Imagine a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of furs under one roof! Picture to your minds raw skins in bales, just as they were unloaded from an Indian canoe, and then look again and see wraps and coats made from them that would each bring five thousand dollars when sold on Fifth Avenue. If your imagination is vivid enough you may see the American beauties who will wear them and know how the furs will add to the sparkle of their eyes and at the same time lighten the purses of their sweethearts and husbands. We shall first go to the cold storage rooms. Here are piles of sealskins from our Pribilof Islands. Put one of these furs against your cheek. It feels like velvet. In these rooms are beavers from Labrador, sables from Russia, and squirrels from Siberia. There are scores of fox skins--blue, silver, black, and white. Some of them come from the cold arctic regions and others from fox farms not twenty minutes distant by motor. Take a look at this cloak of silvery gray fur. A year ago the skins from which it was made were on the backs of hair seals swimming in the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. As we go through the factory, some of the secrets of fur making are whispered to us. For example, this bale contains fifteen hundred skins of the muskrat. The animals which produced them will change their names after a trip to the dyers. They will go into the vats and when they come out they will be Hudson Bay seals, and eventually will find their way into a black coat with a wonderful sheen. Years ago the muskrat skin was despised. Now it is made into coats that, under the trade name of Hudson seal, bring nearly as much as those of real seal. Here are two Russian sables, little fellows of beautiful fur, that together will form a single neck piece. The undressed skins are worth seven hundred dollars the pair. As we look, the manager shows us two native sables that seem to be quite as fine. He tells us they can be had for eighty-five dollars each, or less than a quarter of the price of the Russian. The most valuable fur in the world to-day is the sea otter, of which this firm gets only three or four skins in a year. But, in contrast, over there is a whole heap of Labrador otters, beautiful furs, which will wear almost for ever and will look almost as well as the sea otter itself. But you can have your choice of these at forty dollars apiece. They are cheap chiefly because the Labrador skin is not in fashion with women. Fashion in furs is constantly changing. Not many years ago a black fox skin often brought as much as fifteen hundred dollars. To-day, so many are coming from the fur farms that the price has fallen to one hundred and fifty dollars. Scarcity is one of the chief considerations in determining the value of furs, and fashion always counts more than utility. The rich, like the kings of old, demand something that the poor cannot have, and lose their interest in the genuine furs when their imitations have become common and cheap.