cular saw rises, and cuts off a piece about six feet in length, which drops into a chute below. Then another piece is cut off, until the whole piece is cut into short lengths, and dropped into the chute. At the bottom of this chute is an endless chain fitted with projections which catch. the piece as it drops, and carry it along, dropping it finally in a car beneath, in which it is carried away. The time may come when this refuse lumber may be valuable for kindling and other purposes, but at present it has no value, and some mills burn it, while one mill, situated on the tide flats of Puget Sound, uses it to fill in on the water front, and has thus made considerable valuable land. Having followed the refuse lumber we may return to the saw which has just cut off a plank three inches thick. It drops on the rollers, and is allowed to remain there. Another is cut off and drops on top of it. When five planks are thus piled up, the log will yield no more of that size. The rollers are started, and carry the pile along a few feet. There an endless chain running across the building is set in motion, and it carries our planks sideways until they are in the line of the desired gang saw. Now the endless chain is stopped, and the line of rollers upon which the planks now rest carry them forward to the gang saw. This saw, or series of saws, can be set any distance apart. At present they are one inch apart, and our five A.A. B.B. Platforms. Sectional view of the platforms Iron supports on which the log rests after coming up the chute. C. Eccentric wheel, which may be turned to the right or left, lifting the log and rolling it on to platform A or A,' D.D. Tracks of the car carrying the logs to the saws. OF THE HIVERSITY) D. The nigger. B C.C.C.C. The spikes or teeth. (For rolling the log steam is applied in both cylinders equally; for hammering it steam is withdrawn from A alone and then turned into it.) planks, being 25 inches wide, come out at the other end as a pile of 125 scantlings one by three inches in size. They have now been cut to the desired. size, but not the desired lengths. A new set of rollers carries them forward, and leaves them beside a platform inclined upward slightly. One by one the scantlings are placed at the edge of this platform, and a series of endless chains catches them, and carries them up the face of the platform. As they come up, circular saws rise through slits in the platform, cut them to the desired lengths and drop again out of sight. Sixteen to twenty of these saws are arranged side by side, two feet apart, and they are all under the control of one man, who by means of a series of levers elevates or lowers them at will. As the scantlings, now cut to the desired length and size, reach the upper end of the platform they are carried away and piled up, or sent through chutes, where by means of the ubiquitous endless chain they are carried and delivered to the planing machines on the lower floor. We have followed the scantlings through their various processes of manufacture. Lumber of other dimensions is handled in the same manner, being carried to other sets of gang saws. Beneath each of the various saws is a chute into which the sawdust, of which there is necessarily a great amount, drops. At the bottom of the chute it is taken by scrapers attached together in the form of endless chains, and carried over the fire box in the engine room, into which it is dropped, furnishing sufficient fuel to supply the motive power for all the machinery. Endless chains and chutes. These are the agents that perform the work in the steam saw mill. The marker who measures the logs, a gang of four men on the car, an engineer in charge of each saw, an engineer in charge of the movement of lumber on rollers, and a few mill hands to handle the finished lumber,- these are the men who, with the assistance of marvelously perfect machinery, turn out in a day thousands of dollars worth of finished lumber. F. I. Vassault. A STRUGGLE WITH INSOMNIA. whiskers the spiniest that I ever set eyes upon. The first time I met him he was in his night-shirt. He tapped at my door and asked me what time it was. "I saw by the transom that there was a light in your room," said he, “so you will excuse me for venturing to knock. One A. M., is it? Why I thought it must be three. I forgot to wind my watch, and it is run down. Thank you. Good night, or rather, good morning." "Have you been ill?" I asked, after I had told him not to be in a hurry about going, and had laid down my "Sappho with her face to the table cover,— for I had been reading. His face looked very bad. KILLING time was my employment his hair was the dryest-looking and his then, and in that line I was a complete success. How relentlessly I grasped a fresh young day by the throat, and butchered it in cold blood at my leisure! My favorite place of murder was in my bachelor's apartments. They were in a big lodging-house - one of those great shells that, with their elaborate external shams, are so decoying to the lonely home-seeker. In there, among my cheap French novels, and with my hubble-bubble pipe a genuine hookah - I slew the innocent hours, the guileless days, and the helpless weeks. I was not always alone in my crimes. Sometimes I had confederates who were skillful as sassins in this line, and who aided me in the wretched work. Among us we would make away with an afternoon and evening in short order. Our neatest and most effective work of this sort was done at the card-table, around which we would sometimes sit until morning, when my friends would sneak stealthily down the stairs, feeling no little remorse at times over the reflection that they had murdered the very choicest and best of all the hours those which should have been devoted to sleep. "O, no; nothing unusual. I have been having another wrestling-bout with my old enemy, Insomnia; that's all. He is very hard to lay on his back sometimes. No matter how early I may retire, it is often broad daylight before I can get to sleep. Are you ever troubled that way?" I lied a little for the sake of sympathy, saying that I, too, had had a sleepless night now and then. But the fact of the matter is, that as soon as my head touches my pillow and my eyes close I enter the Land of Nod by the limited express. "Then you know something of what I suffer. You know what it is to have all the prescribed formulas of sleep-producing, except the sedative, fail you. Now, I hate to resort to drugs. They leave me with less and less power against my enemy after each succeeding application. Of course you know that, still you cannot have the slightest conception of the torture I have endured after all; for I believe I have descended into the uttermost depths of the hell of the sleepless. I fear that drugs must in a note accompanying the package, and time become my only hope, and they are, as you know, a frail one. In vain have I tried many influences, the exertion of which I thought might withdraw my mind from the consciousness of its operations, and suspend the directing power of my will. I will not deny the fact that my restlessness