ccomplished by feeding it to a series of pickers
which pull the matted locks and wads to shreds, beat out the dirt and
seeds, and roll the cotton in the form of batting upon cylinders until
it issues from the finisher lap machines as a downy roll or lap.

The lap of cotton then goes to the carding rooms, where it is combed
into parallel fibers by means of a revolving cylinder covered with
fine wire teeth, sometimes 90,000 of them to the square foot. On
leaving the carding machines the lap has become a gossamer-like web
thirty-nine inches broad. This web is next passed through a small
"eye" which condenses it into a narrow band about an inch in width,
known as the sliver. By this time the fiber has been so drawn out that
one yard of the original lap has become 360 yards of the sliver. The
sliver now looks almost perfect, but if it were spun it would not make
good thread. It is necessary to lay every fiber as nearly parallel as
possible, so that there will be an equal number of fibers in the
strand per inch. Besides this, the remaining dirt and short fibers
must be removed and the knots and kinks in the fibers straightened
out. To accomplish these objects the cotton must be "combed." First,
the slivers are passed through several sets of rollers, each set
moving faster than the preceding, so that the strands are drawn out
fine and thin. In this condition the cotton passes to a doubling
frame, and from thence to the lapping frame, a device combining six
laps into one and drawing the whole out into one fine, delicate, ropy
lap.

[Illustration: WARP ROOM

1. Beam on which the warp is wound.
2. Warp.
3. Creel.
4. Spools in the creel.]

The comber now takes the lap and combs out all the impurities and
short fibers, at a sacrifice of about one-fifth of the material; next,
it combines six of these fluffy combed rolls of fiber into one. A
number of these rolls are then drawn out by another machine twelve
times as long as they were before and twisted together on a slubbing
frame. This last drawing reduces the roll to about the thickness of
zephyr yarn. After being further doubled and twisted, the yarn, or
roll, is ready for the mule spinner, which accomplishes by means of
hundreds of spindles and wheels what the housewife once did with her
spinning wheel. The mule, however, does the work of more than 1,000
hand spinners and takes up much less space. On this machine 900
spindles take the yarn from 1,800 bobbins, and b