d begun to work with it at once, for the three great
requisites were transparency, ductility, and lightness. In a few minutes
he had convinced himself that his glass possessed all these qualities in
an even higher degree than the master's own, and that was immeasurably
superior to anything which the latter's own sons or any other
glass-maker could produce. Zorzi had taken very little at first, and he
made of it a thin phial of graceful shape, turned the mouth outward, and
dropped the little vessel into the bed of ashes. He would have set it in
the annealing oven, but he wished to try the weight of it, and he let it
cool. Taking it up when he could touch it safely, it felt in his hand
like a thing of air. On the shelf was another nearly like it in size,
which he had made long ago with Beroviero's glass. There were scales on
the table; he laid one phial in each, and the old one was by far the
heavier. He had to put a number of pennyweights into the scale with his
own before the two were balanced.

His heart almost stood still, and he could not believe his good fortune.
He took the sheet of rough paper on which he had written down the
precise contents of the three crucibles, and he carefully went over the
proportions of the ingredients in the one from which he had just taken
his specimen. He made a strong effort of memory, trying to recall
whether he had been careless and inexact in weighing any of the
materials, but he knew that he had been most precise. He had also noted
the hour at which he had put the mixture into the crucible on Saturday,
and he now glanced at the sand-glass and made another note. But he did
not lay the paper upon the table, where it had been lying for two days,
kept in place by a little glass weight. It had become his most precious
possession; what was written on it meant a fortune as soon as he could
get a furnace to himself; it was his own, and not the master's; it was
wealth, it might even be fame. Beroviero might call him to account for
misusing the furnace, but that was no capital offence after all, and it
was more than paid for by the single crucible of magnificent red glass.
Zorzi was attempting to reproduce that too, for he had the master's
notes of what the pot had contained, and it was almost ready to be
tried; he even had the piece of copper carefully weighed to be equal in
bulk with the ladle that had been melted. If he succeeded there also,
that was a new secret for Beroviero, but the oth