“I feel,” said Mr. Douglass, “that it is rather a pity to spend our last few hours here in a visit to the Midway Plaisance. We should really prefer to go again to the Art Gallery, which we have not half seen.”
“I know,” said Harry; “but the Art Building is long and time is fleeting. The advantage of going to the Midway is that the poor shows are not worth staying through, and the good ones are few.”
Entering the Midway they found that the rain had dampened the enthusiasm of even this crowd—usually the liveliest and gayest on the grounds. They passed by the “Congress of Beauty,” and the Philadelphia Working-man’s Model Home (Philip wondered why they did not show an Idle-man’s Home beside it), and selected the Libbey Glass-works for their first visit.
Within a rounded building they found a tall brick chimney, the lower part of which was made into a glass-heating furnace. About this boys were carrying upon iron rods lumps of what looked like hot coal. When the glass was just right, it was handed to a man, who cut and molded and trimmed the lump of glass into a bottle, or goblet, or globe. The men were so skilful that it was difficult to make out how they did their work; and, somehow, they never seemed to be making any of the more interesting pieces that were exhibited in the show-cases. The only bit of skill the boys could discover was that shown in keeping the ball of molten glass rounded. Whenever one of the rods was put down for a few moments, the glass would become stretched by its own weight to a long drop, and then had to be reheated.
When one of the workmen wished to cut a finished piece of work from the end of the rod, he would hold a pair of cold pincers against it for a few moments and it would snap away at a touch.
The tickets of admission to this show were announced to be good for twenty-five cents applied upon any purchase made in the building. But the boys concluded, after an examination of the prices, that it was easy to see through that little scheme. In fact, Harry declared that if postage-stamps had been on sale there, the price of two-centers would have been “two cents and a ticket.”
LITTLE DAHOMEY BOY,
AND HIS PLAYTHINGS.
They bought little. Philip paid ten cents “and a ticket” for a spun-glass book-mark, and Harry bought a tiny cup of white and ruby glass. The compartments about the central hall contained, besides show-cases, a loom for weaving glass threads, a glass-cutting wheel, and, most interesting of all, a glass-spinning wheel. The boys studied this for quite a while. There was a big wheel with a broad, thin metal rim kept cool and moist. The workman sat at one side holding a glass rod before a blowpipe and moving it round and round and slowly forward so as to keep it melted fast enough to feed the single long thread to the rapidly revolving wheel.
“How do you suppose he begins the spinning?” said Philip, turning to Mr. Douglass.