,
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 Phoenicians, 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."

Th