Chapter XVII: Part II (2)

Sylvester is a porter on the Twentieth Century Limited; and, like Roundtree, he is a colored man of far more than ordinary force and character. He had opportunity to show both on a winter night, when his train was stopped and a drunken man--a man who was making life hideous for other passengers on Sylvester's car--was taken from the train. The fact that the man was a powerful politician, a man who raved the direst threats when arrested, made the porter's job the more difficult.

The Pullman Company, in this instance alone, had good cause to remember Sylvester's force and courage--and consummate tact--just as it has good cause in many such episodes to be thankful for the cool-headedness of its black man in a blue uniform who stands in immediate control of its property.

Sylvester prefers to forget that episode. He likes to think of the nice part of the Century's runs--the passengers who are quiet, and kind, and thoughtful, and remembering. They are a sort whom it is a pleasure for a porter to serve. They are the people who make an excess-fare train a "fat run." There are other fat runs, of course: the Overland, the Olympian, the Congressional--and of General Henry Forrest, of the Congressional, more in a moment--fat trains that follow the route of the Century.

It was on one of these, coming east from Cleveland on a snowy night in February last, that a resourceful porter had full use for his store of tact; for there is, in the community that has begun to stamp Sixth City on its shirts and its shoe tabs, a bank president who--to put the matter lightly--is a particular traveler. More than one black man, rising high in porter service, has had his vanity come to grief when this crotchety personage has come on his car.

And the man himself was one of those who are marked up and down the Pullman trails. An unwritten code was being transmitted between the black brethren of the sleeping cars as to his whims and peculiarities. It was well that every brother in service in the Cleveland district should know the code. When Mr. X entered his drawing-room--he never rides elsewhere in the car--shades were to be drawn, a pillow beaten and ready by the window, and matches on the window sill. X would never ask for these things; but God help the poor porter who forgot them!

So you yourself can imagine the emotions of Whittlesey Warren, porter of the car Thanatopsis, bound east on Number Six on the snowy February night when X came through the portals of that scarabic antique, the Union Depot at Cleveland, a redcap with his grips in the wake. Warren recognized his man. The code took good care as to that. He followed the banker down the aisle, tucked away the bags, pulled down the shades, fixed the pillow and placed the matches on the window sill.

The banker merely grunted approval, lighted a big black cigar and went into the smoker, while Warren gave some passing attention to the other patrons of his car. It was passing attention at the best; for after a time the little bell annunciator began to sing merrily and persistently at him--and invariably its commanding needle pointed to D.R. And on the drawing-room Whittlesey Warren danced a constant attention.

"Here, you nigger!" X shouted at the first response. "How many times have I got to tell all of you to put the head of my bed toward the engine?"

Whittlesey Warren looked at the bed. He knew the make-up of the train. The code had been met. The banker's pillows were toward the locomotive. But his job was not to argue and dispute. He merely said:

"Yas-suh. Scuse me!" And he remade the bed while X lit a stogy and went back to the smoker.

That was at Erie--Erie, and the snow was falling more briskly than at Cleveland. Slowing into Dunkirk, the banker returned and glanced through the car window. He could see by the snow against the street lamps that the train was apparently running in the opposite direction. His chubby finger went against the push button. Whittlesey Warren appeared at the door. The language that followed cannot be reproduced in THE SATURDAY EVENING POST. Suffice it to say that the porter remembered who he was and what he was, and merely remade the bed.

The banker bit off the end of another cigar and retired once again to the club car. When he returned, the train was backing into the Buffalo station. At that unfortunate moment he raised his car shade--and Porter Whittlesey Warren again reversed the bed, to the accompaniment of the most violent abuse that had ever been heaped on his defenseless head.

Yet not once did he complain--he remembered that a servant a servant always is. And in the morning X must have remembered; for a folded bill went into Warren's palm--a bill of a denomination large enough to buy that fancy vest which hung in a haberdasher's shop over on San Juan Hill.

If you have been asking yourself all this while just what a fat run is, here is your answer: Tips; a fine train filled with fine ladies and fine gentlemen, not all of them so cranky as X, of Cleveland--thank heaven for that!--though a good many of them have their peculiarities and are willing to pay generously for the privilege of indulging those peculiarities.

Despite the rigid discipline of the Pullman Company the porter's leeway is a very considerable one. His instructions are never to say "Against the rules!" but rather "I do not know what can be done about it"--and then to make a quick reference to the Pullman conductor, who is his arbiter and his court of last resort. His own initiative, however, is not small.

