She shook her head gently. As the
! opening bud, brushed by the bee, he-
comes the full-blown flower, as the
fruit ripens swiftly when the wasp
has stung it, so the catastrophe of
surfeit had made the child a woman.
“Not possible,” she said. “The things
that might have been are always the
sweetest. There is that which may
come again to me. We will make an
end here.”
“How, make an end?”
: Francois, his eyes full of shadow.
“We will not marry. We will not
give such inheritance to any,” she
said, her eves searching the heart of
the fleur-de-lis.
“Which,” said Francois, “does not
hinder that we shall be together.”
The prison corridors were very still
that day. Possibly it was the still-
ness that precedes the storm. Except
for now and then a burst of derisive
song, there was all but dead silence
there. The directress, who at last
had seen the end in view for which
she had wrought, had informed the
women that they would make no more
flowers to hang round Aimee. Their
flowers should be put on sale in the
market, and the prison would therce-
forth be self-supporting. A matter
for pride ard joy.
“No more roses for Aimee—for the
little one? No more, then, for any
one! The State had put them here;
the State would have to support
them!” And they sat back and folded
their arms, and Adriane’s arms were
the most ‘resolute of all, and her
shower of nods the most emphatic, as
she tossed her scissors through the
grille.
Francois was there that day to take
Aimee away, the day of liberty hav-
ing come. She was allowed to pause
at every grating and say good-by to
the sad souls. They begged to kiss
her pretty fingers.
“I am going to sell my flowers,”
she said to them. “Francois gives me
a window in his shop. Francois is my
brother.” !
“We will make flowers for your win-
dow,” they called, almost in chorus.
And peace reigned again in the poor
prison and in the heart of the direct-
ress. -
“Qh, how good is the air, the wind,
the sky, the sun, the freedom, the rus-
tling of the leaf!” cried Aimee, as she
sat at work on her flowers in Fran-
cois’s window. “How sad for my poor
sisters of the prison! But I shall go
often to bring them the breath of the
outdoors.”
“But, yes,” said Francois. “Thou
art always thinking for others.”
“See! I have made great sales to-
day, not only mine, but theirs. We
shall be rich, my brother. We will
have a little: house and a garden
of real flowers in the country, and ap-
said
leader in countless riots, “can hold me |
Madame did. And Adriane cut and
and those :
other arranged and twisted and gum- :
two
ers. “It is able to be too much,” she
| said. And after that she merely left '
thing,” she said. “It has a soul.” And |
ers for me, the ribbons for thee.”
“That cannot be, petite, unless—
Is brother the last word, Aimee?”
And his voice trembled like a string
that is stretched to breaking.
“The last,” she said, gazing into
space with eyes like violets’ washed
with dew.
then she added in a lighter tone:
“They go to pardon Adriane. She can
live with us and keep the house. And
since you have no other name, shall
brother.”
And today would you have silken
flowers, with a suspicion of fragrance |
to them, a dash perhaps of dew, and
so like the real that ycu expect them
to wither and be tossed away, flowers
of an almost ethereal beauty, you will,
as the duchesses and princesses do,
buy them at the window of Aimee.—
By Harriet Prescott Spofford, in
Harper's Monthly Magazine.
Made in Philadelphia.
One-sixth of the world’s output of
radium is made within seven miles of
Philadelphia in a factory at Lans-
downe, which is one of six plants of
its kind in the world. - It has a capac-
ity of producing threes grams of ra-
dium a year. The process by which
the metal is made was discovered by
Dr. D. H. Kabakjian, assistant pro-
: fessor of physics in the University of
, Pennsylvania and a resident of
: Landsdowne.
i There are only two other radium
. factories in the United States. Ore is
‘operated by a private corporation in
| Pittsburgh and the other, a Govern-
| ment enterprise, is under the super-
| vision of the Bureau of Mire: in Den-
i ver, Col. In all three plants the pro-
| cess by which radium, the most valu-
| able of all substances, is made, broad-
i ly speaking, is the same. In all the
i plants “radium salt” is male from
i carnotite, a yellowish, claylike miner-
! al, found in Colorado. Doctor Kabak-
| jinan’s secret method of treating the
| carnotite ore, however, is bringing
“Entirely the last.” And | paper came from Canada, according |
of Pulp
Used in U. S.
More thar two-thirags of the more
than a billion pounds of wood pulp
imported into the United States dur-
ing the fiscal year ending June 30,
1916, and used in the manufacture of
j to a communication to the National
i Geographic Society from John Oliver |
La Gorece.
