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From the concentrated saintliness of the Vivarini to the sumptuous assurance of Titian is a far cry, yet how few the years that intervened! To-day there are no painters in Murano; nothing indeed but gardeners and glass-blowers, and the island is associated purely with the glass industry.
Beside the low central building a huge gas-pipe towered, and the water, trickling down it, made a puddle through which they had to wade to reach the door of the furnace room. Within they could see the huge, round furnace with its belt of small fiery doors, from which glass-blowers, with long blow-pipes were deftly taking small lumps of moulten glass and blowing them into balls.
After the flange is complete, the end must be heated again to the softening temperature and cooled slowly, to prevent it from cracking. Some glass-blowers use a small carbon rod, about 3/16 inch in diameter, as a flanging tool for tubes larger than about 3/8 inch diameter, and a small iron wire or similar piece of metal for smaller tubes. For large heavy tubes a larger carbon would be used.
So you saw the European national lines splitting Local Leesville in two: on the one side, the Germans and the Austrians, the Russian Jews, the Irish and the religious pacifists; on the other side, two English glass-blowers, a French waiter, and several Americans who, because of college-education or other snobbish weakness, were suspected of tenderness for John Bull.
Misc Somers brought me up whar the tavern used to be. It ain't a stand no more. Uncle Meshach owns it." "Is it a nice place?" "Now it ain't as nice as it use to be, Aunt Vesty" the girl glided easily over what Vesta thought might be a hard word "sence the shews don't stop thar no mour." "The shoes? What is that?" "The wax figgers and glass-blowers, and the strongis' man in the world.
It was the deep, fierce hatred of the mediaeval guildsman for the stranger who had stolen knowledge without apprenticeship and without citizenship, and it was made more intense because the glass-blowers were the only guild that excluded every foreign-born man, without any exception.
"We are glass-blowers' sons, sir, we are not poor people," he said with theatrical pride, for he would have taken the coin without remark if he had not felt that he possessed a secret of great value, which might place Giovanni in his power before long. Giovanni was surprised. "What do you want, then?" he asked. "I am old enough to be an apprentice, sir." "Very well," answered Giovanni.
Yet dexterous as they were, there was not one that had his skill, there was not one that could compare with him as an artist, as a workman, as a man. No Indian caste, no ancient nobility, no mystic priesthood ever set up a barrier so impassable between itself and the outer world as that which defended the glass-blowers of Murano for centuries against all who wished to be initiated.
I have seen four thousand men at a time cooking for the whole army as much as twenty or thirty thousand pounds of steaks at a time, all hissing and frying at a time just about noon, of course, you know not a spark of fire! Some of the soldiers, who had been brought up as glass-blowers, at Leith, swore they never saw such heat. I used to go to leeward of them for a whiff, and think of old England!
"Who could remember what he was, Rhoda, sitting all that evening beside you at where was it?" "The Blohemian glass-blowers," Rhoda cried; "the only ones that ever visited the Western Himisfure. Jedge," with sudden impetuosity, "that little one, with the copper rings in his years, wasn't a Blohemian at all.
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