"There may be, but I never found it. Whatever a pencil can draw this wheel can cut," said he, with such a smile as Gottschalk might assume in answering the query as to whether the score could be written that he could not render.
Having now witnessed all the processes of glass-manufacture to be seen at this time and place,[26] the party were conducted to the show-room, passing on the way through a room where a number of young women were engaged in painting and gilding vases, spoon-holders, lamps, and various other articles in plain and colored glass. The colors used showed, for the most part, but a very faint resemblance to the tints they were intended to produce, and the gold appeared like a dingy brown paint; but, as was explained by Cicerone, these-colors were to be fixed by burning, or rather melting them into the surface of the glass, and this process would at the same time evolve their true colors and brilliancy, both of paint and gilding.
In the next room to this, several workmen were busy in fitting the metal trimmings to such articles as lamps, lanterns, castors, molasses-pitchers, and the like.
One chirruping old man insisted upon mounting an immensely ugly blue and yellow lamp upon a brass foot for the edification of his visitors, and when this was over, exhibited some opaque white glass stands for other lamps, which, as he fondly remarked, "would be took for marble anyw'eres."
The show-room was a long, airy hall, with a row of tables on either hand, covered with glass, whose icy glitter and lack of color gave a deliciously cool aspect to the whole place. Glass in every graceful form and design, some heavy and crystalline, enriched with ornate workmanship by cutter and engraver, some delicate and fragile as a soap-bubble; hock-glasses as green and lucent as sea-water, and with an edge not too thick to part the lips of Titania; glasses of amber, that should turn pale Johannisberger to the true vino d'oro; glasses of glowing ruby tint, than which Bohemia sends us nothing finer; vases and goblets as rare in form and wrought as skilfully as those two cups that Nero bought for six thousand sestertii; medallions bearing in intaglio portraits of distinguished men as clearly and unmistakably cut as on coin or cameo; whole services of glass, more beautiful and almost as valuable as services of plate; plumes of spun glass as fine and sheeny as softest silk; toys and scientific playthings; objects of wonder, admiration, and curiosity: all these were to be seen crowded upon these long, white tables in the cool hall, where the wind, sweeping gently through, brought the smell of the rising tide, and the sound of its waves upon the shore.
Here, too, was a man who knew the story, not only of the glass lying beneath his hand to-day, but of all the glass the world has known, from the colored beads inhumed with the Pharaonic princesses to the ruby salver he so fondly fingered as he talked.
He spoke of the glazed windows of Pompeii; of the "excellent portrait" of the Emperor Constantine VII. painted, a. d. 949, upon a church-window. He recounted the ancient story of the Phœnicians, who, landing at the mouth of the river, brought from their ships lumps of soda, and, laying them upon the sand as a support for their dinner-pot, found when they had done lumps of glass among the ashes, and so rediscovered the lost art of glass-making; but to this he added, with a dubious smile,—
"Fire must have been hotter in those days than now. We could never melt sand in that fashion now."
Then coming to window-glass, he clearly described the process of its manufacture, although confessing he had never been engaged in it, and from this Miselle, with a word, launched him into the glowing sea of mediæval painted windows, and the wellnigh forgotten glories of their manufacture.
"There is hardly one of them left that I have not seen," said he,—"from the old heathen temples of the East, that the Christians converted to their own use, and, while they burned the idols, spared the windows, which they had sense to remember they could never reproduce, to the gloomy purple-shadowed things they put up so much in England and the United States at the present day, forgetting, as it would seem, that the first idea of a window is to let the light through.