the Glass Works, and which he had long wished to peep into. His
heart beat quick with curiosity; and he began to wonder (for he
had never given the subject much thought before) how such an
infinite variety of useful and curious articles-- window-panes,
mirrors, vases, beads, goblets, lamps, lenses of telescopes and
microscopes-- were fashioned from so brittle a material, and how
the material itself was made.
It was a wide-spreading, irregular pile,
with brick walls, and two immense, tapering, tall, round chimneys
soaring up into the blue sky above its roofs. The train let them
off at a platform near by, and then moved on past the rear of the
factory.
"Glass works always like to be near a
railroad or a wharf, I find," said the Doctor.
Lawrence said he supposed they sent off
heavy freights.
"Yes, but those are a trifle compared
with the freights that come to them. Look! there is a coal train
switching off and backing up to the yard. They buy fuel by the
cargo, as we do by the ton, and stuff it up those huge chimneys.
But what is so heavy when it goes in is light enough when it goes
out." They looked up at the cloud which poured out of one of the
great flues, and stretched away horizontally, in a long, black
streamer, high over the adjacent city. "Some of it flies off in
smoke, which we can see, but more of it in gases, which we cannot
see; and the wind might blow away the ashes. "Yet," said
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