IN THE DRYING-ROOM.
Fortunately a clever Frenchman conceived the plan of punching a series of small holes between the stamps, and his invention was promptly introduced into this country. The children were now eager to see the finishing processes of stamp-making, and so followed their guide into a large room, where they were greeted by a rush of warm air. Here their guide showed them the method of gumming the stamps and the curious apparatus used for the purpose. Along the entire length of the room, with a narrow passage between, are ranged a series of wooden boxes, quite sixty feet in length. These are heated by steam, and through each box passes a sort of double endless chain. The sheets are fed, face down, into this queer machine, and passed under a roller, which allows the escape of just enough gum to coat the sheet thinly and evenly. The sheet is now caught on the endless chain by two automatic clamps, and carried into the long hot-box. It takes only a few moments for the journey through, but the sheets appear at the other end perfectly dried, and ready to be trimmed and perforated.
As the method of gumming stamps used by the various bank-note companies has been a carefully guarded and secret process, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing has been forced to invent its own machine for this purpose. The sheets are gummed at the rate of about eighteen a minute, which is certainly a vast improvement over the old method of putting on the gum by hand with a brush.
MIXING THE GLUE.
When the children were weary of watching the funny little brass fingers move along and hurry the sheets off into the hot-box, they turned to a corner where a workman was busy over a series of vats and buckets mixing the gum, which looked very clean and nice, and is made of dextrine, a vegetable product. The guide now showed them how the gummed sheets are pressed smooth for perforation, and then led them into a room where a score or more of odd little machines were in swift operation. Each machine is tended by two workwomen, most of whom wear fantastic caps of paper to shade their eyes, as the sheets must be fed into the machines with absolute accuracy in order that the perforations shall come in the right place. Each sheet has register lines printed in the margin, which must be adjusted exactly under a black thread fastened across the feeding-table. A quick whir of the wheels puts a neat line of pin-holes lengthwise between the stamps, cutting the sheet in half at the same time. The next machine perforates the sheet crosswise, and again cuts it in two, so that the sheets are now divided up into the regulation size of one hundred stamps each.
The children thought the minute disks of paper punched out by the perforators too insignificant to be considered, and were accordingly much surprised to learn that the sheets again have to be smoothed out, under great pressure, to reduce their bulk and remove the "burr" caused by the perforation.
After inspecting the final process of making up the stamps into packages, to be mailed to the postmasters all over the country, the children were taken by their father to the office of the chief of the bureau. Here they received a cordial welcome, and learned many interesting and curious details about stamps and stamp-making. About 3,000,000,000 stamps are annually furnished the Post-office Department by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, at the rate of five cents a thousand. Ninety per cent. of these are the two-cent stamps, and according to the last Post-office report the revenue from the sale of stamps is a little over $6,000,000 a month.
"By-the-way," observed the chief, "you young people should be very much interested in the Report of the Third Assistant Postmaster-General for 1893, which contains a carefully prepared and elaborately descriptive list of every stamp and postal card issued by the United States government. It must seem hard to you stamp collectors that the most beautiful stamps issued—the newspaper and periodical stamps—are not permitted to be sold to the public. One of the chief reasons for this is that the values of these small squares of paper run up to such high figures, viz., $24, $36, $48, and $60, that they would offer a great field in counterfeiters if generally circulated. There are some queer denominations among these stamps, notably the $1.92 stamp, which is about to be discontinued, and some very pretty colors. That reminds me—did they show you our ink-mills in your tour of inspection?"