perfectly transparent and hard substance
it by no means follows that they knew how to make looking-glasses For
this requires something behind the glass to throw back the image. But
vanity is not of modern invention, and people having from the
beginning of time had a desire to look at themselves, they were not
slow in providing the means.

The first mirrors used were of polished metal, and for ages nobody
knew of anything better. But there came a time when the idea entered
the mind of man that "glass lined with a sheet of metal will give back
the image presented to it," for these are the exact words of a writer
who lived four centuries before Christ. And you may be sure that
glass-makers took advantage of this suggestion, if they had not
already found out the fact for themselves. So we know that the
ancients did make glass mirrors. It is matter of history that
looking-glasses were made in the first century of the Christian era,
but whether quicksilver was poured upon the back, as it is now, or
whether some other metal was used, we do not know.

But these mirrors disappeared with the bottles and other glass
articles; and metal mirrors again became the fashion. For fourteen
hundred years we hear nothing of looking-glasses, and then we find
them in Venice, at the time that city had the monopoly of the glass
trade. Metal mirrors were soon thrown aside, for the images in them
were very imperfect compared with the others.

These Venetian glasses were all small, because at that time sheet
glass was blown by the mouth of man, like bottles, vases, etc., and
therefore it was impossible to make them large. Two hundred years
afterward, a Frenchman discovered a method of making sheet glass by
machinery, which is called _founding_, and by this process it can be
made of any size.

But even after the comparatively cheap process of founding came into
use, looking-glasses were very expensive, and happy was the rich
family that possessed one. A French countess sold a farm to buy a
mirror! Queens had theirs ornamented in the most costly manner. Here
is a picture of one that belonged to a queen of France, the frame of
which is entirely composed of precious stones.

[Illustration]

I have told you how the Venetians kept glass-making a secret, and how,
at last, the Germans learned it, and then the French, and their work
came to be better liked than that of the Venetians. But these last
still managed to keep the process of making mirro