red-hot and more too. The bowls are made of the Stourbridge fire-clay, and hold about two tons of the liquid, which is called metal. The pipes are iron, nearly as long as a fishing-rod. The bubbles they blow are perfectly marvellous. They weigh about thirty pounds each, and are from five to six feet in length. The whole operation seems like magic. Nothing in the working of other metals is like these strange manipulations. That is not the word for them, either, for the mouth seems to have more to do in the matter than the hand. Here are a score of men dipping their pipes into those terrible pots, taking up a ball of the red metal, and then blowing and twirling the bubble until it becomes a cylinder as long as a two-bushel bag of wheat. What a lung-power must be brought to bear upon the thousands of cylinders inflated here in a week! The human breath forced through all those iron pipes, if put in one volume, ought to be enough to propel a ship of the line across the Atlantic Few artisans could have trained the measurement of the eye to such fine precision as these glass-blowers. To take up to an ounce the exact quantity of metal, then to blow and twirl it into a cylinder that shall not vary a hair's breadth from the requisite thickness and diameter, is a remarkable, almost unparalleled feat of skill.
The operations in making the "crown" glass are
