"No," suggested Optima, "we will enjoy the result and forget the
process. But what is that man about?"

"Making sausages out of cheese, I should say," replied Monsieur; and the
comparison was almost unavoidable; for upon a coarse table lay masses of
moulded clay, in form and size exactly like cheeses, from which the
workman separated with a wooden knife a small portion to be rolled
beneath his hand into cylindrical shapes some four inches in length by
two in diameter.

These a lad carefully placed upon a long and narrow board to carry up to
the pot-room, whither he was followed by the whole party.

Miselle's first impression, upon entering this great chamber, was, that
she was following a drove of elephants; but as she skirted the regular
ranks of the great dun monsters and came to the front, she concluded
that she had stumbled upon the factory of Ali Baba's oil-jars. At any
rate, the old picture in the "Arabian Nights" represented Morgiana in
the act of pouring the boiling oil into vessels marvellously like these,
and in each of these was room for at least four robbers of true
melodramatic stature.

Among these jars, with the noiseless solicitude of a mother in her
sleeping nursery, wandered their author and guardian, a pale, keen man,
and so rare an enthusiast in his art that one listening to him could
hardly fail to believe that the highest degree of thought, skill, and
experience might worthily be expended upon the construction of these
seething-pots for molten glass.

"Will you look at this one? It is my last," said he, tenderly removing a
damp cloth from the surface of something like the half of a hogshead
made in clay.

"I have not begun to dome it in yet; it must dry another day first,"
said the artist, passing his hand lovingly along the smooth surface of
his work.

"Then you cannot go on with them at once?" asked Madame.

"Oh, no, Ma'am! They must dry and harden between the spells of work
upon them, or they never would stand their own weight. This one, you
see, is twelve inches thick in the bottom, and the sides are five inches
thick at the base, and graduated to four where the curve begins. Now if
I was to go right ahead, and put the roof on this mass of wet clay, I
shouldn't get it done before the whole would crush in together. I have
had them do so, Ma'am, when I was younger, but I know better now. I
sha'n't have that to suffer again."

"And what are you at work upon while this dries?"

"Here.