SUN SILK.
The sun gives lustre to fabrics and imparts colours which can be supplied by no other means. In your planet such brilliancy is never seen except in the sun itself. We have, for instance, a silk of a very remarkable colour, which is highly prized by the ladies. Of this you may form a remote notion if you imagine a bright silver green radiant with all the vividness and brilliancy you sometimes see in the sunsets of your southern climes.
Some of our silks in the natural state are of a chalky white. This silver green is obtained by exposing the silk, when woven into the piece, to the rays of the sun during the half-hour after noon; no other time of the day will answer as well. If the silk were kept beyond the half-hour, the tint given would be unequal. The material is exposed to the influence of the sun in a machine, which has two different actions; by one, that lasts for a quarter of an hour, the silk is unrolled, and by the other, which is of exactly the same duration, it is rolled back, the two operations being so regulated as to finish in the half-hour two "pangartas," equal to about twenty of your yards, the quantity required for a lady's dress. The colour penetrates through the silk, but the side exposed to the sun is the more brilliant.
Our Ladies also wear a silk most beautiful in texture and colour, called "Sun Silk." To obtain this silk, the sun is made to bear on silk-worms at particular hours of the day, and the result is, that the silk of the cocoon is of a colour resembling that of a bright sun.
There are numerous other beautiful colours prepared in different ways under the influence of the sun, and, by the action of the same luminary, fabrics for ladies' dresses are endowed with the power of repelling heat.