At one end of the room some women were at work
on transparent lamp-globes, which had come up from below in a large
packing-box. A globe was taken, attached to a lathe, and set whirling
over a trough half filled with sand and water. In one hand the workwoman
held a stiff wire brush, which she pressed upon the glass, while she applied
to it sand and water, in profuse quantities, dipping up from the trough
with the other hand. In this way she ground thoroughly the glass about
the two ends of the globe, rendering it white and opaque, but leaving
a broad belt about the center untouched. She then stopped the lathe, took
off the globe and rinsed it, showing the polar regions, so to speak, white
with frost, which extended well down into the temperate zones, while the
torrid zone remained crystal clear. She told Lawrence the process was
called "roughing."
He followed the globes from her hands to those of
a workman sitting at a narrow-edged grindstone, on which he was ornamenting
the transparent space between the ground parts. Now he was cutting buds
and petals, now leaves, and now a waving stem surrounding the globe like a
tipsy equator, uniting the whole in a graceful garland of flowers. His
cuts on the glass were not afterward polished, but were left white and
opaque.
Lawrence asked if he called his work engraving.
"It is a sort of coarse engraving; but we call it
simply cutting," replied the man. "The real engraving is done at the
upper end of the room."
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