en coming to window-glass, he clearly described the process of its
manufacture, although confessing he had never been engaged in it, and
from this Miselle, with a word, launched him into the glowing sea of
mediaeval painted windows, and the wellnigh forgotten glories of their
manufacture.

"There is hardly one of them left that I have not seen," said he,--"from
the old heathen temples of the East, that the Christians converted to
their own use, and, while they burned the idols, spared the windows,
which they had sense to remember they could never reproduce, to the
gloomy purple-shadowed things they put up so much in England and the
United States at the present day, forgetting, as it would seem, that the
first idea of a window is to let the light through.

"But one of the finest works of modern times was the great
tournament-window, first exhibited in London in 1820. I was a young
fellow then, hardly twenty indeed, and with very little money to spare
for sight-seeing. But from the day I first heard of it, until five years
afterward, when I saw it, I never wavered in my determination to go
abroad and look at that window, as well as all the others I had heard so
much of.

"It was a beautiful thing really, Ma'am, measuring eighteen by
twenty-four feet, and made up of three hundred and fifty pieces of glass
set in metal astragals, so cleverly worked into the shadows that the
whole affair appeared like one piece. It represented the passage-of-arms
between Henry VIII., of England, and Francis I., of France, held at
Ardres, June 25, 1520, and of the hundred figures shown, over forty were
portraits. Among these were the two queens, Katharine of England, and
Claude of France, Anne Boleyn, and Cardinal Wolsey, with a great many
other distinguished persons."

"And this window, where is it now?" asked Optima.

"Destroyed by fire, June 30, 1832," he replied, with the mournful awe of
one giving the date of some terrible human disaster.

"How many glass-factories like this are there in the country?" asked
Monsieur, reverting to the practical view of the matter under
consideration.

"Flint-glass works, Sir? There are three in South Boston, two in East
Cambridge, and one here in Sandwich. That is for Massachusetts alone.
Then there are two in Brooklyn, New York, one in Jersey City, and two in
Philadelphia. These are all flint-glass, you understand; the principal
window-glass factories are in the southern part of New Jersey, and i