What it was Made From.
ONE day Queen Victoria visited a paper-mill. The owner showed her through the works, not knowing who she was, and, among other places, took her into the rag-room. When she saw the soiled and impure condition of the rags, she exclaimed: “How can these ever be made white?”
“Ah, lady,” was the reply, “I have a chemical process of great power, by which I can take the color out of even those red rags.”
Before she left, he discovered that she was the Queen. A few days after, the Queen found, lying upon her writing desk, a quantity of the most beautifully polished paper she had ever seen. On each sheet were the letters of her own name. There was also a note, which read as follows — “Will the Queen be pleased to accept a specimen of my paper, with the assurance that every sheet was manufactured out of the dirty rags which she saw? I trust the result is such as even the Queen may admire. Will the Queen also allow me to say that I have had many a good sermon preached to me in my mill? I can understand how the Lord Jesus can take the poor heathen, and the vilest of the vile, and make them clean; and how, though their sins be as scarlet, He can make them white as snow. And I can see how He can put His Own name upon them; and, just as these rags, transformed, may go into a royal palace and be admired, so poor sinners can be received into the palace of the Great King.’