328 Art of Travel.
WRITING MATERIALS.
Paper. - Its Nuinerous Applications. - Captain Sherard Osborn, in writing of the Japanese, says:-"It was wonderful to see the thousand useful as well as ornamental purposes to which paper was applicable in the hands of these industrious and tasteful people. Our papier-mache manufacturers, as well as the Continental ones, should go to Yeddo to learn what can be done with paper. With the aid of lacker varnish and skilful painting, paper made excellent trunks, tobacco bags, cigar cases, saddles, telescope cases, the frames of microscopes; and we even saw and used excellent waterproof coats made of simple paper, which did keep out the rain, and were as supple as the best macintosh The inner walls of many a Japanese apartment are formed of paper, being nothing more than painted screens ; their windows are covered with a fine translucent description of the same material ; it enters largely into the manufacture of nearly everything in a Japanese household, and we saw what seemed balls of twine, which were nothing but long shreds of
tough paper rolled up In short, without paper, all Japan would come to a dead lock."
Sizing Paper.-The coarsest foreign paper can be sized, so as to prevent its blotting when written on, by simply dipping it in, or brushing it well over with, milk and water, and letting it dry. A tenth part of milk is amply sufficient. Messrs. Hue and Gabet inform us that this is the regular process of sizing, as used by paper-makers in Thibet.
Substitutes for Paper are chips of wood, inner bark of trees, calico and other tissues, lead plates, and slaty stone. I knew an eminent engineer who habitually jotted his pencil memoranda on the well-starched wristband of his left shirt-sleeve, pushing back the cuff of his coat in order to expose it. The natives in some parts of Bengal, when in the jungle, write on any large smooth leaf with the broken-off moist end of a leafstalk or twig of any milky sap-producing tree. They then throw dust upon it, which makes the writing legible. If the leaf be so written upon, the writing is imperceptible until the