Two newspaper men in New York know that. They had gone over to Boston for a week-end, had separated momentarily at its end, to meet at the last of the afternoon trains for Gotham. A had the joint finances and tickets for the trip; but B, hurrying through the traffic tangle of South Station, just ninety seconds before the moment of departure, knew that he would find him already in the big Pullman observation car. He was not asked to show his ticket at the train gate. Boston, with the fine spirit of the Tea Party still flowing in its blue veins, has always resented that as a sort of railroad impertinence.

B did not find A. He did not really search for him until Back Bay was passed and the train was on the first leg of its journey, with the next stop at Providence. Then it was that A was not to be found. Then B realized that his side partner had missed the train. He dropped into a corner and searched his own pockets. A battered quarter and three pennies came to view--and the fare from Boston to Providence is ninety cents!

Then it was that the initiative of a well-trained Pullman porter came into play. He had stood over the distressed B while he was making an inventory of his resources.

"Done los' something, boss?" said the autocrat of the car.

B told the black man his story in a quick, straightforward manner; and the black man looked into his eyes. B returned the glance. Perhaps he saw in that honest ebony face something of the expression of the faithful servants of wartime who refused to leave their masters even after utter ruin had come upon them. The porter drew forth a fat roll of bills.

"Ah guess dat, ef you-all'll give meh yo' business cyard, Ah'll be able to fee-nance yo' trip dis time."

To initiative the black man was adding intuition. He had studied his man. He was forever using his countless opportunities to study men. It was not so much of a gamble as one might suppose.

A pretty well-known editor was saved from a mighty embarrassing time; and some other people have been saved from similarly embarrassing situations through the intuition and the resources of the Pullman porter. The conductor--both of the train and of the sleeping-car service--is not permitted to exercise such initiative or intuition; but the porter can do and frequently does things of this very sort. His recompense for them, however, is hardly to be classed as a tip.

The tip is the nub of the whole situation. Almost since the very day when the Pioneer began to blaze the trail of luxury over the railroads of the land, and the autocrat of the Pullman car created his servile but entirely honorable calling, it has been a mooted point. Recently a great Federal commission has blazed the strong light of publicity on it. Robert T. Lincoln, son of the Emancipator, and, as we have already said, the head and front of the Pullman Company, sat in a witness chair at Washington and answered some pretty pointed questions as to the division of the porter's income between the company and the passenger who employed him. Wages, it appeared, are twenty-seven dollars and a half a month for the first fifteen years of the porter's service, increasing thereafter to thirty dollars a month, slightly augmented by bonuses for good records.

The porter also receives his uniforms free after ten years of service, and in some cases of long service his pay may reach forty-two dollars a month. The rest of his income is in the form of tips. And Mr. Lincoln testified that during the past year the total of these tips, to the best knowledge and belief of his company, had exceeded two million three hundred thousand dollars.

The Pullman Company is not an eleemosynary institution. Though it has made distinct advances in the establishment of pension funds and death benefits, it is hardly to be classed as a philanthropy. It is a large organization; and it generally is what it chooses to consider itself. Sometimes it avers that it is a transportation company, at other times it prefers to regard itself as a hotel organization; but at all times it is a business proposition. It is not in business for its health. Its dividend record is proof of that. All of which is a preface to the statement that the Pullman Company, like any other large user of labor, regulates its wage scale by supply and demand. If it can find enough of the colored brethren competent and willing and anxious to man its cars at twenty-seven dollars and a half a month--with the fair gamble of two or three or four times that amount to come in the form of tips--it is hardly apt to pay more.

No wonder, then, the tip forms the nub of the situation. To-day all America tips. You tip the chauffeur in the taxi, the redcap in the station, the barber, the bootblack, the manicure, the boy or girl who holds your coat for you in the barber's shop or hotel. In the modern hotel tipping becomes a vast and complex thing--waiters, doormen, hat boys, chambermaids, bell boys, porters--the list seems almost unending.

The system may be abominable, but it has certainly fastened itself on us--sternly and securely. And it may be said for the Pullman car that there, at least, the tip comes to a single servitor--the black autocrat who smiles genially no matter how suspiciously he may, at heart, view the quarter you have placed within his palm.

A quarter seems to be the standard Pullman tip--for one person, each night he may be on the car. Some men give more; some men--alas for poor George!--less. A quarter is not only average but fairly standard. It is given a certain official status by the auditing officers of many large railroads and industrial corporations, who recognize it as a chargeable item in the expense accounts of their men on the road.

A man with a fat run--lower berths all occupied, with at least a smattering of riders in the uppers, night after night--ought to be able easily to put aside a hundred and fifty dollars a month as his income from this item. There are hundreds of porters who are doing this very thing; and there are at least dozens of porters who own real estate, automobiles, and other such material evidences of prosperity.

