Uncle Abram nodded solemnly, sent a puff of smoke to east, another to west, and another due south, and then went out into his garden to tie up an Ayrshire rose that had been blown down by a late gale.
“Wind’s changed,” he said to himself, “dead astarn; and our boy’s v’y’ge through life will be an easy one now.”
Uncle Abram was right, for Mr Temple began to make quite a confidant of Will Marion at once, and depended greatly upon him for help in his business transactions over the kaolin and felspar upon his land.
Dick said it was a jolly shame, and Arthur considered it to be a nuisance; but Mr Temple told them it was for their benefit, and to make them more useful to him in time to come, so they had to go to a great school for the next two years, at the end of which time the kaolin works were in full swing, and Mr Temple, as he never forgot to say, thanks to Will Marion, on the high road to fortune.
For while this tin mine proved a failure, and that copper mine had paid no dividend for years, while the fisheries were sometimes successful, sometimes, through storms and loss of gear, carried on at a loss, Mr Temple’s kaolin works became yearly more profitable, the vein growing thicker and finer in quality the more it was opened out.
Kaolin—of course you all know what that Chinese word means. Eh? What? A little boy at the back says he doesn’t know? Then we must enlighten him, and be a little learned for a minute or two.
Earthenware is of course ware made of earth that was ground into a paste, and after working into shape, baked or burned hard in a kiln. The roughest earthenware is a brick, the red brick of simple clay, the yellow and white bricks of simple clay mixed with more or less chalk. Then we get the flower-pot, again of clay; the common pan, which is glazed by covering the interior with properly prepared minerals, which melt in the baking, and turn into a glaze or glass. Then we have finer clay worked up into crockery; and lastly, the beautiful white clay which, when baked, becomes transparent,—a Chinese discovery, and to this day it bears its name, “china.”
This fine white clay the Chinese call kaolin, and it is to the discovery of veins of the soft white plastic material in England that the wonderful strides in our china manufactures are due.
And what is this kaolin of which Will had discovered so grand a store? Well, it is easily explained. The rocks of Cornwall are largely of granite, a stone that must be familiar to every one. It is formed of grains of quartz, mica the shiny, and felspar, that soft white creamy stone like our old alley marbles. This vein of granite will be close and hard, and contain a vast preponderance of quartz, the flinty; and that vein of granite will be very soft from containing so much felspar; and this granite, a familiar example of which can be seen in the material of Waterloo Bridge, the learned, who give names, call porphyry.
Such granite as this abounds in Cornwall, and some, too, which is nearly all felspar, and such rock as this in the course of ages forms such a bed of kaolin as Will Marion disclosed to the father of his friends.