stretched it until it had become a large bulb with a long neck. Then
he touched the end to the ground, to prevent it from expanding farther
in that direction; in the mean while the thin glass of the neck had
become cool, and ceased to enlarge; so that now, when he blew again,
the thicker and softer glass of the sides of the bulb swelled out
into a more spherical form. It was now shaped something like a small
gourd, hanging by its straight stem from the end of the pipe, and the
glass, which had been at a white heat at first, had become transparent
at the neck, and a dull lurid red in the bulb. The workman now took an
instrument in his hand, and pinched the thick soft glass at the
extremity of the bulb into a button, like a blow at the end of a gourd.
All this was done in scarcely more than a minute's
time and Lawrence was amused to observe that the blower, while producing
these magical effects with his iron pipe, had never once taken the clay
pipe out of his mouth.
"How can you blow and smoke at the same time?"
he asked, as the man stood twirling his glass gourd in the air, waiting
for a boy to come and take it. "I should think you would blow smoke and
tobacco out of your pipe."
"O, I just claps my tongue over the end on 't,
and stops the hole, when I blows," was the answer.
A boy now ran up and took the iron tube with the
glass on its end. Lawrence followed him, convinced that the only way of
learning how any article was
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