A NATURAL PAPER MILL. 279* 



from which, the race is made, I have found the aged paper mill 

 about which I started to tell. 



This particular paper mill for there are dozens of them on 

 my land and thousands of them on the tract is in the bed of 

 the rill which feeds the reservoir I am making. The rivulet 

 soaks down across the pasture at a cripple's gait, going out of its 

 way to extemporize shallow ponds here and there, and finally, 

 after swelling up a little to surmount the ring of clay wall, top- 

 ples over into the pool, which, from its size and conformation, I 

 think is a scar or dent that still remains from some stranded ice- 

 berg that grounded here millenniums ago, and dissolving, left 

 the hole in my field which I am trying to enlarge. The land is 

 very dry at present, and looking in the bed of the extinct feeding 

 mill I see it is carpeted with a grayish-brown matting that has a 

 sheen like gossamer silk, and which crackles like stiff paper when 

 struck with my spade. It stretches up the channel for rods and 

 follows the windings very closely. I tear off some from the dead 

 grass stalks, and when I hold it up to the light I find it is very 

 good paper, thin, fairly strong, and in places semitranspar- 

 ent. Under this coat is another, and still another, so when I put 

 my spade down the full length of its blade I find I can not reach 

 through it all. A hand glass shows it is full of zigzag and irregu- 

 lar ribs, like the wings of a fly. These are the coarser portions of 

 the paper, but the whole fabric is made of the same material, 

 which is simply the shredded and digested woody fiber of the 

 coarse grasses and rushes growing by the brookside. For cen- 

 turies past these have flourished in the summer time until killed 

 by the frost. The snow came, beating down the dead herbage, 

 and before spring the whole was bedded in ice. Gradually the 

 rill gnawed its way through the ice cap and the water began to 

 sweep past the dead grass, now lying horizontally in the current. 

 Slowly, atom by atom, the pith, gum, starch, and silex in the 

 grasses were washed away, leaving only a fine and complexly 

 mingled meshing of woody fiber where once were rushes, foul 

 meadow, and blue joint. Then the brooklet receded before the 

 warmer rays of a gaining sun, and a green scum, composed of in- 

 fusoria and numberless low-grade microscopic plants, formed 

 above the slackened water, filling all the spaces in the pulp net- 

 work already in place. This settled with the water until stopped 

 by the stumps of the broken grass, and then for a few weeks the 

 stream ran under the canopy until it dried up altogether, and 

 spiders hunted their prey concealed by a shade of natural paper. 

 Again the grasses came up and grew and died. The snow of the 

 next winter, which beat them down, pressed the underlying paper 

 flat into the bed of the brook, and again the paper mill was mak- 

 ing ready for a new output. Year by year this went on, no 



