THE Rabbi Mathers, through the evil world, and then, Nathan, twoscore years and ten, Just as the almond blossomed in his hair, And miserably sinned. So, adding not Falsehood to guilt, he left his seat, and taught No more among the elders, but went out From the great congregation girt about With sackcloth, and with ashes on his head, Making his gray locks grayer. Long he prayed, And he went his way Barefooted, fasting long, with many prayers; But even as one who, followed unawares, Suddenly in the darkness feels a hand Thrill with its touch his own, and his cheek fanned By odors subtly sweet, and whispers near Of words he loathes, yet cannot choose but hear, So, while the Rabbi journeyed, chanting low The wail of David's penitential woe, Before him still the old temptation came, And mocked him with the motion and the shame Of such desires that, shuddering, he abhorred To free his soul and cast the demon out, At length, in the low light of a spent day, The towers of Ecbatana far away Rose on the desert's rim; and Nathan, faint And footsore, pausing where for some dead saint Saw some one kneeling in the shadow, whom He greeted kindly: "May the Holy One Answer thy prayers, O stranger!" Whereupon The shape stood up with a loud cry, and then, Awestruck Ben Isaac stood. The desert wind "In thought have verily sinned. Hast thou not read, 'Better the eye should see than that desire Should wander?' Burning with a hidden fire That tears and prayers quench not, I come to thee For pity and for help, as thou to me. Pray for me, O my friend!" But Nathan cried, "Pray thou for me, Ben Isaac !" Side by side In the low sunshine by the turban stone Of pitying love, his claim of selfishness; Long after, when his headstone gathered moss, KINGS' CROWNS AND FOOLS' CAPS. "Shim a hat," and three days later, HE went to the hatter's to buy the concern, to whom Mentor, after when he was caught in a shower, the The Baron was naturally dissatisfied, Miselle was discomfited, and Caleb was mildly triumphant. "Another of your favorite economies, my dear," said he. "You should have known by the price that this can only be a wool hat, and the inevitable destiny of wool hats is to terminate like this, in a cone." "Wool! why it is a felt hat, and all felt is made of wool," replied Miselle, in a lofty manner. "Indeed! I was under the impression that the best felt hats are made of fur, and never shrink or lose their shape like this." And Caleb, picking up the unfortunate subject of discussion, set it lightly upon the head of the Venus, whose marble neck seemed to curve anew at the indignity. The Baron forgot his woes, and laughed outright; but Miselle insisted upon calling the question. "Oh! Felt made of fur! I never heard of such a thing, and I don't believe it," said she. "Seeing is believing," tranquilly replied Caleb. "Mentor was speaking of hats to-day, and professed an intention of visiting a factory in Boston. I will get him to take you over it, and you shall afterward convince me, if you choose, that you are, as usual, in the right, and that all felt is made of wool." "I am not always in the right," magnanimously conceded Miselle, "but I should like to visit the hat-factory." Mentor proved willing to make good his sobriquet, and a few days later conducted Miselle to a large establishment in Boston. The heads smiled, bowed, and professed themselves pleased to give all possible information upon the desired points; and Miselle rushed at once to the great question, propounding it in a manner essentially feminine. "Felt hats are made of wool, — are they not?" asked she. The heads smiled benevolently. "Not ours," said they. "There are plenty of wool hats manufactured, but they are only bought by those who cannot afford, or do not know enough to choose, fur ones. We do not use a fibre of wool in our establishment, but consume, instead, about eighteen thousand pounds of fur." "What sort of fur?" inquired Miselle, somewhat hurriedly. "Several sorts, or rather several varieties of one sort," replied the heads. "For although it is all, in point of fact, rabbits' fur, the highest quality is called Russia hares' fur, and the lower grades Scotch and French cony. Then we occasionally get a small quantity of domestic rabbits' fur, brought mostly from the South; and some nutria, a fur obtained from the coypou, a smaller species of beaver." "Do you get any genuine beaver now?" inquired Mentor. "Sometimes. But beaver fur is worth fifty dollars the pound to-day, while the best Russia and German hares' fur commands only five, and the Scotch and French cony from two to four dollars. We will show you some specimens of the principal grades." Some square paper packages, accompanied by a subterraneous odor, were here brought in, and laid upon the table. "This is Russia A. H.," said one of the heads, unfastening the whity-brown They were received by the heads of foreign-looking envelope, and display ing a pile of pretty little fleeces, as one might call them, of a golden brown color, so carefully cut from the skin as to leave them quite whole, although not adhesive enough to admit of handling. "This is from the back of the animal. The fur of the other portions of the body is considered inferior. All this is carotted fur," said one of the heads. "What is carotted fur?" inquired Miselle of Mentor, who of course replied, "Did you never hear of carroty hair? This is the fur of a carroted hare, don't you see?" Without deigning reply, Miselle repeated her question aloud, and was informed that the carotted fur had been subjected to a mercurial or quicksilver bath, the effect of which process was to facilitate the subsequent amalgamation of the fibre. "This effect, however," explained the head, "is obtained at the expense of a certain amount of strength. A felt made entirely of carotted fur would have very little consistence; but, without a certain proportion of it, the raw fur would not felt at all. This next package is Scotch cony. It is entirely white, you perceive, and is used for ladies' white hats without requiring any bleaching process. This other is French cony, dark-colored, like the