United States or Angola ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The invention of the art of diamond-cutting has, like many others, whether mythically or not, been mixed up with a love-story. Berghen, it is said, was a poor working-jeweller, who had the audacity to fall in love with his wealthy master's daughter.
The little wheels are some diamond-cutting affair. He had to do the thing very roughly and in a small way, with the help of a few shepherds or rude fellows on these hills. Snuff is the one great luxury of such Scotch shepherds; it's the one thing with which you can bribe them.
But the Dutch consul at Lisbon managed to procure one of the stones, and sent it to Holland, then almost the only country in Europe where diamond-cutting was pursued as a regular business. The stone, in due time, was returned to the consul in the form of a sparkling brilliant; and the Brazilian diamond-trade immediately commenced.
Ah, Louis Berghem did well to perfect the art of diamond-cutting, which has enabled me to polish and pierce the hardest stones!" Master Zacharius was holding several small watch pieces of cut crystal, and of exquisite workmanship. The wheels, pivots, and case of the watch were of the same material, and he had employed remarkable skill in this very difficult task.
Brickmaking, diamond-cutting; machines for making paper bags, envelopes, cuffs and collars; distilleries, sugar-mills, with the successive apparatus of vacuum-pans, pumps and centrifugal filters; soap, stearine, paraffine, wax, candle, candy and chocolate machines and apparatus, succeed each other, and we next find ourselves in a busy factory of cheap jewelry, Exposition souvenirs and medals, chains and charms.
Yet a vein of brotherhood runs beneath all these feelings of mutual superiority; like the cliqueism which draws together old clo' dealers, though each gives fifty per cent, more than any other dealer in the trade. The Dutch foregather in a district called "The Dutch Tenters;" they eat voraciously, and almost monopolize the ice-cream, hot pea, diamond-cutting, cucumber, herring, and cigar trades.
The use of this fact secures, in many manufactures, a hardness approaching that of steel, without increase of cost. It is not to be supposed that the work is all rude and rough, like ordinary iron casting. The polishing of the large cylinders almost suggests diamond-cutting, it is so fine.
And the Jews themselves, were these the Chosen People he had clothed with such romantic glamour? fat burghers, clucking comfortably under the wing of the Protestant States-General; merchants sumptuously housed, vivifying Dutch trade in the Indies; their forms and dogmas alone distinguishing them from the heathen Hollanders, whom they aped even to the very patronage of painters; or, at the other end of this bastard brotherhood of righteousness, sore-eyed wretches trundling their flat carts of second-hand goods, or initiating a squalid ghetto of diamond-cutting and cigar-making in oozy alleys and on the refuse-laden borders of treeless canals.
In due time the work was completed; and Charles was so delighted with the brilliant beauty of the previously dull stone, that he remunerated the young jeweller with three thousand ducats. We need not inform the reader how Berghen soon married his lady-love; but we may state that, retaining the secret of diamond-cutting in his own family, he and his descendants acquired immense wealth.
"Attending these Turkish gentlemen, or officials, was a numerous suite of Moslem guards and servants, whilst, immediately following their arrival, came from Amsterdam some dozen noted experts in the diamond-cutting industry. These were lodged in a neighbouring private hotel, where they were extremely uncommunicative as to their business in London.
Word Of The Day