toward a thorough cleansing, and its aim is to get out the dust and loosen the rags. From the hopper the rags fall into a large room, where many girls are busy sorting and grading the rags to obtain a uniformity of material for manufacture. The girls in this room wear a kind of uniform, for each has, at least, a blue cap and an apron. Most of them stand facing the windows before a wide continuous bench consisting of shallow bins that have bottoms of coarse wire screening. Buttons, rubber, and metal abound in the rags, and each girl has in front of her a heavy, upright knife like a broad-bladed scythe, which does service in cutting these off. Behind her are two or three enormous baskets into which the different sortings of rags are thrown.

The rags go from the "screen girls" to the "table girls," for a more thorough sorting, and the heavily-loaded baskets that the latter fill are slid into a little side room, where their contents are fed into a low, rattling, grinding, jarring machine known as "the cutter." Six feet from the starting point, this machine delivers the rags all chopped into pieces from one to three inches square at the rate of two tons an hour. Until comparatively recent years the work of this mechanical cutting-monster was done by hand on the scythe-like knives in the room adjoining.

The cutter drops the rags on a revolving strip of canvas, which carries them downstairs, and lets them fall into a dusting machine -- a huge box or small room equipped with fans, wire netting, and other apparatus. Lift a door and look in, and you see the rags rolling about within the box; and below is a thick deposit of linty "dust." This "dust" is nearly white and appears entirely suited for fine paper, but it is all sold to mills which manufacture a much coarser grade of paper than is used for writing purposes.

The rags pass through several of these dusters, one after another, and then are caught on a belt of canvas