A tip is not necessarily a humiliation, either to the giver or to the taker. On the contrary, it is a token of meritorious service. And the smart porter is going to take good care that he gives such service. But how about the porter who is not so smart--the man who has the lean run? As every butcher and every transportation man knows, there is lean with the fat. And it does the lean man little good to know that his fat brother is preparing to buy a secondhand automobile. On the contrary, it creates an anarchist--or at least a socialist--down under that black skin.

Here is Lemuel--cursed with a lean run and yet trying to maintain at least an appearance of geniality. Lemuel runs on a "differential" between New York, Chicago and St. Louis. Every passenger-traffic man knows that most of the differentials--as the roads that take longer hours, and so are permitted to charge a slightly lower through fare between those cities, are called--have had a hard time of it in recent years. It is the excess-fare trains, the highest-priced carriers--which charge you a premium of a dollar for every hour they save in placing you in the terminal--that are the crowded trains. And the differentials have had increasing difficulty getting through passengers.

It seems that in this day and land a man who goes from New York to Chicago or St. Louis is generally so well paid as to make it worth dollars to him to save hours in the journey. It is modern efficiency showing itself in railroad-passenger travel. But the differentials, having local territory to serve, as well as on account of some other reasons, must maintain a sleeping-car service--even at a loss. There is little or no loss to the Pullman Company--you may be sure of that! The railroad pays it a mileage fee for hauling a half or three-quarter empty car over its own line--in addition to permitting the Pullman system to take all the revenue from the car; but Lemuel sees his end of the business as a dead loss.

He leaves New York at two-thirty o'clock on Monday afternoon, having reported at his car nearly three hours before so as to make sure that it is properly stocked and cleaned for its long trip. He is due at St. Louis at ten-fifteen on Tuesday evening--though it will be nearly two hours later before he has checked the contents of the car and slipped off to the bunking quarters maintained there by his company.

On Wednesday evening at seven o'clock he starts east and is due in New York about dawn on Friday morning. He cleans up his car and himself, and gets to his little home on the West Side of Manhattan Island sometime before noon; but by noon on Saturday he must be back at his car, making sure that it is fit and ready by two-thirty o'clock--the moment the conductor's arm falls--and they are headed west again.

This time the destination is Chicago, which is not reached until about six o'clock Sunday night. He bunks that night in the Windy City and then spends thirty-two hours going back again to New York. He sees his home one more night; then he is off to St. Louis again--started on a fresh round of his eternal schedule.

Talk of tips to Lemuel! His face lengthens. You may not believe it, white man, but Lemuel made fifty-three cents in tips on the last trip from New York to Chicago. You can understand the man who gave him the Columbian antique; but Lemuel believes there can be no future too warm for that skinny man who gave him the three pennies! He thinks the gentleman might at least have come across with a Subway ticket. It is all legal tender to him.

All that saves this porter's bacon is the fact that he is in charge of the car--for some three hundred miles of its eastbound run he is acting as sleeping-car conductor, for which consolidated job he draws down a proportionate share of forty-two dollars a month. This is a small sop, however, to Lemuel. He turns and tells you how, on the last trip, he came all the way from St. Louis to New York--two nights on the road--without ever a "make-down," as he calls preparing a berth. No wonder then that he has difficulty in making fifty dollars a month, with his miserable tips on the lean run.

Nor is that all. Though Lemuel is permitted three hours' sleep--on the bunk in the washroom on the long runs--from midnight to three o'clock in the morning, there may come other times when his head begins to nod. And those are sure to be the times when some lynx-eyed inspector comes slipping aboard. Biff! Bang! Pullman discipline is strict. Something has happened to Lemuel's pay envelope, and his coffee-colored wife in West Twenty-ninth Street will not be able to get those gray spats until they are clean gone out of style.

What can be done for Lemuel? He must bide his time and constantly make himself a better servant--a better porter, if you please. It will not go unnoticed. The Pullman system has a method for noticing those very things--inconsequential in themselves but all going to raise the standard of its service.

Then some fine day something will happen. A big sleeping-car autocrat, in the smugness and false security of a fat run, is going to err. He is going to step on the feet of some important citizen--perhaps a railroad director--and the important citizen is going to make a fuss. After which Lemuel, hard-schooled in adversity, in faithfulness and in courtesy, will be asked in the passing of a night to change places with the old autocrat.

And the old autocrat, riding in the poverty of a lean run, will have plenty of opportunity to count the telegraph poles and reflect on the mutability of men and things. The Pullman Company denies that this is part of its system; but it does happen--time and time and time again.

George, or Lemuel, or Alexander--whatever the name may be--has no easy job. If you do not believe that, go upstairs some hot summer night to the rear bedroom--that little room under the blazing tin roof which you reserve for your relatives--and make up the bed fifteen or twenty times, carefully unmaking it between times and placing the clothes away in a regular position. Let your family nag at you and criticize you during each moment of the job--while somebody plays an obbligato on the electric bell and places shoes and leather grips underneath your feet. Imagine the house is bumping and rocking--and keep a smiling face and a courteous tongue throughout all of it!

