They climbed the stairs but there was no sign of life and no answer to knocks.
From an evidential point of view the apparition is the most valuable class of death-warning, inasmuch as recognition is more difficult in the case of an auditory hallucination, even where it takes the form of spoken words; moreover, auditory hallucinations coinciding with deaths may be mere knocks, ringing of bells, &c.; tactile hallucinations are still more difficult of recognition; and the hallucinations of smell which are sometimes found as death-warnings rarely have anything to associate them specially with the dead person.
When the waste contains any large percentage of worm or chrysalis, it is taken to a " cocoon beater," a machine which has a large revolving disk on which the silk is put, and while revolving slowly is beaten by a leather whip or flail, which loosens the silk and knocks out the wormy matter.
Their hands bore the hard calluses of heavy manual labor, their backbones carried the scars of years of knocks against rough hewn surfaces.
