Description
We can almost understand, standing here under blue and drooping skies, amid this widespread forest of tall, golden-blossomed plants, how, in those ancient days, the odd old Chinese poets could have been inspired by the cotton-flower. Yes though it is this century of perfect common sense--this day of work, not dreams--something very like that long-banished, scorned and frightened Sprite of Poesy eyes us wistfully from yonder orange-grove, fans with its quivering wings the golden air, and cries to us with a very piteous, tender, thrilling cry from out that heap of blackened stones! Talk as you will of these "uncivilized" and "barbarous" islands of ours, they are rich and fair and wonderful, for all that you may say--rich in past gorgeous memories, and fair with present beauty, and wonderful with the illimitable possibilities their future shadows forth. The cotton gathered from these island fields has far more tender treatment than that bestowed upon its sister of the interior. Of finer and more silky fiber, and having a money value three, four and even five times as great, it is readily understood that such should be the case. As this fiber was found to be injured by the action of the saws, and to be more or less "cut" or "nepped," a more recent invention, the "McCarthy gin," has come into use for cleaning Sea Island, Egyptian and Brazilian cotton. In this machine, the fiber is drawn by a leather roller between a metal plate called the "doctor," fixed tangential to the...