the Creek. Skipper Barney must have sailed around sunrise on his return trip to Boston, and suddenly Kit knew in his heart just how glad he was not to be aboard the sloop.
There was no one, not even Sam or Ben, to be seen outside the building, but from the tall chimneys rose columns of smoke which spoke of huge fires below, and the very instant Kit pushed open the door and stepped over the threshold, he knew that never before had he viewed a scene of such intense activity.
Everywhere men were exceedingly busy. Some walked round and round the huge furnace, throwing in thin strips of dried-out, coffee-colored wood. Others drew measures of chemicals from huge bins which released automatically the correct amounts to be added to mixtures already waiting in great kettles. Here and there sat engravers at their lathes, working on pieces of glass with tiny wheels at such an angle they were quite unable to see what they were doing, yet making exquisite designs by what seemed to Kit mere guesswork. Apart from the rest, seated in a special sort of chair, a man with a tube several feet in length blew through it, creating an oval bubble of molten glass which grew and grew in size until its creator gave an expert twist of his wrist, made a clip with a pair of shears, and turned the bubble into a long-necked bottle.
Kit, fascinated by all that was going on, had completely forgotten his errand, and not until he felt a tap on his arm and heard a voice say, “Looking for somebody, young man?” did he remember it.
“Yes, I am,” he said. “The superintendent.”
The speaker, an oldish man who wore a leather apron that came nearly to his feet and carried his spectacles high on his forehead, limped toward a partition which bore above an open doorway the words, “Superintendent’s Office.” He disappeared inside to return a moment later.
“Sit ye down,” he said, pointing to a long bench beside the partition. “He’ll see ye just as soon as he’s through with the young man he’s closeted with.”
Kit sat down, only to rise immediately as someone, undoubtedly the young man in question, burst out of the doorway almost, Kit couldn’t help thinking, as if he had been helped by some force in his rear. Furthermore, the young man seemed in passing to throw him a look that was distinctly inquiring, although Kit was sure he had never seen him before in his life.
However, he straightway forgot all about the entire incident when the old man in the leather apron gave him a nod and a gesture to go into the office.
Within, at a swivel chair in front of a big roll-top desk sat a stout gentleman with a round face and side whiskers, who was brushing his hands and breathing a bit hard.
“Hm,” he said. “Sit down.”
Kit sat down, but on the very edge of the chair. The roof of his mouth felt suddenly as dry as a herring right out of the barrel.
“John Sprague said you wanted to see me.”
“Yes, sir, I do. My father told me — I have a letter — I mean I’d like a job.”
“Like a job. What can you do?”
“Not anything special.” Suddenly he remembered the man with the long tube. “I think I could blow glass.”
The other nodded. “Blow glass. I see you are a young man who believes in starting at the top.”
Kit could feel even the tips of his ears redden. Evidently there was more to blowing glass than he suspected. “Oh, no — I didn’t know. I thought — well, it did look easy to do ——”
“Can you dry wood?”
Kit was considerably less sure of himself than he had been a moment ago. “I — I think so,” he said doubtfully.
“Very good. Tell John Sprague you’re on the payroll. You’re hired to fill the place of the young man I just threw out of here for unpunctuality, idleness, unreliability, incompetence, dawdling, defiance, and impudence. And now, who is your father?”
“Henry Freeman, sir.”
The superintendent stood up and held out his hand. “How do you do! Glad to make the acquaintance of Hank Freeman’s son.” Suddenly his gray eyes twinkled. “Stay with us long enough and you may get to blow glass at that.”
Kit, as he left the office, could not help wondering guiltily just what the superintendent would think if he knew that he planned to stay only long enough to earn sufficient money with which to buy a boat.
He found John Sprague waiting outside. “I am to be put on the payroll,” said Kit.
The old man grunted. “I heerd him,” he said testily. “But what we need is ’prentices. We get plenty of these come-and-go lads. However, seein’ as you’re Hank Freeman’s boy ——”
“Do you know my father?” asked Kit eagerly.
“’Course I know your father. ’Twas he got my brindle cow stuck on the belfry stairs o’ the Meeting House one Fourth o’ July. Had to come arter me to help get her down again.”
Kit made a mental note to ask his father about this incident of which he had never heard, and right now he would have liked to know further details. But the old man had changed the subject. “Suppose you’d like to be shown around a bit afore ye start in on your job.”
For the next hour Kit saw more strange sights than he had ever seen at any one time in all his life before. He heard expressions used and directions given of whose meaning he had no idea whatever. He heard familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. He heard odd words which he suspected were but the beginning of an entirely new vocabulary.
He learned that the hollow iron tube — it was all of four feet in length — used by the blower to make his glass bubble was the “blow pipe,” that the long rod held by an assistant or “servitor” to support the bubble while it was being shaped into a bottle or a flask or a goblet was the “punty” or “punter,” and that the master blower was a “gaffer” and head of the “shop”; that in addition to the massive furnace with the eight pots arranged around it there was a small furnace used when a bit of glass needed re-heating and known as the “glory-hole”; that the blob of molten glass picked up by the blower for his bubble was the “gather,” and that the molten glass itself was called “metal,” although it really wasn’t metal at all but a mixture of sand and “cullet” and chemicals, the latter taken from various bins and comprising, Kit fancied, the nitrates and saltpeter and pearlash filling the sacks on the sloop Polly.
It was when he stopped for a moment to watch Sam and Ben collecting bits of broken glass from the floors, especially around the chairs of the blowers, that he found out what “cullet” was.
“Can’t make new glass without old glass,” explained John Sprague. “The glass being picked up by these young-uns is first cleaned and than dumped into the cullet box, from which a mess or so is added to every fresh mix.”
But Kit’s ear tips had to redden again exactly as they had in the superintendent’s office. He had paused to look at a heap of sand. The sand looked to him precisely like any handful of ordinary beach sand. Just a collection of tiny shiny white particles which could burn like the sting of a hundred wasps when blown against one’s bare legs.
“It’s very lucky there’s so much sand around here,” he said. “I guess it takes plenty of sand to make all this glass!”
It
