V

The working-place of Master Tobias was a small room half underground,
with three windows on a level with the street. Long boards on trestles
were ranged upon three sides, leaving the centre free; these were much
chipped and scarred, and black with oil and dirt. On these tables were
small list-wheels for polishing, formed of circular thicknesses of
woollen stuff clamped tightly between two wooden disks of smaller
diameter which left a pliant edge of wool projecting, held firmly in
wooden frames and turned by hand. There were trays of tools for carving
and graving and scraping, and boxes of fine sand and of glass-parchment.
In a corner was a grindstone; and the unclean floor was littered with
sawdust and scrapings of bone. Here half a dozen men were working, in
oil-stained aprons of leather. The wheels hummed continuously, with a
steady droning; at intervals the great saw shrieked and grated; from the
storeroom a boy brought long tusks ready for the first cutting.

Men have worked in ivory before ever history began, and of all known
arts it is the most ancient and one of the most beautiful. And no two
master-workmen have gone about it after precisely the same manner, but
each has followed his own method of treating the bone, of cutting, which
is a delicate business, of smoothing, and of polishing. At different
ages widely differing means were employed to bring about the same
effect. There were many curious things to be learned in the way of what
and what not to do,--how to treat bone with boiling vinegar, and secret
processes of rolling out ivory and joining it invisibly, for the making
of larger pieces than could possibly be cut from any one tusk. Lost
secrets, these, to us; and being lost, by many doubted as having ever
been. These things Master Tobias had learned, many years before, from a
workman of Byzantium, where the work was already famous, and far and
away ahead of all. This man, dying, had left Master Tobias all he knew,
and tools such as never otherwise could he have obtained. So that the
fame of Master Tobias went abroad through the province; and he did much
work in the way of tablets, diptychs, caskets, figures of gods and
goddesses and of Christian saints. Many a carven comb and jewel-box
found its way to some haughty Roman beauty's dressing-table, the work of
Master Tobias's own fat hands. He found good markets for his wares,
since Roman love of bijouterie was strong, and he had few competitors.
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