mass into the form required. By keeping the glass continually turning round and round, the glass-maker prevents it dropping from the blow-pipe. It is so soft and pliable that he is able to cut it with a pair of scissors, and bend and shape it with that sugar-tongs-looking thing he holds in his right hand, and which is called the pucellas. In this part of the work the article is heated several times, and the glass-maker is assisted by a boy who holds the pipe and blows through it when it is necessary in order to enlarge the article. With the pucellas the workman forms the foot of the decanter, with the tongs he opens the mouth, and with the scissors he cuts off the waste glass; then, at the end of a solid rod of iron, called the pontil, the article is held firm till its shape is completed, when, with a little tap, it is broken off from the glass knob at the end of the pontil, and is taken away to the annealing oven to cool. If glass were at once exposed to the cold air after being made, it would crack or contract unequally. It is therefore passed through a series of ovens more or less hot, till at last it is fit to stow away in the warehouse prepared for sale or use. The front of the annealing oven is at the left of the picture.

By this process nearly all the better kinds of glass utensils are made, but many cheap drinking vessels and so on are moulded in iron shapes and afterwards cooled in the annealing oven. The finer and more expensive kinds of glassware are afterwards ground and polished. Pressing the decanter on the edge of a swiftly-revolving wheel, the glasscutter, with no guide but his eye, cuts those beautiful figures on its surface which render such kinds of glass-ware so expensive and valuable. The forms of fruit, flowers, animals,

&c., are produced with equal ease and facility by the experienced glass-cutter; and this, too, with no other tool than a revolving or stone wheel and a little sand and water.

Littlery tells me that I have said nothing about the making of window or plate-glass. Well, the general operations are much the same as those I have described, except that the large circles of flat glass, which are afterwards cut into squares by the glazier, are produced by the rapid swinging of the blow-pipe round the head of the glass-blower till the glass at its end is a wide flattened mass, which is then pressed against a smooth metal plate, and afterwards annealed or cooled in the way I have told you of. Plate glass is cast in wide smooth moulds of iron, and afterwards polished. At the Great Exhibition of 1851 there was shown a plate of glass cast in one piece, and silvered at the back, twenty-four feet square-the largest looking-glass in the world!

NEW YEAR'S EVE.

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EW YEAR'S EVE was quickly gathering in its wings. In another hour the old year would be dead, and the new year born into the world. It was near midnight, and an old man stood at his window looking out upon the stars and down upon the snow-covered earth. Just under his window was the churchyard, looking pure and beautiful in its mantle of white just fallen from heaven. Oh how peacefully slept the silent tenants of those The old man looked

awful graves.

upon them and shuddered, and then looked upwards at the deep blue sky and wept. He knew that his grave too was being prepared,-and was he fitted to take possession? Nearer, nearer, nearer came that grave to

him. He could feel that it was so, though as yet it was concealed from his bodily vision. But it was the snow of age and not the verdure of youth that hid it from his sight. He knew now-oh hateful knowledge!-that he had brought out of the life so quickly passing away-passing even as the old year-no saving balm to cheat the grave-nothing but the errors, sins, and sickness of an enfeebled body, a desolated soul, a breast full of poisons, and an old age full of

remorse.

His beautiful youthful days came back to him to-day as spectres, and led him far away back again to the fair morning, when his father first set him out upon the highway of life, which, to the right, leads by the sun-path of virtue, into a wide and quiet land, full of light and harvests, and inhabited by angels; and which to the left leads down into the mole-path of vice, into a black cavern, full of dripping poisons, full of serpents ready to dart upon their prey, and full of dismal, close exhalations. O! the serpents hung around his breast, and the poison-drops to his tongue, and he knew not where he was.

Beside himself, and with unspeakable grief, he cried out to Heaven: "O, give me youth again! O, Father, set me out once more upon the highway, that I may choose the other path!" But his father and his youth were past long ago! He saw ignes fatui dance over the marshes, and go out upon the grave-yard, and he said, "They are my foolish days!"

He saw a star shoot from heaven, shimmer in its fall, and vanish on the earth. "That is me!" said his bleeding heart,

and the serpent-fang of remorse dug deeper into the wounds. His glowing imagination revealed to him tottering sleepwalkers on the roof; the windmill raised its arms, threatening to crush him; and a mask, which had been left in the empty charnel-house, by degrees assumed his own features.

Suddenly, in the midst of the struggle, the music of the new year broke out of a tower near at hand, like the distant sound of a church-anthem. His mind became calmer. He looked up to the horizon, and out over the white earth; and he thought on the friends of his youth, who, now happier and better than he, were teachers on the earth, fathers of happy children, and blessed of men, and he said, "Oh, I might also have slumbered, with closed eyes, on this first night of the year, if I had willed it! Oh, I might also have been happy as you, dear parents, had I fulfilled your New-Year's wishes and instructions!"

Amidst these feverish reminiscences of his youth, it appeared to him as if the mask, with his features, stood up in the charnel-house; and, at last, by means of that superstition which on New-Year's Eve sees ghosts and future events, it was changed into a living youth!

He could look at it no more! He veiled his eyes; a thousand hot tears streamed dissolving into the snow, and still he sighed, but very low, beside himself, and grief-stricken— "Come again, only once, O youth; come again!"

And it came again; for he had only dreamed so bitterly, in the New-Year's Eve. He was still a young man; only his wanderings were no dream. But he thanked God that he,

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