Each layer of skins, as placed on the stack, is well sprinkled with naphtha to disinfect and keep it wholesome. If the hides are to remain long in the stacks before going into the dressing, they must be unstacked from time to time, shaken out, aired, and restacked, to prevent them from overheating. When the dresser receives from the manufacturer instructions to put one of his lots into the dressing, the first thing that has to be done is carefully to inspect each skin in the pile; it is then classified as “hard,” “extra strong,” or “medium”; as “fine” or “superfine.” After all the skins in the stack have been looked over, and sorted in this manner, they are carried to the ground floor of the factory and placed in tanks of clear, cold water, in which they must remain for forty-eight hours. At the end of that time, they are thoroughly washed in running cold water, and are again put into the tanks, where they are kept for another forty-eight hours. The next step is one of the most particular in the entire process. The skins are removed from the clear water into tanks of concrete, sunk in the floor of the factory, which are filled with a mixture of water and dead sifted lime. Every forty-eight hours they are taken out and well swilled with a similar mixture; then immediately replaced in the tanks. The length of time skins should be kept in this lime bath depends upon their character and origin. The effect of the lime on the skin is to render it very easy to scrape off the hair. According to the regions from which they come, skins remain in the bath for from ten to twenty-five days. This lime treatment is the most crucial point in the dressing of kid skins, for it is only after long years of experience that a master dresser knows exactly how long it takes to render—let us say, for instance—an Auvergne skin “unhairable.” If the skins are left even twenty-four hours too long in the lime mixture, they are so damaged as to be useless for manufacturing into high grade gloves. When it is judged that the skins have remained long enough in the lime bath, they are taken out and then energetically washed in clear, running water; after which they are passed along to another set of men who place them, one by one, flat, over a smooth, rounded block of wood, and with a blunt, two-handled, almost scythe-shaped knife, proceed to scrape the hair and fat off the surface of the skins. The “unhairing” completed, the skins, still wet and mussy, are passed on to women workers who trim the edges—to which adheres superfluous fat—with large hand shears. The next process is to rid the skins of the lime with which they have been charged. Therefore, scraped and trimmed, they are submerged in a large, wooden vat, containing hot water mixed with an entirely new product, invented by Monsieur Louis Peyrache. This product is called “peroly” and is an enemy to lime. When the skins are lifted out of this solution they are found to be quite devoid of all traces of the latter.