it rapidly.  The end of the wand, armed with a ball of refractory clay, collects a ball of semi-liquid glass; the worker must estimate the amount of glass to be withdrawn for the particular size of the bottle that is to be made.  This ball of glowing material is withdrawn from the furnace; the worker rolls it on a sloping moldboard, shaping it to a cylinder, and passes the wand to the blower who is standing ready to receive it.  The blower drops the cylinder of glass into a mold, which is held open for its reception by yet another man; the mold snaps shut; the blower applies his mouth to the end of the blowpipe; a quick puff, accompanied by the drawing away of the wand, blows the glass to shape in the mold and leaves a thin bubble of glass protruding above.  The mold is opened; the shaped bottle, still faintly glowing, is withdrawn with a pair of asbestos-lined pincers, and passed to a man who chips off the bubble on a rough strip of steel, after which he gives the bottle to one who sits guarding a tiny furnace in which oil sprayed under pressure roars and flares.  The rough neck of the bottle goes into the flame; the raw edges left when the bubble was chipped off are smoothed away by the heat; the neck undergoes a final polishing and shaping twirl in the jaws of a steel instrument, and the bottle is laid on a little shelf to be carried away.  It is shaped, but not finished.

The glass must not be cooled too quickly, lest it be brittle.  It must be annealed—­cooled slowly—­in order to withstand the rough usage to which it is to be subjected.  The annealing process takes place in a long, brick tunnel, heated at one end, and gradually cooling to atmospheric temperature at the other.  The bottles are placed on a moving platform, which slowly carries them from the heated end to the cool end.  The process takes about thirty hours.  At the cool end of the annealing furnace the bottle is met by the packers and is made ready for shipment.  These annealing furnaces are called “lehrs” or “leers”—­either spelling is correct—­and the most searching inquiry failed to discover the reason for the name.  They have always been called that, and probably always will be.

In the hand-blowing process six men are needed to make one bottle.  There must be a gatherer to draw the glass from the furnace; a blower; a man to handle the mold; a man to chip off the bubble left by the blower; a shaper to finish the neck of the bottle; and a carrier-off to take the completed bottles to the lehr.  Usually the gatherer is also the blower, in which case two men are used, one blowing while the other gathers for his turn; but on one platform I saw the somewhat unusual sight of one man doing all the blowing while another gathered for him.  The pair used two wands, so that their production was the same as tho two men were gathering and blowing.  This particular blower was making quart bottles, and he was well qualified for the job.  He weighed, at a conservative estimate, two hundred and fifty