Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/294

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Walks in the Black Country

elongated at the top into a chimney, and other characteristics of the two classes of architecture. These buildings cover a territory of about twenty-four acres. The main street, that divides the domed and steepled town in two nearly equal parts, is the railway. This again is intersected by a canal, with its landings in the middle of the works; which have about a score boats of their own for transportation of the raw material and its wonderful productions when ready "for home and exportation." This may serve to convey some idea of the establishment when cold and silent. But when all aglow with its fiery industries, it presents a scene which Virgil and Dante would have described in terms and figures unsuited to modern conceptions or facts. As every man who pretends to have once been a boy was a bubble-blower in his childhood, whether he has seen the real process or not, he can understand how glass is made into such infinite shapes and uses. And boys, fresh from the sport of making and floating in the air their tinted globes, ought to have the clearest idea of the whole matter. It will be easy for them to see in their minds twenty-four boys standing in a circle, each with a long-stemmed tobacco pipe in a bowl of soapsuds, blowing up bubbles one after the other. Well, they will see that picture to the life in one section of these great works. But here the soapsuds are