"I guess you'll know all you want to about them before you've been here long. I'm 'bout dead from being in this dust so much. It fills a feller all up. See how thick it is now, and you're drawing it in with every breath."
By this time the other machine was ready for action, and Carl, finding that they were short of flocks, gave Fred a basket, took another himself, and both boys started for a fresh supply. They went up stairs, passed through the "gig room," and across a long hall which opened into a little room by itself, where the rag grinders were humming away. This was their destination. Carl filled one of the baskets with flocks and the other with ground rags; then turning to Fred, said:
"You wanted to know about flocks and how they are made. This is the first machine they go through. You see that pile of rags and odds and ends. When they have been run through here, they will come out cut up fine, like those I just put in your basket. Now we will go back, and I will show you the next process they go through."
Each of the boys now shouldered his basket and returned down the stairs. There Carl turned his flocks upon the cloth that was rapidly being filled, and then emptied the contents of the other basket into a tub or tank, which was about five feet wide by fifteen long. It was full of thick, muddy looking water, which was rapidly going round the tank.
It struck Fred as a curious proceeding when he saw the fine cut rags thrown into that place; it looked to him very much like throwing them away, and he was about to ask an explanation when Carl satisfied his curiosity by saying:
"This is the wet grinder. We put the rags in here, and run them in water about three hours until they are ground up as fine as can be, and look just like porridge."
"What do you do with the porridge?"
"Do you see these little bags at this end of the tank? We bail it out into them, and after the water strains out a little, we tie them up and load them on one of these cars and run them out to the 'extractor.'"
"What kind of a thing is an extractor?"
"It is something that shakes the water out. It has a big basket inside that goes around like lightning."