Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/169

 *lyoke. My cocoonery you have examined, with its fixtures for feeding silk-worms—the mode of open feeding, ventilator, and ventilating cradles. Since you left, the whole has been completed, with hammocks suspended over the cradles, easily put in motion, and so constructed that no offal can drop into the cradles beneath, nor interfere with the rocking motion or winding; the arrangement is much admired, and estimated to accommodate half a million of worms, or more, to be fed simultaneously. About half of the cocoonery has hurdles of lattice work, covered in part with gauze netting four feet wide and the same number of tiers in height. The cocoonery is supposed to be sufficiently open on the sides, ends, and roof, to admit a free circulation of pure air. The flooring is the natural earth.

"The past winter has been uncommonly severe on grape-vines and fruit; forest and mulberry trees; the Asiatic I found the most hardy of any other, and the Canton the earliest in foliage. On the 21st and 22d of May there were severe frosts, destroying garden vegetables, and injuring some early mulberry foliage; added to this, ice was formed in many places. The accounts from Vermont and New Hampshire are so disastrous as to delay early feeding; while in Northampton, June 14, at one of my plantations, you saw silk-worms in the act of winding, and others in a good state of forwardness. On the day of your departure, I received a letter from a distant silk grower, a staunch promoter of the one early and open crop system, that, on account of the unpropitious season and condition of his trees, he would delay fetching out his worms until the last of June, and then make his great effort upon one crop.

"To provide against premature hatching of silk-worms, or the disaster of an early frost, it is advisable to have foliage gathered and dried the year preceding; which, being pulverized and moistened with water, may be given to the worms until new foliage appears; and they will eat it freely.

"To obtain the most and best foliage of the mulberry, it will be necessary every Spring to cut or head them down within three or four inches of the ground, and preserve the stalks for bark-silk. I have a quantity of them saved with bark peeled from the large Asiatics to be used for making bark-silk, in ad