I can remember the churning. I wouldn't exactly like to go back to it all but sometimes I miss it terribly. Sometimes it would n't take you more than five minutes to get the butter and sometimes you'd churn for 45 or two hours and sometimes it would never come. We'd get four or five pounds or more at a churning. Then it would have to be washed and salted and packed in jars in the cellar.
So now that it is raining. So now that it is Amazonius—we go to buy a metal syringe at the factory because we know the men who live on our street who own the bricks that make the walls that hold the floors that hold the girls who make mistakes in the inventories:
Every order that comes in is copied. You must rely on your help. As the orders come in they are handled by a girl who puts them on our own uniform order sheets. So right there it begins. You have to rely on a young flyaway who has perhaps been up dancing the night before. It's easy enough for her to write "with" for "without" and—that's the sort of thing that happens. There is a certain minimum of error that you must count on and no reputable house will fail to make good promptly.
The glass blowers have never in my entire experience of 17 years suffered any harm from their trade. Why we had a boy in the old factory, a cripple, a withered leg, the weakest, scrawniest lad you ever saw. He's been blowing for us for 15 or 17 years and you should see him today. Why the fat fairly hangs down over his collar.
In our thermometer work they blow the bulb then fill it with mercury which is in a special container like the cups you get at Child's restaurant say. They never have to touch the stuff. When the bulb is full they seal it. Then the mercury in the bulb is warmed by passing the bulb through a flame. This is to drive it up the capillary tube. There can be no volatilization since the mercury is in the tube and this is the only time the stuff is heated. Then when the metal rises from the heat the other end of the glass is dipped in the stuff so that as the bulb now cools the mercury is sucked up filling the thermometer completely.
Sometimes, of course, a bulb breaks in heating so that the floor is full of the stuff.
The hydrofluoric acid for marking is used under a hood with a special exhaust-blower that has nothing else to do but exhaust that hood. There is not the slightest odor of fumes in the room. The air is as good there as here.
And what is your business?
Rag merchant.
Ah yes. And what does that mean?