ound handle, chess-man,
or even a perfect ball can be turned.

Well, it is just such a lathe as this that the teapot spinner stands
before at his work, which is to make a handsome tea or coffee-pot
service.

But he uses no sharp tools, and he does not turn his teapot out of a
solid block of metal. His tool is a hard piece of wood, something like
a child's hoop-stick, and fixed to the spinning-round part of the lathe,
the "chuck," as a workman would call it, is a solid block of smooth wood
shaped like a deep slop-basin.

Up against the bottom of this wooden sugar-basin the workman places a
flat round disc or plate of Britannia metal--plate is a good term, for
it is about the size or a little larger than an ordinary dinner plate.
A part of the lathe is screwed up against this so as to hold the plate
flat up against the bottom of the wooden sugar-basin; the lathe is set
in motion and the glistening white disc of metal spins round at an
inconceivable rate, and becomes nearly invisible.

Then the man begins to press his wooden stick up against the centre of
the plate as near as he can go, and gradually draws the wooden tool from
the centre towards the edge, pressing it over the wooden block of basin
shape.

This he does again and again, and in spite of the metal being cold, the
heat of the friction, the speed at which it goes, and the ductility of
the metal make it behave as if it were so much clay or putty, and in a
very short time the wooden tool has moulded it from a flat disc into a
metal bowl which covers the wooden block.

Then the lathe is stopped, the mechanism unscrewed, and the metal bowl
taken off the moulding block, which is dispensed with now, for if the
spinner were to attempt to contract the edges of his bowl, as a potter
does when making a jug, the wooden mould could not be taken out.

So without the wooden block the metal bowl is again fixed in the lathe,
sent spinning-round, the stick applied, and in a very short time the
bowl, instead of being large-mouthed, is made to contract in a beautiful
curve, growing smaller and smaller, till it is about one-third of its
original diameter, and the metal has seemed to be plastic, and yielded
to the moulding tool till a gracefully formed tall vessel is the result,
with quite a narrow mouth where the lid is to be.

Here the spinner's task is at an end. He has turned a flat plate of
metal into a large-bodied narrow-mouthed metal pot as easily as if the
hard