"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."