“THIS is a piece of Sister’s new silk dress,” said the boy named Billy. “It looks as though the fairies had woven it out of cobwebs.”
“It was made by something more wonderful than fairies, if that is possible,” said Somebody. “It was spun by a queer little worm who needed it for his own slumber robe, and had no idea in the world of giving it to sister for a party dress.”
“You mean the silk-worm’s cocoon, of course,” said the boy named Billy.
“About 4,500 years ago there was a Chinese Empress whose name was Si-Ling-Shi, who used to spend a great deal of time in her garden, and as she loved Nature very much she became interested in the worms who lived on her mulberry trees. There were so many of them, and the thread they spun was so strong and beautiful that she thought if it could be unrolled without being tangled or broken it could undoubtedly be spun into a web.
“She knew if the chrysalis were left alive to emerge the thread would be broken and spoiled, so she had some of the cocoons devitalized and experiments proved her theories correct.
“The rest of the world tried hard to induce China to give their secret of silk-making but to no avail, so the Emperor Justinian sent some young monks to China to study and to get the secret. After some years they went back to Constantinople with enough eggs of the silk-worm butterfly in their hollow pilgrim staffs to begin raising them.
“But even after they had the eggs it was not easy to raise them as the children of Mr. and Mrs. Bombyx Mori can only be raised where the mulberry tree will grow.”
“After they get the cocoons how do they get the silk unwound?” asked the boy named Billy.