Excerpt from The Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. 266: January to June, 1889 The city is plastered on the slopes of the snow-capped Olympus, lies buried in rank verdure, and echoes with the murmur of many streams. Brusa, in fact, comes up as nearly to the reality of a drop scene at a theatre, or a Turnerian glimpse at Paradise, as one is likely to see on this side the grave, and yet it is not sleepy and dull, as most beautiful places are. Close to Madame Brotte's establishment are many factories of silk, at the mouth of a lovely gorge and, inasmuch as water is here the motive power and not coal, we find no chimneys belching forth their nature-destroying breath, and industry, when it does not destroy the beauties of nature, is a pleasure and not a horror to look upon. The operatives in these factories are, for the most part, Greek and Armenian girls. In the earthquake of 18 5 5 a whole factory, with sixty girls at work, fell down and buried them in its ruins but a new factory has been built on this cemetery, and a new race of girls were busily at work when we visited it, as if uncon scious of the wholesale destruction which was buried beneath them. These girls are content with the average wages of Sixpence a day, which, seeing that they eat only vegetables, olives, bread, and oil, is ample, and no complaints of a sweating system are here heard of. The younger hands are employed in boiling the cocoons, while the more experienced undertake the harder task of threading them on to the meshes. Each girl sits before her tank of boiling water, in which the cocoons are immersed, and by her side she has a tank of cold into which to plunge her hands from time to time, and every evening she dips them in vitriol to harden the skin. The great art seems to be to deftly join the ends so as to produce an even and true thread, and this is only acquired by years of experience. The smell of the boiling cocoons is very noisome, and the heat very oppressive. No wonder that the girls are, for the most part, sallow and unhealthy but then many of them have very line profiles and beautiful large eyes. In fact, so attractive did the gay young men of Brusa find the sixty girls in the imperial factory, that it has been found necessary to put up Turkish blinds before the windows, for they would congregate outside and greatly interfere with the diligent attention of the maidens to their business. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.