Soapbox

“ This barrel was placed on bricks or set at a slight angle on a circular groove in a wood or stone base; then filled with ashes; water was poured in till the lye trickled or leached out through an outlet cut in the groove, into a small wooden tub or bucket. The water and ashes were frequently replenished as they wasted, and the lye accumulated in a large tub or kettle. If the lye was not strong enough, it was poured over fresh ashes. An old-time receipt says:—
"The great Difficulty in making Soap come is the want of Judgment of the Strength of the Lye. ”

“ The price of a cake of toilet soap to a great extent depends upon the perfume, and the manufacturer should aim to give the best possible perfume for a certain price. He should not allow his personal likes or dislikes to enter into the judgment of whether an odor is good or not, but submit it to a number of persons to obtain the concensus of opinion. In giving or selling a piece of soap to the consumer, it is second nature for him to smell it, and in the great majority of cases his opinion is formed not from any quality the soap itself may have during use, but from the odor. ”

“ Rarely would any money be found, but people liked to be fooled if it is done the right way. To get them "biting" he might let one of the bills go to a confederate who was seemingly just one of the crowd. It was a money-making business as a rule for there were ordinarily quite a number of "easy-marks" around. They got the soap anyway. So came the name "Soapy."
Well, it was the same old clever, crooked game in other bigger and bolder forms that he now worked in Skagway, with the gun-play in addition. ”

“ The only thing which will render it easy of removal is soap, as by its action it softens the oily material and dislodges it from the skin. Soap has acquired an evil reputation which it certainly does not deserve, and if it disagrees it is either due to the fact of its being an inferior article, or else the skin itself must be at fault. The best soap to use is the white, not the mottled, Castile, as it is made from pure olive oil. By the proper and judicious use of soap the skin is kept soft and natural, and the complexion is maintained in the hue of health. ”

“ Here the blanks are plunged into a tank of cold water, which hisses and spits like a dozen angry snakes as the hot metal touches it. From the cooling bath the blanks go to the acid bath. Into this latter they disappear black with the oxide of copper clinging to them. Pears' Soap or Sapolio, or whatever means to cleanliness we may employ, would hardly accomplish the wonders in an hour's application to the human skin, which a few seconds of the sulphuric solution accomplishes with the blank of the coin. They emerge from their bath in every sense white as snow. ”

“ Bucket by elbow, hold Hon. Rags in teeth and splatter Hon. Window with what fingers I had left. In the meanwhile, what was Hon. Soap doing? When he got wet his nature changed and he imagined he was a snake. He would not stay where he was, but amuse himself by slipping off from everywheres I put him. Every time he fall, I must dutifully ascend down that ladder, pick him from grass, carefully descend upwards again and attempt to hang him somewheres where he would not make an eel of himself. I never seen soap so full of slyness. ”

“ Unless a soap-ley be rendered caustic, or deprived of its fixed air, it can have no natural attraction for vegetable or animal subtsances, such as oil, tallow, or grease of any kind, so as to convert them into a soap. For the sole purpose, therefore, of extracting the fixed air from the leys, do soapmakers use quicklime. Depriving the mild alkali of its fixed air, renders it caustic, or of a burning, corroding quality, and of that peculiar nature that instantly attach themselves to all greasy substances, and converts them into soap. ”

“ The lower half of a barrel of home-made soap is always the strongest. Soft soap, made with clean grease and good potash is of a light nankeen color, and is better for washing flannels and white clothes than any other. ”

“ I did not in the last lecture by any direct experiment show that a soap-film or bubble is really elastic, like a piece of stretched india-rubber.
A soap-bubble consisting, as it does, of a thin layer of liquid, which must have of course both an inside and an outside surface or skin, must be elastic, and this is easily shown in many ways. Perhaps the easiest way is to tie a thread across a ring rather loosely, and then to dip the ring into soap water. On taking it out there is a film stretched over the ring, in which the thread moves about quite freely, as you can see upon the screen. ”

