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“Buy mercerized cotton for your dining-room table or your bedding, if you want, but pay just what it is worth and no more. To be quite explicit, as mercerized cotton fabrics are worth just half what pure linen is worth, if you pay for mercerized cotton the price asked for pure linen, you are wasting father’s money.

“I have here two bolts of table ‘linen’ in exactly the same chrysanthemum design. One of these is real linen, value one dollar and fifty cents per yard; the other is mercerized cotton, value seventy-five cents per yard. I am quite sure that when these two bolts are passed around, you will not be able to tell the linen from the mercerized cotton. My own salesmen can not tell them apart without applying some sort of a test. Down in our basement you can buy the mercerized cotton at seventy-five cents a yard. If you will launder it carefully, rinsing it finally in very thin starch water, iron it very dry with heavy irons, you can get exactly the same gloss possible for linen damask, and you will get its full value of seventy-five cents a yard.