, lengthening out the word as if to make it cover the
extent of feeling expressed by a single syllable.

"Well, let us sit here," he said, and taking Eve's hand, he went to a
great baulk of timber lying below the wheels of a paper-mill. "Let
me breathe the evening air, and hear the frogs croak, and watch the
moonlight quivering upon the river; let me take all this world about us
into my soul, for it seems to me that my happiness is written large over
it all; I am seeing it for the first time in all its splendor, lighted
up by love, grown fair through you. Eve, dearest, this is the first
moment of pure and unmixed joy that fate has given to me! I do not think
that Lucien can be as happy as I am."

David felt Eve's hand, damp and quivering in his own, and a tear fell
upon it.

"May I not know the secret?" she pleaded coaxingly.

"You have a right to know it, for your father was interested in the
matter, and to-day it is a pressing question, and for this reason. Since
the downfall of the Empire, calico has come more and more into use,
because it is so much cheaper than linen. At the present moment, paper
is made of a mixture of hemp and linen rags, but the raw material is
dear, and the expense naturally retards the great advance which the
French press is bound to make. Now you cannot increase the output of
linen rags, a given population gives a pretty constant result, and it
only increases with the birth-rate. To make any perceptible difference
in the population for this purpose, it would take a quarter of a century
and a great revolution in habits of life, trade, and agriculture. And if
the supply of linen rags is not enough to meet one-half nor one-third
of the demand, some cheaper material than linen rags must be found
for cheap paper. This deduction is based on facts that came under my
knowledge here. The Angouleme paper-makers, the last to use pure linen
rags, say that the proportion of cotton in the pulp has increased to a
frightful extent of late years."

In answer to a question from Eve, who did not know what "pulp" meant,
David gave an account of paper-making, which will not be out of place in
a volume which owes its existence in book form to the paper industry no
less than to the printing-press; but the long digression, doubtless, had
best be condensed at first.

Paper, an invention not less marvelous than the other dependent
invention of printing, was known in ancient times in China. Thence by
the unrecog