ong experience as an operative in
various departments of the works.

"How fortunate that the stage-coaches and peddlers no longer frequent
Sandwich! If our friend had them to attend to, he could not devote
himself to us in this charming manner," suggested Optima, as she and
Miselle gayly followed Monsieur, Madame, and Cicerone down the long
sunny street, whose loungers turned a glance of lazy wonder upon the
strangers.

Passing presently a monotonous row of lodging-houses for the workmen,
and a public square with a fountain, which, as Optima suggested, might
be made very pretty with the addition of some water, the travellers
approached a large brick building, many-windowed, many-chimneyed, and
offering ingress through a low-browed arch of so gloomy an aspect that
one looked at its key-stone half expecting to read there the well-known
Dantean legend,--

"Lasciate ogni speranza, voi chi'ntrate!"

Nor was the illusion quite destroyed by handling, for through the arch
and a short passage one entered a large, domed apartment, brick-floored
and dimly lighted, whose atmosphere was the breath of a dozen flashing
furnaces, whose occupants were grimy gnomes wildly sporting with strange
shapes of molten metal.

"This is the glass-room, and in these furnaces the glass is melted; but
perhaps you will go first and see how it is mixed, and how the pots are
made to boil it in."

"Yes, let us begin at the beginning," said all, and were led from the
Inferno across a cool, green yard, into a building specially devoted to
the pots. In a great bin lay masses of soft brown clay in its crude
condition, and upon the floor were heaped fragments of broken pots,
calcined by use in the furnaces, and now waiting to be ground up into a
fine powder between the wheels of a powerful mill working steadily in
one corner of the building. In another, a row of boxes or pens were
partially filled with a powdered mixture of the raw and burnt clay, and
this, being moistened with water, was worked to a proper consistency
beneath the bare feet of several stout men.

"This work, like the treading of the wine-press, can be properly
performed only by human feet," remarked Monsieur.

"So when next we sip nectar from one of your straw-stemmed glasses, we
will remember these gentlemen and their brothers of the wine-countries,
and gratefully acknowledge that without their exertions we could have
had neither wine nor goblet," said Miselle, maliciously.