It was a bright morning in April. Prue woke up at seven, half an hour before she need get up. This is a very pleasant thing to do. She knew it was seven because she looked at her watch. Her watch! This is rather serious, because few things that we use in daily life contain the results of more labour in many countries than a very ordinary watch, and if I tell you all about that now, we shall not get back to Prue for many pages. I had forgotten that Prue's watch would come in so soon. Let us then postpone the examination of her watch for a little, because I want to tell you how she began to think of this dependence of hers (and ours) upon the rest of the world. She lay there in her little bed all cosy between the sheets and blankets. (Sheets and blankets, did I say? This story is not only never going to end, I can see, but is never going to begin either, for Prue's sheets jump us straight away to Carolina in North America, and the cotton fields, and the negroes at work there, and the great Atlantic steamers being laden with the bales, and the Lancashire cotton mills, and the girls in clogs, and the boys thinking of football as they work, and the broad, Lancashire dialect filling the air, and ... do you see what a task we have before us? While as for Prue's blankets, they take us farther still, right away to Australia, to a great sheep farm with thousands and thousands of sheep, and the hot sun, and the dry Bush stretching as far as the eye can reach, and the rouseabouts driving the sheep up to the shearing sheds, and rows of half-naked men shearing and shearing, with the sheep kicking and struggling beneath them. Think of the heat of it all, and the dust and thirst and weariness, and nothing to do when evening comes in this wilderness but rest and get ready for the next day! And then the despatch of the wool in wagons to the nearest train, and the train going to the port and the long voyage to the factory in England where it is to be spun. How many sheep's warm coats contributed to make one of your blankets? You never thought of that before, perhaps. But still we have not reached the awakening of Prue's consciousness on this great matter of herself and the world.) She lay there in that blessed half-awake, half-asleep state for some minutes, until she began to feel something warm on her cheek, and realized that it was the sun. And she suddenly thought how wonderful it was that there should be such a substance as glass which can keep out the cold but lets light and warmth through it, and, idly thinking, she began to wonder how glass is made, and when it was discovered, and what people did before they had it, and either how draughty or how dark their rooms must have been; and she determined to ask her father and Miss Fry about it; and that was the beginning of this story.