I have made it my business to learn all that
books could teach me on the subject."

"I should like to see glass made!" said the
vociferous admirer of Dr. Johnson, "especially
plate glass."

To this, the other replied, with ready politeness,
"If your wish be very strong, and you
have an hour to spare, I shall be happy to
show you the works, to which I am going,—
those of the Thames Plate Glass Company.
They are close by."

"The fact is," was the reply, "Mrs. Bossle
(I'm sorry to say Mrs. Bossle is an invalid)
expects me down to Gravesend to tea; but
an hour won't matter much."

"And you, sir?" said the civil gentleman,
addressing me.

My desire was equally strong, and the
next hour equally my own; for, as the
friend, whom a negligent public had driven
to emigration, was not to sail until the next
morning, it did not much matter whether I
took my last farewell of him at Gravesend
early or late that evening.

Tracking our guide through dock gates,
over narrow drawbridges, along quays; now,
dodging the rigging of ships; now, tripping
over cables, made "taut" to rings; now,
falling foul of warping-posts (for it was
getting dusk); one minute, leaping over
deserted timber; the next, doubling stray casks;
the next, winding among the strangest ruins
of dismantled steam-boats, for which a regular
Hospital seemed established in that desolate
region of mud and water; then, emerging
into dirty lanes, and turning the corners of
rootless houses; we finished an exciting game
of Follow my Leader, at a pair of tall gates.
One of these, admitted us into the precincts
of the southernmost of the six manufactories
of plate glass existing in this country.

The first ingredient in the making of glass,
to which we were introduced, was contained
in a goodly row of barrels in full tap, marked
with the esteemed brand of "Truman, Hanbury,
Buxton, & Co." It is the well-known
fermented extract of malt and hops, which
is, it seems, nearly as necessary to the
production of good plate glass, as flint and soda.
To liquefy the latter materials by means of
fire, is, in truth, dry work; and our cicerone
explained, that seven pints per day, per man,
of Messrs. Truman, Hanbury, Buxton, and
Company's entire, has been found, after years
of thirsty experience, to be absolutely necessary
to moisten human clay, hourly baked at the
mouths of blazing furnaces. These furnaces
emit a heat more intense than the most
perspiring imagination can conceive, or the
staunchest thermometer indicate. An attempt
to ascertain the degree of heat was once
made: a pyrometer (a thermometer of the
superlative degree, or "fire-measurer,") was
applied to the throat of a furnace—for
every furnace has its mouth, its throat, and
its flaming tongues; but, the wretched instrument,
after five minutes' scorching, made an
expiring effort to mark thirteen hundred
degrees above boiling point, cracked, was
shivered into bits, and was finally swallowed
up by the insatiable element whose proceedings
it had presumptuously attempted to register.

Having, by this time, crossed a yard, we
stood on the edge of a foul creek of the
Thames, so horribly slimy that a crocodile, or
an alligator, or any scaly monster of the
Saurian period, seemed much more likely to
be encountered in such a neighbourhood than
the beautiful substance that makes our
modern rooms so glittering and bright; our
streets so dazzling, and our windows at once
so radiant and so strong.

"In order to understand our process
thoroughly," said the obliging director of the
seven acres of factory and the four hundred
operatives we had come to see, "we must
begin with the beginning. This," picking up
from a heap a handful of the finest of fine
sand—the glittering pounce, in fact, with
which our forefathers spangled their writing,
—"is the basis of all glass. It is the whitest,
most highly pulverised flint sand that can
be procured. This comes from Lynn, on the
coast of Norfolk. Its mixture with the other
materials is a secret, even to us. We give
the man who possesses it a handsome salary
for exercising his mystery."

"A secret!" cried Mr. Bossle. "Every
body I thought, knew—at least everybody in
the drysaltery line understands—what glass
is made of. Why, I can repeat the recipe
given by Dr. Ure, from memory:—To every
hundred parts of materials, there are of
pure sand forty-three parts; soda twenty-
five and a half (by the bye, we have some
capital carbonate coming forward ex Mary
Anne, that we could let you have at a low
figure); quick-lime, four; nitre, one and a
half; broken glass, twenty-six. The Doctor
calculates, if I remember rightly, that of the
whole, thirty parts of this compound run
to waste in fusing, so that seventy per cent,
becomes, on an average, glass."

"That is all very true," was the answer;
"but our glass is, we flatter ourselves, of a
much better colour, and stands annealing
better, than that made from the ordinary
admixture: from which, however, ours differs but
little—only, I think, in the relative quantities.
In that lies the secret."

Mr. Bossle expressed great anxiety to behold
an individual who was possessed of a secret
worth several hundreds a-year, paid weekly.
Romance invariably associates itself with
mystery; and we are not quite sure from
the awful way in which Mr. Bossle dropped
his voice to a soft whisper, that he did
not expect, on entering the chamber of
pre-vitrified chemicals, to find an individual
clothed like the hermit in "Rasselas," or
mingling his "elements" with the wand of
Hermes Trismegistus. He looked as if he
could hardly believe his spectacles, when he