The pulp importations for 1915-
we be Francois Freres? Always my | 191g have been 180,000,000 pounds
A EE TTR
Sugar Cane in Cuba.
| Nothing about the sugar industry,
! which was full of surprises, astonish-
i ed me more than to discover that sev-
en crops of cane are raised on Cuban
land without sticking a plow in the
i soil. This is one of the several rea-
sons why Cuba can produce sugar
i cheaper than any other country in the
world and does the job so well.
| The clearing is simple. With ox
! and machete the Cuban fells the trees
and hacks down the underbrush.
| less than for the previous twelve | These he lets lie until dry and then
|
better results than any of the other:
. processes used in this country or else-
i where. According to the inventor, it
| is extracting ninety per cent of ra-
dium from the ore.
{ nia since 1905, when he entered one of
i the departments there as a student.
{ He has been on the teaching staff
since 1910, and he discovered his car-
| notite radium ‘process after three
i years of experimentation in the lab-
| oratories at the University of Penn-
| sylvania. “
| Some idea of the delicacy of the
i secret chemical processes which the
| carnotite ore undergoes can be glean-
ied from the output of the "factory.
! Hundreds of tons of carnniite are
jnsed during the course of a year.
{ Twenty-five men working nine hours
{a day for a year will produce three
! grams of pure radium salt. 'The mar-
ket price of radium is $100,000 a gram
‘at this time, and the Lansdowne fac-
days yearly output is worth $300,-
000.
! Doctor Kabakjian recently sold his
process to the W. L. Cummings
: Chemical Company, now operating
i the plant at Lansdowne, but has been
- retained by the company as its ra-
: dium expert. The carnotite is brought
| from the company’s mines in Paradox
| Valley, Col. n
0
“For
| “The carnotite process is an
| one,” said Doctor Kabakjian.
, several years, however, I have been
| experimenting ' to discover a method
{ which would be more efficient than
| those in use in other radium factories
| throughout the world. I believe I
i have found one at last. We have no
| way of telling exactly what our com-
| petitors are doing, but we do know we
| are getting mighty fine results here.
“The cost of the ore varies from
$100 to $500 per ton, depending on
the percentage of pure carnotite it
| contains. We use on an average of
| two tons a day: The ore is put through
' off. The byproducts of these proces-
| ses, uranium and vanadium, are used
' for making varicus steel alloys. We
{send them abroad, where they are
used for making a highspeed steel
that will withstand terrific tempera-
ture. These two by-products cf ra-
dium are used for making gun and
projectile steel, I understand.
“Before the war,” said he, “the
great surgeons of Europe were able
to give their attention to the cure of
cancer and other diseases which re-
quire radium treatment. Since the
war started, however, these surgeons
are busy taking care of the sick and
wounded on the battle fronts. The
unfortunates who are suffering from
cancer and similar diseases are get-
ting along as best they can without
treatment, so the demand for radium
has fallen off. Before the war start-
ed the price was $120,000 a gram.
Now it has fallen to $100,000.”
Radium is sent to all parts of the
world from the factory in Lansdowne.
A short time ago Doctor Kabakjian
sent out a $5000 order to an institu-
tion in the West. “We have to be
mighty careful how we ship this ma-
terial,” he said. “The radium salt is
placed in a sealed glass tube like this
one,” and he rolled a little glass tube
not much larger than a five-penny
nail between his fingers.
The radium salt is carefully locked
up each night in a vault at the Lans-
downe factory. “Of cousre, we have
no fear of theft,” said W. L. Cum-
mings, president of the corporation,
“put we are taking no chances. A
gust of wind might blow away ten
years’ output of radium before you
could wink an eyelid. And even if a
clever thief stole a quantity of radi-
um he would find it virtually impossi-
ble to dispose of it. The Bureau of
Standards at Washington keeps a rec-
ord of every milligram of radium, and
no hospital would buy radium from
an individual without insisting on
knowing where he got it.”
A wealthy philanthropist has just
placed an order for $50,000 worth of
radium with the Cummings company.
When the order is completed the met-
al will be sent to a large eastern hos-
pital as a permarent memorial to its
donor. It is to be used for establish-
ing a free radium treatment clinic.
months, yet the amount shipped to us
from Canaca during the last year was
130,000,000 pounds in excess of her
1914-1915 shipments.
During the year just closed nearly 70
per cent. of our 1,135,000,000 pounds
of pulp came from our neighbor to
the north, while most of the remain-
ing thirty per cent. came from Nor-
way and Sweden.
