around boy messengers. There is great excitement when a ship load of very fine cotton comes in.
Perhaps you think all cotton is alike. It isn't. There are as many kinds of cotton as there are of apples. Most of the little cotton hairs are less than an inch long, but we have one kind that is two inches long, and very fine and silky. It grows on tall bushes along sea-coasts and on islands, so it is called sea-island cotton. It is so costly, and there is so little of it, that it is used only for thread and lace and the finest lawns and swiss muslins. Some cotton is very white, some a creamy yellow. In Egypt there is a brown cotton that is the bets in the world for stockings and knitted underwear. Cotton traders can tell in a minute what a little sample of lint is best for. They buy the kinds their mills need.
A ship load of cotton goes up a wide river from Liverpool, and through a canal, and is unloaded beside the mill that bought the cargo. In the mill the bales are opened, the crowded lint loosened, beaten to a swan's down fluff again, and fanned free of dust. One bale fills a large room, it is so light and soft. The tiny hairs lie twisted and tangled together. They have to be combed, and made to lie all one way, just like your hair. Think of it. They are only as long as the first joint of your little finger, and as fine as spider webs. Yet they have to be combed and made to lie all one way.
The fluff goes through roller combs set with little steel teeth like sewing needles. One row is laid straight, then another behind it, and another until a sheet is formed. The little hairs lie end to end, overlapping and clinging to each other. The fluff sheet is parted into narrow strips that pass through grooves in big steel rolls. Each strip is rolled over and over into a soft hollow rope as big as your papa's thumb. This passes through smaller and smaller grooves. It is squeezed and twisted and rolled, in one machine after another, until it is a cord as big as twine, but still very soft. Another cord just like it is twisted with it to a fine yarn. All this rolling and twisting is called spinning. It makes a yarn ready for weaving. If you want to know how small this yarn is, ravel a piece of muslin and look at just one thread. That is cotton yarn. It would take six such strands of yarn twisted together, to make fine sewing thread.
The spun yarn is wound on big bobbins or spools for weaving. Cloth is woven as you wove paper and splint mats in the kindergarten. The threads run up and down and across, over and under. In a weaving machine the ends of the lengthwise threads are fastened
