die and comes out in soft, doughy black strings. These are
the "leads" of the pencils. They have been thoroughly wet, and now
they must be made thoroughly dry. They are laid on boards, then taken
off, cut into pieces the length of a pencil, and put into ovens and
baked for hours in a heat twenty times as great as that of a hot
summer day. They certainly ought to be well dried and ready for the
wood. The red cedar of Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama is
the best wood for pencils because it is soft and has a fine, straight
grain. It is cut into slabs about as long as one pencil, as wide as
six, and a little thicker than half a pencil. Every piece must be
examined to make sure that it is perfect, and it must be thoroughly
seasoned and kiln-dried to free it from oil. Then it goes through a
grooving-machine which cuts out a groove half as deep as the lead.
The lead is laid into one piece, another is glued on top of it; and
there is a pencil ready for work.

[Illustration: _Courtesy Joseph Dixon Crucible Co._

HOW THE LEAD GETS INTO A PENCIL

(1) The cedar slab. (2) Planed and grooved. (3) The leads in place.
(4) Covered with the other half of the slab. (5) The round pencils cut
out. (6) The pencil separated and smoothed. (7) The pencil varnished
and stamped.]

Such a pencil would be useful, but to sell well it must also be
pretty; and therefore it goes through machinery which makes it round
or oval or six-sided, as the case may be, rubs it smooth, and
varnishes it, and then, with gold leaf or silver leaf or aluminum or
ink, stamps upon it the name of the maker, and also a number or letter
to show how hard the lead is.

The pencil is now ready for sale, but many people like to have an
eraser in the end, and this requires still more work. These erasers
are round or flat or six-sided or wedge-shaped. They are let into the
pencil itself, or into a nickel tip, or drawn over the end like a cap,
so that any one's special whim may be gratified. Indeed, however hard
to please any one may be, he ought to be able to find a pencil to suit
his taste, for a single factory in the United States makes more than
six hundred kinds of pencils, and makes so many of them that if they
were laid end to end they would reach three times across the continent.

There are many exceedingly cheap pencils, but they are expensive in
the end, because they are poorly made. The wood will often split in
sharpening, and the lead is of poor materia