COTTON is spun and woven into so many useful forms that we could hardly live without it since we have become so thoroughly accustomed to the comforts and luxuries it supplies to us. From the loose fiber that we use in treating our teeth when they get to troubling us to the delicate lace handkerchief which is such a dream of the weaver's art we use cotton for our commonest and our most extraordinary purposes.
Muslin takes its name from Mosul, in India, where it was first made. Although muslin is now made in both Europe and America in great quantities, the kind that is most famed for its fineness is that from Dacca, India. To get an idea of the fine threads used in making the rarest of this muslin we must note that one pound of cotton is spun into three hundred eighty hanks of thread with eight hundred forty yards of thread in each hank. This means that one pound of cotton is spun out to the length of 319,000 yards, or over one hundred eighty-one miles.
One pound of this thread would, if it could be stretched out without breaking, reach from New York City up the Hudson to Albany, and there would still be enough of it unused to reach over to Saratoga. Ten pounds would reach from New York city to Omaha, with enough left over to reach back to Chicago.
It is even possible to exceed this in fineness if we do not care for use. To show the perfection of a machine, a thread of the fineness of 10,000 has been spun. If this could be strung out, as suggested above, it would reach 4,770 miles. One pound of the finest fiber has thus been spun so that it would reach from New York to Naples, Italy, and there would still be enough of it left to reach half-way back to London on the return trip.
Where three hundred and eighty hanks of thread are spun from a pound the muslin made from it is called three hundred eighty-degree muslin. But even this is not the finest muslin made. It is the finest made by the old hand processes, but the perfections of machinery have made it possible for us to have seven hundred-degree cotton. A strange thing about our finest machine-made cotton is that it does not seem to the eye or the touch to be as fine as the Dacca. There is a peculiar softness which cannot be imitated by the machine.
I went the other day into one of our great dry-goods stores to see how fine a piece of cotton I could buy. I was surprised to find that the gentlemanly clerks knew very little about where the goods were made and almost nothing at all about the processes. They were very obliging, but their business of selling does not seem to require any knowledge of those things I was so desirous of learning.
The finest things I found were India linen and Swiss mull. The India linen has a remarkable name, seeing it is not linen and is made in Scotland. The Swiss mull is nearly as well named, for it is also made in Glasgow. Whether these goods sell better because their names seem to indicate that they are made somewhere else I cannot say, but the truth seems to be that they were called by these names innocently enough by those who first made them, being proud that they could produce mull equal to the finest worn by the ladies in Switzerland or equal to the finest products of the Indian looms.
It is well known that in the dry-goods business it seems to be greatly to the advantage of the merchant to have fine names for his wares, the larger houses regularly employing women who do nothing but find fancy names for the things that are for sale. Goods are sometimes displayed with one name for several days without finding a purchaser, but the namer soon comes in with a new name to attach to the goods and some of the very shoppers who do not care for them under the first name buy them readily under the new one.
A lady recently asked me to tell her the difference between muslin and long cloth. I thought there might be a difference, but have been unable to find anyone who can tell what it is. Both names are applied to white cotton goods of various degrees of fineness. Long cloth is of a superior quality of cotton, and so is muslin when intended for dress goods. Some of the names under which white cotton goods are sold are muslins, tarletans, mulls, jaconets, nainsooks, lawns, grenadines, saccarillas, cottonade, cotton velvet, and velveteen.