The enormous volume and impert-
ance of the paper manufacturing in-
dustry in the United States are sel-
dom realized by the chief beneficiary,
the average reader. According to the
most recent figures the United States
Department of Commerce (1914,) the
value of the annual preduction of the
paper mills of this country exceeds
$330,000,000. More than fifty million
dollars of this sum is represented in
newspaper—1,313,284 tons, or enough
to print 10,500,000,000 fourteen-page,
eight-colamn papers. The book paper
(plain, coated ana cover) output was
valued at $73,000,000 in 1914, an in-
crease of thirty-four per cent. over
1909. The weight of this class of pa-
per was 1,869,958,000 pounds—
enough to print thirty-three stand-
ard-size magazines of 120 pages eacl
for every man, woman and child in
the United States. °
For the manufacture of coated or
calendered paper two essential ingre-
dients—casein and koalin—are exten-
sively imported. For the nine months |
ending March 31, 1916, our receipts
of casein from abroad reached the
enormous total of 7,185,794 pounds,
valued at $598,979, much of which, of :
course, was used in other arts as well
as in paper manufacture. Casein is
the principal ingredient in cheese, and |
is a white crumbling
its pure form
Most of our imported
acid substance.
i kaolin or china clay, which is used in
Doctor Kabakjian has been connect- | Fr
. ed with the University of Pennsylva- |
the manufacture of porcelain as well
as in paper-making, comes from Eng-
land, the shipments from that country
for 1915 amounting to more than five
hundred million pounds, valued at
$1,478,905. Our total imports of kao-
lin from all couniries for the year
ending June 30, 1916, were valued at
$100,000 less than the shipments from
| England -alone the year before.
much we deplore the
material for the
However
stringency in raw
paper market brecught about bv the.
European war, it should not be for-!
gotten that to the beneficent results
of a battle fought nearly twelve cen-
turies ago an be traced the introduc-
tion of the art of paper making . to
the western world. China is credited
with having nurtured the genius who
first conceived the idea of a writing
material made from fibrous pulp, and
some investigators profess to have
found evidences that paper existed
in the Celestial kingdom at least two
centuries before the Christian era.
Whether these claims of centuries
of priority will endure the light of
further research, or whether they will
be discredited just as have been the
same nation’s claim to the invention
of the mariner’s compass and gun-
powder, the fact is fairly well estab-
lished that when the Arabs defeated a
raiding army of Celestials before the
gates of Mamarkand, in the middle of |
the eighth century, they captured a
party of Chinamen who were skilled
paper makers. It was from this city
of Russian Turkistan, once the capi-
tal of that most ruthless of Mongol
princes, Tamerlane, that the art of |
spread throughout
these captives
Asia Minor and northern Africa into
Moorish Spain and finally into Italy,
where the first extensive factories
were established in 1276 at Fabriano,
demanded | seven distinct chemical processes be- | still a center of the paper industry in
{ fore the pure radium finally is given | southern Europe.
The Arabs and their Persian as-
sistants are supposed to have used
flax and cotton in the manufacture of
their first paper, and subsequently
rags were extensively utilized. Cot-
ton and linen rags are still the basis
of the best grades of paper, but the
article used by the newspapers is
made exclusively’of wood pulp. In the
United States black spruce, hemlock,
aspen and poplar are the most widely
used woods, while in Europe the
Scotch fir supplants the hemlock.
England manufactures much of her
paper from esparto or Spanish grass,
which has been quite extensively im-
ported by that country from North
Africa during the last fifty years.
Germany and France use quantities
of rye, wheat, oat and barley straw in
the paper-making industry. The wide-
ly used “India paper” comes chiefly
from England, Germany, France, Bel-
gium and Italy. Its name is a misno-
mer and was given to a soft quality
of Chinese paper introduced into
England in the eighteenth century
but, like many other commodities
brought from tke Far East during
that period, it was creaited to India.
It is manufactured from rags and its
opacity is due largely to the admix-
ture of mineral matter with the fibre.
Its thinness is due to special process-
es of “beating.”
Up to the closing years of the
eighteenth century ull paper was
made by hand, sheet by sheet, but in
the same year that Napoleon fought
the battle of the pyramids, Louis
Robert, a humble workman in the pa-
per mill of Didot, at Essones, south
of Paris, invented a machine for mak-
ing paper in an endless web. This in-
vention was developed ir England by
the two Fourdriniers, who lost a for-
tune in their pioneer work. Their
names, however, are perpetuated in
the paper-making machines of the
present day.
The first American paper mill was
established by Willian Rittenhouse
in Roxborough, near Philadelphia,
just eighty-three years after the first
permanent English settlement in the
United States at Jamestown.
—For high class Job Work come to
the WATCHMAN Office.
i sets them on fire The stumps and
| the loose logs that do not burn are
| left undisturbed.
