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.
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