“ But as Soapy set foot inside the restaurant door the head waiter’s eye fell upon his frayed trousers and decadent shoes. Strong and ready hands turned him about and conveyed him in silence and haste to the sidewalk and averted the ignoble fate of the menaced mallard.
Soapy turned off Broadway. It seemed that his route to the coveted island was not to be an epicurean one. Some other way of entering limbo must be thought of. ”

“ If we ask ourselves how it is that the liquid in the interior of one of these drops does not flow out, pressed as it is by the liquid above it, the answer is that everywhere the stretched skin presses it back. A soap-bubble too presses on the air in its interior, both the outside layers and the inside layers of the thin film being curved over the interior space. This is the reason that a soap-bubble blown on the bowl of a pipe will slowly collapse again if we remove the stem of the pipe from our mouth. ”

“ But if that person doesn't want it, and I'm pretty sure—that person—won't, you shall have it, I promise you. And now," said he, pocketing the ring and turning, still scowling, on Soapy, "you are one of M'Ginnis's gang, I fancy; anyway, if you see him you can tell him from me that if he gives me another chance I'll surely kill him for the foul beast he is."
"Sport," said Soapy, "I guess the Spider's right about you—anyway, you ain't my meat. An' as fer killin' Bud—you sure ain't goin' t' get th' chance—not while I have the say-so. S' long, sport!" and turning upon his heel, Soapy lounged away. ”

“ A prominent manufacturer recently made the statement, which is often the truth, that it makes no difference to the public what kind of soap you give them, as long as you put plenty of odor into it. The perfuming of soaps is an art in itself and a subject to be treated by one versed in this particular branch. We can only take into account the importance of [Pg 74] the perfume as related to toilet soap not only, but the necessity of adding a certain proportion of the cheaper products of odoriferous nature to laundry soap to cover and disguise the odor of even this type of soap. ”

“ Asiatics as a rule know little about soap; they clean their clothes by pounding, and themselves by rubbing; but sometimes they put an exaggerated value upon it. A Kashmir woman, seeing herself in a mirror side by side with the fair face of an English friend of mine, sighed, "If I had such good soap as yours I too would be white." ”

“ To obtain the knowledge necessary to complete a Soap-maker, must at all times be attended with a very considerable expence, besides the consumption of a large portion of time. No experienced Soap-boiler would consider it at all worth his attention, to undertake the instructing, in the fundamental principles of the art, any person under a premium of One Hundred Guineas, besides the benefit of the person's labour spent in the acquirement. ”

“ John Jefferson Doodle stood up, and without speaking led the way to the washroom. With a grim smile upon his face he explained the mechanism of the Soap Thief Detector to the president of the International Toilet Soap Trust, and the fat man breathed heavily.
"There is nothing vague about this," sneered Doodle. "What I wired you is the truth. Nine out of every ten people who steal soap from hotels and restaurants never buy toilet soap. Therefore, the more thieving the more soap you will sell us, and it stands to reason that you do not wish the Thief Detector to come into general use." ”

“ I do not suppose that there is any one in this room who has not occasionally blown a common soap-bubble, and while admiring the perfection of its form, and the marvellous brilliancy of its colours, wondered how it is that such a magnificent object can be so easily produced. ”

“ Burdock heard that groan, and learned shortly that Soapy reckoned he had cleaned up a thousand an hour for the last four hours, against which his rival had the one nugget last tossed across the creek. The latter cooked and ate in a kind of choking silence, and that, again, is the way of the wilderness. Enough is never enough. What the other fellow has determines one's own objective, and it was the irony of Ragged River that doubled on the man who dared not go back East, and halved on the one who ached to go. ”

“ Two or three reliable persons should be chosen for judges to decide the contest. The parents or some older members of the family, at whose house the party is held, usually perform this duty. I should have added, when speaking of the soap mixture, that the common yellow soap intended for laundry use, is much better for this purpose than the finer toilet varieties most commonly used by amateur soap-bubble blowers. ”

