“Doctor Andre, I’m sorry I can’t tell you more,” Jimmie apologized. “You—you’ll know more very soon, I am sure.”
“That is quite all right,” the old man bowed him out.
“Yes. He’ll know much more,” the boy thought grimly. “But will I be here to tell him?”
Arrived at the glass-blower’s place, Jimmie plied the astonished man with questions for a full ten minutes. His answers were, “Ja, I tink so!” “It might be so. Aber, I cannot say.” “Ja, some glass iss thin like paper. It break very easy. Some it is thick unt tough. Maybe you throw it on the floor unt it do not break.” “Ja. Ja.” “Nein, it cannot be so.”
At last, wearied by the boy’s persistence, he said:
“Wait, I show you, maybe!”
After heating glass until it was in molten form, he left the room to return with a package of yellow powder. To this he applied a match. The powder burned with a blue blaze. Jimmie smelled burning sulphur. After drawing some of the sulphur fumes into a pair of hand bellows, the glass blower thrust a long tube into his molten glass, puffed the fumes into the tube, removed the end of the tube from the pool of glass and, with three quick puffs, blew a bubble of thin glass the size of an indoor baseball. With a deft twist he closed the hollow glass ball and severed it from his tube.
“Now,” he breathed, “you stand there. I stand here unt I throw the glass bubble.”
The next instant the glass bubble struck Jimmie’s chest. It chanced to hit a button and burst with a low pop, at the same time treating the boy to a large dose of sulphur fumes.
“That—that’s the answer,” Jimmie sputtered, trying to get a breath. “Thanks—thanks a lot.”