Russia, but not as glossy or heavy. Here is a package of German fur very like the Russia; in fact it generally goes by that name among the trade, although not in reality so valuable; for as a general rule the richest furs come from the coldest climates." Miselle took up the label dropped from this German package, and read : accident of death should transform a German rabbit into a Russian hare I do not understand." "Besides these varieties of fur," proceeded the head, "the felt contains another ingredient called 'roundings.' This substance is the trimmings of the hats cut off in the finishing-room, pieces of felt, in fact, ground and picked fine again. The effect of this roundings is to give a softer and finer finish to the completed work, as in the process of felting; its tendency is to work up to the surface, and closely connect the cruder fibres of the new fur. Too large a proportion of roundings, however, would have a tendency to weaken the consistency of the felt." "In what proportions do you mix the different varieties of fur, and the roundings?" inquired Mentor. "That depends altogether upon the style of work we have in hand," replied the head. "For men's felt hats we use about equal proportions of the whole. For ladies' hats, which are thinner, smaller, and not so high-priced, we use less of the hare's fur, and also less of the roundings, making them principally of the medium grades. White hats, as we before mentioned, are made altogether of white cony. "And now, having shown you the material in all its varieties, we will proceed to the first process of its manufacture into hats." So saying the heads led the way from their comfortable office to a large upper room containing boxes and bales of fur and trimmings waiting to be ground into roundings, and several large machines. One of these was a picker much like those used in woolfactories. Into this the mixed fur is introduced by means of an endless leathern apron and feed rollers, is next passed between two sets of toothed rollers revolving with great rapidity, and finally escapes through a square opening into a large closet, where it lies in a soft pearly heap. "From this picker the fur goes directly to the blower," said one of the heads, shutting the door upon the heap, and leading the way to a curious machine about twenty feet long, and seven or eight high, furnished with little windows all along its sides, and altogether extremely like a secondclass railway car; a resemblance aided by the whir of steam-driven wheels and bands, and the heated smell of oily machinery. "This," explained the head, "is the blower; and the fur, after passing through the picker, is placed upon this endless apron at the end of the blower, and fed in between these rollers to a toothed cylinder just beyond. This cylinder, revolving at the rate of thirtyfive hundred times in a minute, seizes the fur, and, while tossing the lighter part violently upward and forward, carries the heavier hairs, and the bits of pelt or dirt which may still remain among it, downward through the opening in which it revolves. The heavier portion of the remainder falls presently upon the grated or sieve-like floor of the blower, to which floor a constant jarring motion is imparted by the machinery, so that most of the refuse is shaken through. The rest, with the finer portions still floating in the air, is blown forward to the next set of rollers, the next cylinder, and the next sieve, and so on. In this blower there are eight compartments thus divided. In that other one, used for coarser work, there are only four compartments." "Why should not the fur for coarse hats be as well blown as that for nice ones?" asked Miselle. "Because in each compartment it loses weight, and the quantity sufficient for a hat, after passing through four compartments, would only be half enough after passing eight," said the head, as patiently as if the question had been a wiser one. The process thus explained, the blower was set in motion, and Miselle was invited to look through the little glass windows, and watch its operations. This she did so eagerly, that, while one head kindly shouted explanations and information into her ear, the other, with Mentor, was fully occu pied in preventing her limbs and draperies from coming to hopeless grief among the machinery. "What makes all that smoke inside?" inquired she, after several moments of breathless contemplation. "That smoke is the fur, or rather the lightest portions of it," replied the head; and Miselle, looking again, tried, hard to believe that the graceful and fantastic cloud-wreaths floating through the dome-roofed chamber of the blower could be anything so substantial as even the downiest of down. "Here is some of the siftings," said the head, taking up a handful of the accumulation beneath the blower, and showing that it consisted principally of the hair, so soft and glossy upon the original pelt, but so harsh, wiry, and unmanageable when separated from it. This hair, so far as ascertained, is not adapted to any use, and offers a wide and untrodden field for Yankee invention and speculation. From the eighth chamber the fur, now thoroughly separated from every impurity, issues between a pair of rollers like those which carry it into the blower, and falls into a box. It now looks and feels very like eider-down, and is ready for use. "The next process," pursued one of the obliging heads, "is to weigh out the fur into quantities sufficient for one hat, and then to carry it to the formingmachine. For men's felt hats, upon which we are at present running, the weight of fur is six ounces; for the bodies of silk hats it is often no more than three, and for ladies' and children's hats it varies from two to four." Revolving this information, Miselle followed her conductors to a lower room, where she was presently introduced to the "Wells's Patent Hat-Forming Machine," and assured that the specimens before her were the only ones to be found in Massachusetts. "And a very pretty specimen of American ingenuity it is," said one of the heads, contemplating the machine with affectionate interest; and, so soon |