As it is always better honestly to confess one’s ignorance, rather than exist under its torture, with a firm step I walked to the door of the governor of the brunnen; and sending up to him a card, bearing the name under which I travelled, he instantly appeared, politely assuring me that he should have much pleasure in affording any information I desired.
Instantly pointing to the noseless soldiers, my instructor was good enough to inform me, that bottles in vast numbers being supplied to the Duke from various manufactories, in order to prove them, they are filled brimful (as I had seen them) with water, and being left in that state for the night, they are the next morning visited by an officer of the Duke, whose wand of office is a thin, long-handled, little hammer, which at the moment happened to be lying before us on the ground.
It appears that the two prevailing sins to which stone bottles are prone, are having cracks, and being porous, in either of which cases they, of course, in twelve hours, leak a little.
The Duke’s officer, who is judge and jury in his own court-yard, carries his own sentences into execution with a rapidity which even our Lord Chancellor himself can only hope eventually to imitate. Glancing his hawk-like eye along each line, the instant he sees a bottle not brimful, without listening to long-winded arguments, he at once decides “that there can be no mistake—that there shall be no mistake;” and thus at one blow or tap of the hammer, off goes the culprit’s nose. “So much for Buckingham!”
Feeling quite relieved by this solution of the mystery, I troubled the governor with a few questions, to reply to which he very kindly conducted me to his counting-house, where, in the most liberal and gentlemanlike manner, he gave me all the data I required.
The following, which I extracted from the daybook, is a statement showing the number of bottles which were filled for exportation during the year 1832, with the proportionate number filled during each month.
| Large | Small. | ||
| January, 1832 | 301 | 25 | |
| February | 9,235 | 2,100 | |
| March | 304,529 | 95,714 | |
| April | 207,887 | 49,562 | |
| May | 167,706 | 61,589 | |
| June | 155,688 | 14,063 | |
| July | 76,086 | 16,388 | |
| August | 58,848 | 9,159 | |
| September | 27,216 | 9,555 | |
| October | 23,512 | 3,297 | |
| November | 2,323 | 25 | |
| December | 151 | 44 | |
| 1,033,662 | 261,521 |
Besides the above, there is a private consumption, amounting, on an average, to very nearly half a million of bottles per annum.
It will, I hope, be recollected that by the time a bottle is sealed it has undergone fifteen operations, all performed by different people. The Duke, in his payments, does not enter into these details, but, delivering his own bottles, he gives 17 ½ kreuzers (nearly sixpence) for every hundred, large or small, which are placed, filled, in his magazines. The peasants, therefore, either share their labour and profits among themselves, or the whole of the operations are occasionally performed by the different members of one family; but so much activity is required in constantly stooping and carrying off the bottles, that this work is principally performed by young women of eighteen or nineteen, assembled from all the neighbouring villages; and who, by working from three in the morning till seven at night, can gain a florin a day, or 30 florins a month, Sunday (excepting during prayers) not being, I am sorry to say, at Nieder-Selters, a day of rest.
For the bottles themselves the Duke pays 4 ½ florins per cent. for the large ones, and 3 florins per cent. for the small ones. The large bottles, when full, he sells at the brunnen for 13 florins a hundred.