is always de. pendent upon mental agitation and extreme nervousness. It generally is in cases such as mine." me. These confidences were not in my line. The next thing I knew he might be confessing some horrible crime to So I got rid of him, after asking if he had ever heard of strong cold tea as a cure for sleeplessness. He said he had drank pints of it at a sitting, without the slightest noticeable good. As his long shirt trailed through the door, and he turned his cavernous eyes toward me, and again bade me good night in that thin voice of his, I knew I should have to read three more chapters of "Sappho" to get him and his confounded insomnia off my mind. By the time I had finished reading, it was three o'clock in the morning. I heard slight creaking sounds across the hallway, and knew they emanated from my new acquaintance's bedroom. The sounds seemed like those of a person striding softly up and down the floor. I slept the sleep of the just, and woke not until nearly noon, when I went abroad as usual, and on coming back and making an anxious inquiry for the letter that was to contain the eagerly awaited news of the Great Event, I received the usual reply and went on with my time-killing. It was getting to be slow work now, for I had nearly read myself out, and there was no prospect of a card-party of my chums until Saturday night, which was a long way off. The evening post brought nothing, but an expressman did manage to break the monotony with a good sized bundle, which I eyed with curiosity. There was on opening it I was told in little Cousin May's absurdly large chirography that this was my birthday, and that I had become the owner of a mandolin. Cousin May was always making people foolish gifts, bless her dear heart. The year before she had sent me a lot of little bags, scented with sachet powder. I unwrapped my mandolin and looked at it with a smile. "I have about as much use for this thing as a blind woman has for a looking glass," said I, for I knew not so much as a single note of music, not even a semi-quaver. So I put the mandolin on the mantle-piece, and turned to a fresh novel that I had brought home with me that day. I found in the first two chapters that the story was too tame for me, and so I lighted a cigar and sauntered out upon the street. At the corner I fell in with my afflicted friend. "I am taking a good walk tonight," said he. "Perhaps it will aid me in getting to sleep." "I hope it may," said I, not very interestedly, and at the same time I thought, "This man is getting to be a bore." But he did not insist on walking with me, as I had thought he would. Still I was very far from being rid of him. He came again to my bedroom at midnight. This time he was more decently arrayed, but he had the same thin voice, the same awful eyes, and the same dry and uncanny beard and hair. He talked a long time, and as a result of his talk the most unlikely thing occurred. I actually became interested in the fellow and his everlasting insomnia. I can hardly account for it now, but he managed to impress me and so to gain my sympathy as to create in me a desire to help him. I knew that I was too selfish and indifferent to the woes of others to have this sort of feeling last long, and I wondered not a little at myself for harboring it at all. I went into his room with him, put him to bed, and selecting the stupidest "Then you did not go to sleep, after all?" "No," he replied sadly, vainly trying to smooth down his rebellious whiskers. I was disgusted. My first insomnia patient was evidently a very bad case, worse, indeed, than I had imagined. Well, what was he or his sleeplessness to me? People had no right to force their maladies upon their neighbors, particularly in a boarding-house. I had come there to kill time, to be sure, but I wanted to choose my own way of doing it. For the next few days I was a thing of wild unrest. There was no card party, nor, in fact, any other kind of amusement that I cared for on the calendar, and the Great Event, though seemingly just at the point at times, actually refused to come off. book of all the mass of rot on my shelves, "You worked so faithfully with me I read for an hour in the most monoto- that I did not like to discourage you, so nous tone at my command. It seemed I assumed the state that you were trythat his evening walk had done him no ing so hard to force upon me." earthly good, and he had been tossing about until he had nearly worn out his mattress. Now he lay quite calm. He was not asleep,- that I could tell by his breathing, which was of the waking sort. I droned away in the most unimpressive manner, hoping to smooth down his auditory nerves, and cause his mind to yield itself to the soporific influence. I tired of this at the end of the hour. His eyes were closed, but the lids twitched in a horrible way. I saw on a shelf a well-thumbed volume, Macnish on "The Philosophy of Sleep." I opened it at page 21, and read that the mind while. remaining poised, as it were, between sleep and its opposite condition, is "pervaded by a strange confusion which almost amounts to wild delirium; the ideas dissolve their connection with it one by one, and its own essence becomes so vague and diluted that it melts away in the nothingness of slumber." What an awful thing sleep was, after all! It had never struck me in that light before, I read on and found a lot of sleep-producing experiments, which I proceeded to put to the test. Following the instructions, I began a soft tapping on the edge of the table, at the same time droning out a sort of see-saw melody, like unto nothing ever heard on the earth above, the waters beneath, or elsewhere. But the eyelids kept up their infernal twitching and the breath got no deeper. Then I began a buzzing noise, curling my tongue and pressing it to my tightly closed teeth. He turned his face to the wall, and soon I was rewarded by a heavy and regular breathing. I went away, still buzzing as I walked to the door, for fear that if I stopped he would wake and all my trouble would go for naught. He did not bother me for several days after that. On meeting him then I asked how he had slept that night. One day, when particularly angry at the world, my eye fell upon the mandolin. I had been out a few evenings before at an entertainment where a man with gray hair had played the mandolin very sweetly, and he had told me that he had learned in two weeks. I had regarded the statement with proper sus-. picion, but now that I came to look at the instrument closely I saw that it was a simple affair, after all. "If I can get somebody to teach me to tune it and to twang it," I thought, "I can consume a little time fooling with the strings. I liked those ear-tickling notes very well the other night. Only two weeks' practice. Of course the man lied." I took the mandolin to a house on Sutter Street, where a modest sign announced that lessons were given on that instrument. A soft-eyed girl, with a lot of fluffy hair hanging over her forehead, gave me a lesson before I left the house. She applied a sort of Ollendorff system to her teaching, beginning |