The land is ready to plant—no plow
| or harrow or disk ever c<mnes near 1,
: A joint of sugar cane eight or ten
inches long is buried in the loose soil
| every five feet.
i And for seven of eight years, with-
| out any cultivation whatever, that one
i planting produces cane. The sprouts
| from the stumps are cut down the
| first and second year. After that even
i a hoe is never needed in the field.
| The cane grows so rank that all
| weeds and grass are smothered out.
i At cutting time the leaves, which are
| stripped from the stalk, cover the
ground thickly and prevent any
: growth except the cane, which quick-
ly sprouts from the same roots as be-
| fore.
| Another surprise was that cane
does not ripen nor need it be cut with-
"in a few days, or even weeks. It is
very accommodating. One good crop
grows in twelve months. But if the
. farmer’s relatives are visiting him,
| and he wants to take a few months off
to show them the country, and try to
: induce them to go bathing where there
are lots of sharks, it is perfectly all
! right with the cane.
It just keeps on growing, and he
can cut it next year. And instead of
| spoiling by a monrth’s a six month’s,
ior a year’s delay, the two years’
| growth makes almost as much sugar
as two crops.
However, it is much better, aside
from needed ready money, to cut the
cane every vear. The cutting begins
about the first of November and lasts
until May or June. These months are
driest in Cuba, and dry weather ic
essential for hauling. As to Cuban
roads when it rains—well, they are
‘ at least as bad as ours.
! The cane is usually cut and hauled
: by contract. The cutters this year
| got 90 cents a ton for cutting, which
i includes stripping. It is hauled to the
; mill in two-wheeled carts pulled by
| three or four yoke of oxen. Four to
six tons are hauled at a load. ;
{ The cartmen are the aristocrats of
{ the cane field. They get 60 cents a
i ton for hauling any distance under a
! mile and a half; more if it is farther.
A cartman often makes, at the present
scale, $10 a day.
But oxen are high. A wagon and
four yoke cost nearly a thousand dol-
i lars; so a thrifty Cuban who saves up
enough to have a carting outfit is sure
of not having too much competition.
The whole load of cane is lifted by
one hoist of a pulley and dumped on a
long feeder (like an exaggerated
straw carrier on un old threshing ma-
chine) to the mill. The carts wait
their turns to be unloaded.
At the end of the cutting season
there is a great fiesta. The cartmen
in bringing in their last loads decor-
ate their oxen and carts, and that
night there is a dance and food and
drink. One of the favorite drinks is
made of pineapple. :
The yield is very heavy, some cane
fields cutting as high as 60 tons to
the arce. A ton makes approximately
300 pounds of sugar. At the present
prices of sugar the cane grower gets
about $5 a ton for his cane at the mill.
A man could get immensely rich
raising cane in Cuba if there were no
drawbacks. But there are. One is
that you mwst be within three miles
of a mill or the hauling ruins the
i profits. But the worst, the constant
terror of the cane man, is fire. And
he can’t get away from it.
The leaves are like tinder at cut-
ting time; a spark from a careless
cigarette—there are millions of cig-
arettes—a match from a discharged
workman, a puff from a careless
laborers’ camp, or a blaze from some-
body’s clearing, and fire sweeps the
cane field like a whirlwind. I saw two
hundred thousand dollars’ worth of
cane go up in smoke in four hours.
The growers are organized to fight
fire, and watch constantly. But even
then the loss is heavy. However,
after a fire all the care that can be
got to the mill ir threes days is saved.
The stalks do not burn, but the heat
cooks the syrup and it sours after
three days. When there is a fire all
the neighbors turn out to help the
owner get as much cane to the mill as
possible.
But in spite of all drawbacks, at
present prices, Cuba is growing im-
mensely rich cn sugar. Last year the
sugar crop yields for every man,
woman, and child in the island, aver-
aged $125 in cash. And, of course, this
is only one of many crops the island
grows.—By William H. Hamby.
i
Arbor Day October 27.
Harrisburg.—Dr. Nathan C.
Schaeffer, State Superintendent of
Public Instruction, issued a procla-
mation fixing Friday, October 27, as
Autumn Arbor Day. In the procla-
mation he says:
“Trees grow while we sifep and
add to our wealth by day and by
night. They lend beauty to the land-
scape and cover the mountains of
Pennsylvania to the very summits
with green verdure. For ages they
have been catching the sunshine and
converting the sunlight into fuel for
man’s use. They are useful for
shade, for fruit and for timber. The
planting and the care of trees is one
of the most useful lessons which the
schoo! can impart.”
‘Teachers and pupils in our public
schools are earnestly urged to oh-
serve the day by the planting of trees
and by other appropriate exercises.
Needs Most Rescuing.
“De man dat rocks de hoat,” said
Uncle Eben, “generally can’t swim
an’ needs de most rescuin.’ ’—Wash-
ington Star.