t paper mills in the country. There were
mills in which paper was made of wood fiber, and others in which paper
was made of rags. You could smell the sulphur as soon as you crossed the
bridge that led to the Flats. Sometimes, when the wind was right, the
pungent odor of it spread all over the town. Strangers sniffed it and
made a wry face, but the natives liked it.

The mills themselves were great ugly brick buildings, their windows
festooned with dust webs. Some of them boasted high detached tower-like
structures where a secret acid process went on. In the early days the
mills had employed many workers, but newly invented machinery had come
to take the place of hand labor. The rag-rooms alone still employed
hundreds of girls who picked, sorted, dusted over the great suction
bins. The rooms in which they worked were gray with dust. They wore caps
over their hair to protect it from the motes that you could see spinning
and swirling in the watery sunlight that occasionally found its way
through the gray-filmed window panes. It never seemed to occur to them
that the dust cap so carefully pulled down about their heads did not
afford protection for their lungs. They were pale girls, the rag-room
girls, with a peculiarly gray-white pallor.

Fanny Brandeis had once been through the Winnebago Paper Company's mill
and she had watched, fascinated, while a pair of soiled and greasy old
blue overalls were dusted and cleaned, and put through this acid vat,
and that acid tub, growing whiter and more pulpy with each process until
it was fed into a great crushing roller that pressed the moisture out
of it, flattened it to the proper thinness and spewed it out at last,
miraculously, in the form of rolls of crisp, white paper. On the first
day of the Easter vacation Fanny Brandeis walked down to the office of
the Winnebago Paper Company's mill and applied at the superintendent's
office for a job. She got it. They were generally shorthanded in the
rag-room. When Mrs. Brandeis heard of it there followed one of the few
stormy scenes between mother and daughter.

"Why did you do it?" demanded Mrs. Brandeis.

"I had to, to get it right."

"Oh, don't be silly. You could have visited the mill a dozen times."

Fanny twisted the fingers of her left hand in the fingers of her right
as was her way when she was terribly in earnest, and rather excited.

"But I don't want to write about the paper business as a process."

"Well, then, what do y