In another home for nearly an hour we observed a method of beating cotton and of laying it to serve as the body for mattresses and the coverlets for beds.  This we could do without intrusion because the home was also the work shop and opened full width directly upon the narrow street.  The heavy wooden shutters which closed the home at night were serving as a work bench about seven feet square, laid upon movable supports.  There was barely room to work between it and the sidewalk without impeding traffic, and on the three other sides there was a floor space three or four feet wide.  In the rear sat grandmother and wife while in and out the four younger children were playing.  Occupying the two sides of the room were receptacles filled with raw cotton and appliances for the work.  There may have been a kitchen and sleeping room behind but no door, as such, was visible.  The finished mattresses, carefully rolled and wrapped in paper, were suspended from the ceiling.  On the improvised work table, with its top two feet above the floor, there had been laid in the morning before our visit, a mass of soft white cotton more than six feet square and fully twelve inches deep.  On opposite sides of this table the father and his son, of twelve years, each twanged the string of their heavy bamboo bows, snapping the lint from the wads of cotton and flinging it broadcast in an even layer over the surface of the growing mattress, the two strings the while emitting tones pitched far below the hum of the bumblebee.  The heavy bow was steadied by a cord secured around the body of the operator, allowing him to manage it with one hand and to move readily around his work in a manner different from the custom of the Japanese seen in Fig. 67.  By this means the lint was expeditiously plucked and skillfully and uniformly laid, the twanging being effected by an appliance similar to that used in Japan.

Repeatedly, taken in small bits from the barrel of cotton, the lint was distributed over the entire surface with great dexterity and uniformity, the mattress growing upward with perfectly vertical sides, straight edges and square corners.  In this manner a thoroughly uniform texture is secured which compresses into a body of even thickness, free from hard places.

The next step in building the mattress is even more simple and expeditious.  A basket of long bobbins of roughly spun cotton was near the grandmother and probably her handiwork.  The father took from the wall a slender bamboo rod like a fish-pole, six feet long, and selecting one of the spools, threaded the strand through an eye in the small end.  With the pole and spool in one hand and the free end of the thread, passing through the eye, in the other, the father reached the thread across the mattress to the boy who hooked his finger over it, carrying it to one edge of the bed of cotton.  While this was doing the father had whipped the pole back to his side and caught the thread over his own finger, bringing