The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864

Rest, plenty of cool water, and dinner having restored the energies of the travellers, it was proposed that they should proceed at once to the Glass Works. And now, indeed, did Fortune smile upon this band of adventurous spirits; for when the question of a guide arose, mine host of the inn announced himself not only willing to act in that capacity, but eminently qualified therefor by long experience as an operative in various departments of the works.

"How fortunate that the stage-coaches and peddlers no longer frequent Sandwich! If our friend had them to attend to, he could not devote himself to us in this charming manner," suggested Optima, as she and Miselle gayly followed Monsieur, Madame, and Cicerone down the long sunny street, whose loungers turned a glance of lazy wonder upon the strangers.

Passing presently a monotonous row of lodging-houses for the workmen, and a public square with a fountain, which, as Optima suggested, might be made very pretty with the addition of some water, the travellers approached a large brick building, many-windowed, many-chimneyed, and offering ingress through a low-browed arch of so gloomy an aspect that one looked at its key-stone half expecting to read there the well-known Dantean legend,—

"Lasciate ogni speranza, voi chi'ntrate!"

Nor was the illusion quite destroyed by handling, for through the arch and a short passage one entered a large, domed apartment, brick-floored and dimly lighted, whose atmosphere was the breath of a dozen flashing furnaces, whose occupants were grimy gnomes wildly sporting with strange shapes of molten metal.

"This is the glass-room, and in these furnaces the glass is melted; but perhaps you will go first and see how it is mixed, and how the pots are made to boil it in."

"Yes, let us begin at the beginning," said all, and were led from the Inferno across a cool, green yard, into a building specially devoted to the pots. In a great bin lay masses of soft brown clay in its crude condition, and upon the floor were heaped fragments of broken pots, calcined by use in the furnaces, and now waiting to be ground up into a fine powder between the wheels of a powerful mill working steadily in one corner of the building. In another, a row of boxes or pens were partially filled with a powdered mixture of the raw and burnt clay, and this, being moistened with water, was worked to a proper consistency beneath the bare feet of several stout men.

"This work, like the treading of the wine-press, can be properly performed only by human feet," remarked Monsieur.

"So when next we sip nectar from one of your straw-stemmed glasses, we will remember these gentlemen and their brothers of the wine-countries, and gratefully acknowledge that without their exertions we could have had neither wine nor goblet," said Miselle, maliciously.

"No," suggested Optima, "we will enjoy the result and forget the process. But what is that man about?"

"Making sausages out of cheese, I should say," replied Monsieur; and the comparison was almost unavoidable; for upon a coarse table lay masses of moulded clay, in form and size exactly like cheeses, from which the workman separated with a wooden knife a small portion to be rolled beneath his hand into cylindrical shapes some four inches in length by two in diameter.

These a lad carefully placed upon a long and narrow board to carry up to the pot-room, whither he was followed by the whole party.

Miselle's first impression, upon entering this great chamber, was, that she was following a drove of elephants; but as she skirted the regular ranks of the great dun monsters and came to the front, she concluded that she had stumbled upon the factory of Ali Baba's oil-jars. At any rate, the old picture in the "Arabian Nights" represented Morgiana in the act of pouring the boiling oil into vessels marvellously like these, and in each of these was room for at least four robbers of true melodramatic stature.

Among these jars, with the noiseless solicitude of a mother in her sleeping nursery, wandered their author and guardian, a pale, keen man, and so rare an enthusiast in his art that one listening to him could hardly fail to believe that the highest degree of thought, skill, and experience might worthily be expended upon the construction of these seething-pots for molten glass.

"Will you look at this one? It is my last," said he, tenderly removing a damp cloth from the surface of something like the half of a hogshead made in clay.

"I have not begun to dome it in yet; it must dry another day first," said the artist, passing his hand lovingly along the smooth surface of his work.

"Then you cannot go on with them at once?" asked Madame.

"Oh, no, Ma'am! They must dry and harden between the spells of work upon them, or they never would stand their own weight. This one, you see, is twelve inches thick in the bottom, and the sides are five inches thick at the base, and graduated to four where the curve begins. Now if I was to go right ahead, and put the roof on this mass of wet clay, I shouldn't get it done before the whole would crush in together. I have had them do so, Ma'am, when I was younger, but I know better now. I sha'n't have that to suffer again."

"And what are you at work upon while this dries?"

"Here. This one is just begun. Shall I show you how I do it? John, where are those rolls? Yes, I see. Now, Ma'am, this is the way."

Taking one of the rolls in his left hand, and manipulating it with his right, our artist laid it upon the top of the unfinished wall, and with his supple fingers began to dovetail and compact it into the mass, pressing and smoothing the whole carefully as he went on.

"You see I must be very careful not to leave any air-bubbles in my work; if I do, there will be a crack."

"When the pot dries?" asked Madame.

"No, Ma'am, when it is heated. I suppose the air expands and forces its way out," said the man, shyly, as if he were more in the habit of thinking philosophy than of talking it. "But see how smooth and fine this clay is," added he, enthusiastically, passing his finger through one of the rolls. "It is as close-grained and delicate as—as a lady's cheek."