“ It is considered the best procedure to commence the pasting or saponification with weak lye.
In order to economise tank space, it is the general practice to store strong caustic lye (60° to 70° Tw., 33° to 37° B.) and to dilute it as it is being added to the soap-pan by the simultaneous addition of water.
Many manufacturers give all their soap a "brine wash" to remove the last traces of glycerine and free the soap from carbonates. This operation takes place prior to "fitting"; sufficient water is added to the boiling soap to "close" it and then brine is run in to "grain" it. ”

“ A river is no more than human, after all. But what has soap been doing?"
"Nothing; and in the fact that it has been doing nothing lies one of my chief counts against it. Of old you judged a man by the club to which he belonged, the number of his quarterings, the tailor who made his clothes, the income he had, the wife he married, the horses he backed, or the wine he drank. Now we classify men according to the soap they use. There are more soaps now than patent medicines."
"Soaps are patent medicine for external use only," said Lady Forcar, touching her white plump wrist. ”

“ Burdock did not wash gravel so clean, but got through a third more stuff. This was important, as they might run out of that strip at any moment, and hunt for the next. It was the first time Soapy had felt his age, and he hated it. That night, the moon being full, he slipped to the water's edge to put in a little overtime. At the second pan he heard a laugh.
"I love to see my dear old father work," trolled a bass voice.
He straightened, hurled a string of oaths across Ragged River, and slunk back to camp, his beard wagging angrily.
"The way some folks is brought up nowadays!" he exploded. ”

“ Among the necessities of life there is one to which few people pay the attention they ought, and that is Soap. Yet it is undoubtedly a most important matter, for the skin is a very delicate and sensitive organ, and the constant application of impure or inferior Soaps injures its texture, and gives rise to numerous cutaneous troubles. Most people are content, so long as it appeals to the eye and the sense of smell, without stopping to consider that perfumes may be employed to hide defects. ”

“ Kelly, bringing out a pink box. “The regular [100] price of the soap is ten cents a cake or three cakes for a quarter. But I want you to have a free cake,” I told her, “to sort of pay you back for the cookies.”
“Beauty soap?” she repeated. And I had the sudden feeling that something queer was happening in her head.
“It’s a very wonderful soap,” Scoop picked up. “It makes women beautiful. The homelier they are the more beautiful they become. And we have been told further that it removes warts and blemishes; turns wrinkles into dimples. ”

“ As mistakes by Excise-officers are not at all improbable, in casting up gauges of soap, it is proper that every soap-maker should cast up his own, after the dip of the frame is ascertained by the officer, supervisor, &c. ”

“ Only soap made from best quality fats is usually milled, a suitable base being that obtained by saponifying a blend of the finest white tallow with a proportion, not exceeding 25 per cent., of cocoa-nut oil, and prepared as described in Chapter V.
The first essential of a milling base is that the saponification should be thorough and complete; if this is not ensured, rancidity is liable to occur and a satisfactory toilet soap cannot be produced. The soap must not be short in texture or brittle and liable to split, but of a firm and somewhat plastic consistency. ”

“ The indications to be noticed are the shape and size of the flakes of soap as the sample on the trowel breaks up and runs from the hot iron surface, when the latter is turned in a vertical position, as well as the condition of the iron surface from which the soap flakes have fallen. A closed soap will run slowly into a homogeneous sheet, leaving the trowel's surface covered with a thin layer of transparent soap; a grained mass will run rapidly down in tiny grains, about one-half an inch in diameter or less, leaving the hot trowel [Pg 39] absolutely dry. ”

“ As you will soon find out if you try, you cannot make with a soap-bubble a great length of any of these curves at one time, but you may get pieces of any of them with no more [Pg 76] apparatus than a few wire rings, a pipe, and a little soap and water. You can even see the whole of one of the loops of the dotted curve of the first figure (A) , which is called a nodoid, not a complete ring, for that is unstable, but a part of such a ring. Take a piece of wire or a match, and fasten one end to a piece of lead, so that it will stand upright in a dish of soap water, and project half an inch or so. ”