"The gum."
"How do you get it off the cocoon?"
Felix called his wife, who took ten of the cocoons, and put them into warm water to loosen the gum; then she stirred them with a little broom of straw; the threads of the silk stuck to the broom so she was able to take hold of them with her fingers; she then joined five of the threads together, making two compound threads of the ten, and put those two through holes in a thin piece of iron that lay across the kettle, brought them together, wound them on a hand reel, and made a skein of silk, which she divided, giving one half to Ned, and the other to Walter.
Felix told the boys that they sold the cocoons at the mills where they reeled it, as it required machinery to do it properly, and his wife had only reeled that just to let them see how it could be done.
"Suppose the thread should break," said Ned.
"Then all you have to do is to lay the end on to the main thread, and the gum will stick it."
He said the reason his wife stood so far from the kettle was, that the gum might cool and the threads not stick together. He then gave them some eggs and cocoons to take home with them.
"Gabriel," said Walter, when they met again, "I've changed my mind since I came here. I thought at first it was the last place for a man to live by farming; but if ever you get a good government, under which a man can receive the fruits of his labor, and not be beggared by imposition, I will engage to come here and get rich in ten years."
"How could you do that, citizen?"
"In the first place I would make every day of the year tell. I'd raise two crops in a year, where you raise one. I would build a mill to grind and press these olives in a quarter of the time it takes you, and get a third more oil than you can get from the press I made you. I would build my house in the midst of my land, and not lose a great part of my time walking back and forth, carting stuff, and wearing out both cattle and carts. I would make a cart that would run so much easier than yours, that one mule would haul as much as two do in yours. Then, in the winter, when there was leisure, I would make a good road; that would make half as much difference more. Then, instead of making what you call a fallow (which is letting the ground, after a crop is taken off, grow up to weeds, then ploughing them in, putting back no more than you have taken out), I would keep cattle, raise corn, and have manure. It takes, according to your statement, about thirty-five days to raise a crop of silkworms; that pays first rate, and your children could do nearly all that is to be done; it also comes at a time when there's not much else to do. Now only see how much can be raised. Here's a crop of wheat, potatoes, and buckwheat; after them (at any rate every other year), vines and olives, that will grow on the mountains where nothing else will, and come off late, after the other crops are out of the way; then silk in the latter part of winter and the early spring, before work is driving."