"But, really, how could one describe the shape of these creatures?" asked Optima aside of Miselle, as she stood contemplating a completed monster.

"By comparing them to an Esquimaux lodge, with one little arched window just at the spring of the dome. Doesn't that give it?"

"Perhaps. I never saw an Esquimaux lodge; did you, my dear?"

"No, nor anything else in the least degree resembling these, unless it was the picture of the oil-jars. Choose, my Optima, between the two."

"Hark! we are losing something worth hearing."

So the young women opened their ears, and heard the pallid enthusiast tell how, after days and weeks of labor, and months of seasoning, the pots were laboriously carried to a kiln, where they were slowly brought to a red heat, and then suffered to cool as slowly. How the pot was then taken to one of the furnaces of the Inferno, and a portion of its side removed to receive it; how it was then built in, and reheated before the glass-material was thrown in; and how, after all this care and toil, it was perhaps not a week before it cracked or gave way at some point, and must be taken away to make room for another. But this was unusually "hard luck," and the pots sometimes held good as long as three months.

"And what becomes of the old ones?" asked Optima, sympathetically.

"Oh, they are all used over again, Miss. There must be a proportion of burnt clay mixed with the raw, or it would be too rich to harden."

"And what is the proportion?"

"About one-third of the cooked clay, and two-thirds of the raw."

"And where does the clay come from?"

"Nearly all from Sturbridge, in England. Some has been brought from Gay Head, on Martha's Vineyard; but it doesn't answer like the imported."

Leaving the courteous artist in glass-pots to his labors, the party, crossing again the breezy yard, entered a dismal brick-paved basement-room, where grim bakers were attending upon a number of huge ovens. One of these was just being filled; but instead of white and brown loaves, golden cake, or flaky pies, the two attendants were piling in short, thick bars of lead, and, hurry as they might, before they could put in the last of the appointed number, little shining streams of molten metal began to ooze from beneath the first, and trickle languidly toward the mouth of the oven.

But our bakers were ready for them. With hasty movement they threw in a quantity of moistened clay, shaping and compacting it with their shovels as they went on, until in a very few moments they had completed a neat little semi-circular dike just within the door, as effectual a barrier to the glowing pool behind it, wherein the softened bars were rapidly disappearing, as was ever the Dutchman's dike to the ocean, with whom he disputes the sovereignty of Holland.

A wooden door was now put up, and the baking was left to itself for about twenty-four hours, at the end of which time the lead would have become transformed into a yellowish powder, known as massicot.

"You will see it here. They are just beginning to clear this oven," said Cicerone, pointing to a row of large iron vessels which the workmen were filling with the contents of the just opened kiln.

"And what next? What is it to the glass?" asked Miselle, unblushing at her ignorance.

"Next, it is put into these other kilns, and kept in motion with the long rakes that you see here, and at the end of forty-eight hours it will have absorbed sufficient oxygen from the atmosphere to turn it from massicot to minium, or red-lead. Look at this, if you please."

Cicerone here pointed to other iron vessels, in shape like the bowl out of which the giant Blunderbore ate his bread and milk, while trembling little Jack peeped at him from the oven; but these bowls were filled with a beautiful scarlet powder of fine consistency.

"That is red-lead, one of the most important ingredients in fine flint-glass, as it gives it brilliancy and ductility. But it is not used in the coarser glasses. And here is the sand-room."

So saying, Cicerone led the way to a light and cheerful room of delicious temperature, even on that summer's day, where, upon a low, broad, iron table, heated from beneath by steam-pipes, lay a mass of what might indeed be sand, and yet differed as much from ordinary sand as a just washed pet-lamb differs from an old weather-beaten sheep.

Like the lamb, the sand had been washed with care and much water, and now lay reposing after its bath at lazy length, enjoying its kief, like a sworn Mussulman. This sand is principally brought from the banks of Hudson River and the coast of New Jersey; but a finer article of quartz sand is found in Lanesboro', Massachusetts.

In the centre of the room stood a great sifting-machine, worked by steam; and the sand, after being thoroughly dried, was passed through this, coming out a fine, glittering mass, very much resembling granulated sugar, so far as looks are concerned.

"Now it is ready to be sent up to the mixing-room; but if you will step on this drop, we will go up before it," said the civil workman here in charge.

So some of the party stepped upon a solid platform about six feet square, lying under a trap in the floor overhead, and were slowly wound up to the mixing-room, feeling quite sure, when they stepped upon the solid floor once more, that they had done a very heroic thing, and were not hereafter to be dismayed by travellers' tales of descents into coal-mines, or swinging to the tops of dizzy spires in creaking baskets.

Here, in the mixing-room, stood great boxes, filled with sand, with red-lead, or with sparkling soda and potash; and beside a trough stood, shovel in hand, a good-natured-looking man, who was busily mixing portions of these three ingredients into one mass.