goods are rubbed over with a final gloss, for which Eitner gives the following recipe:--8 liters olive oil, 500 grm. tallow, 500 grm. yellow wax, 500 grm. rosin, 500 grm. gum arabic. (No water is given in the recipe, but the gum arabic is presumably softened in water.) The mixture is cooked for two hours in an earthen pot till the water is evaporated, and allowed to cool with constant stirring. The skins are then rubbed with a flannel with a very small sprinkling of French chalk, and are ready for sale. [Illustration: FIG. 38.--The Slocomb Staking Machine.] The manufacture of glove-kid is quite similar in principle to that just described, but varied in detail to suit the softer and more delicate skins employed, to give greater softness, and especially the quality of stretching in any direction without springing back, which is so characteristic of the leather. Lamb-skins are the principal raw material, though genuine kid is also employed for the best qualities. The manufacture varies much with the quality and character of the goods. The skins, which are mostly dried, are soaked in clean and cool water for three to four days, according to age and thickness. Common qualities (small imported slink lambs) are often unhaired by dipping in or painting with a paste of gas-lime, lime and sulphide of sodium, or lime and red arsenic, so as to destroy the wool. Better skins are sometimes unhaired by painting on the flesh with lime alone or in mixture, and in other cases ordinary lime-pits are used, with limes, which are most usually strengthened with red arsenic, which is added to the lime while hot from slaking (cp. p. 142). The calcic sulphydrate (and perhaps sulpharsenite) thus formed hastens the unhairing, and preserves the gloss of the grain. Well conducted glove-kid establishments avoid as much as possible the use of old limes, which produce a loose, porous leather, with a rough, dull grain. The liming lasts on the average ten days, and is of the greatest importance. It is essential that the inter-fibrillary substance should be dissolved, that the leather may have the quality known in Germany as _Stand_, that is to say, may be strongly stretched in either length or breadth without springing back. It also depends upon the liming (and this is of special importance in the case of lamb-skins), whether the tissue of the fat-glands is well loosened, so that the fat, either as such, or as lime- or ammonia-soap, may be readily and completely worked out. Skins in which this is neglected can never be properly dyed.