val 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. It was a shame to them to be outdone by one who had not
their blood, nor their teaching, nor their high acknowledged rights.

They were peaceable men in their way, not given to quarrelling, nor
vicious; yet, excepting the mild old foreman, there was not one of them
who would not gladly have brought his iron blow-pipe down on Zorzi's
head with a two-handed swing, to strike the life out of the intruder.

Zorzi's deft hands made the large piece he was forming spin on itself
and take new shape at every turn, until it had the perfect curve of
those slim-necked Eastern vessels for pouring water upon the hands,
which have not even now quite degenerated from their early grace of
form. While it was still very hot, he took a sharp pointed knife from
his belt and with a turn of his hand cut a small round hole, low down on
one side. The mouth was widened and then turned in and out like the leaf
of a carnation. He left the cooling piece on the pontil, lying across
the arms of the stool, and took his blow-pipe again.

"Has the fellow not finished his tricks yet?" asked Piero
discontentedly.

It would have given him pleasure to smash the beautiful thing to atoms
where it lay, almost within his reach. Zorzi began to make the spout,
for it was a large ampulla that he was fashioning. He drew the glass
out, widened it, narrowed it, cut it, bent it and finished off the
nozzle before he touched it with wet iron and made it drop into the
ashes. A moment later he had heated the thick end of it again and was
welding it over the hole he had made in the body of the vessel.

"The man has three hands!" exclaimed the foreman.

"And two of them are for stealing," added Piero.

"Or all three," put in the beetle-browed man who was working next to
Zorzi.

Zorzi looked at him coldly a moment, but said nothing. They did not mean
that he was a thief, except in the sense that he had stolen his
knowledge of their art. He went on to make the handle of the ampulla, an
easy matter compared with making the spout. But the highest part of
glass-blowing lies in shaping graceful curves, and it is often in the
smallest differences of measurement that the pieces made by Beroviero
and Zorzi--preserved intact to this day--di