Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/291

Rh 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, topples over into the pool, which, from its size and conformation, I think is a scar or dent that still remains from some stranded iceberg 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 semitransparent. 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 irregular 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 centuries 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 infusoria and numberless low-grade microscopic plants, formed above the slackened water, filling all the spaces in the pulp network 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 making ready for a new output. Year by year this went on, no