Or do this on a bitter night in midwinter; and between every two or three makings of the bed in the overheated room slip out of a linen coat and into a fairly thin serge one and go and stand outside the door from three to ten minutes in the snow and cold. In some ways this is one of the hardest parts of George's job. Racially the negro is peculiarly sensitive to pneumonia and other pulmonary diseases; yet the rules of a porter's job require that at stopping stations he must be outside of the car--no matter what the hour or condition of the climate--smiling and ready to say:

"What space you got, guv'nor?"

However, the porter's job, like nearly every other job, has its glories as well as its hardships--triumphs that can be told and retold for many a day to fascinated colored audiences; because there are special trains--filled with pursy and prosperous bankers from Hartford and Rochester and Terre Haute--making the trip from coast to coast and back again, and never forgetting the porter at the last hour of the last day.

There are many men in the Pullman service like Roger Pryor, who has ridden with every recent President of the land and enjoyed his confidence and respect. And then there is General Henry Forrest, of the Congressional Limited, for twenty-four years in charge of one of its broiler cars, who stops not at Presidents but enjoys the acquaintance of senators and ambassadors almost without number.

The General comes to know these dignitaries by their feet. When he is standing at the door of his train under the Pennsylvania Terminal, in New York, he recognizes the feet as they come poking down the long stairs from the concourse. And he can make his smile senatorial or ambassadorial--a long time in advance.

Once Forrest journeyed in a private car to San Francisco, caring for a Certain Big Man. He took good care of the Certain Big Man--that was part of his job. He took extra good care of the Certain Big Man--that was his opportunity. And when the Certain Big Man reached the Golden Gate he told Henry Forrest that he had understood and appreciated the countless attentions. The black face of the porter wrinkled into smiles. He dared to venture an observation.

"Ah thank you, Jedge!" said he. "An' ef it wouldn't be trespassin' Ah'd lak to say dat when yo' comes home you's gwine to be President of dese United States."

The Certain Big Man shook his head negatively; but he was flattered nevertheless. He leaned over and spoke to Henry Forrest.

"If ever I am President," said he, "I will make you a general."

And so it came to pass that on the blizzardy Dakota-made day when William Howard Taft was inaugurated President of these United States there was a parade--a parade in which many men rode in panoply and pride; but none was prouder there than he who, mounted on a magnificent bay horse, headed the Philippine Band.

A promise was being kept. The bay horse started three times to bolt from the line of march, and this was probably because its rider was better used to the Pompeian-red broiler car than to a Pompeian-red bay mare. But these were mere trifles. Despite them--partly because of them perhaps--the younger brethren at the terminals were no longer to address the veteran from the Congressional merely as Mr. Forrest. He was General Forrest now--a title he bears proudly and which he will carry with him all the long years of his life.

What becomes of the older porters?

Sometimes, when the rush of the fast trains, the broken nights, the exposure and the hard, hard work begin to be too much for even sturdy Afric frames, they go to the "super" and beg for the "sick man's run"--a leisurely sixty or a hundred miles a day on a parlor car, perhaps on a side line where travel is light and the parlor car is a sort of sentimental frippery; probably one of the old wooden cars: the Alicia, or the Lucille, or the Celeste, still vain in bay windows and grilles, and abundant in carvings. For a sentimental frippery may be given a feminine name and may bear her years gracefully--even though she does creak in all her hundred joints when the track is the least bit uneven.

As to the sick man's tips, the gratuity is no less a matter of keen interest and doubt at sixty than it is at twenty-six. And though there is a smile under that clean mat of kinky white hair, it is not all habit--some of it is still anticipation. But quarters and half dollars do not come so easily to the old man in the parlor car as to his younger brother on the sleepers, or those elect who have the smokers on the fat runs. To the old men come dimes instead--some of them miserable affairs bearing on their worn faces the faint presentments of the ruler on the north side of Lake Erie and hardly redeemable in Baltimore or Cincinnati. Yet even these are hardly to be scorned--when one is sixty.

After the sick man's job? Perhaps a sandy farm on a Carolina hillside, where an old man may sit and nod in the warm sun, and dream of the days when steel cars were new--perhaps of the days when the platform-vestibule first went bounding over the rails--may dream and nod; and then, in his waking moments, stir the pickaninnies to the glories of a career on a fast train and a fat run. For if it is true that any white boy has the potential opportunity of becoming President of the United States, it is equally true that any black boy may become the Autocrat of the Pullman Car.

* * * * *

_(The Independent)_

THE GENTLE ART OF BLOWING BOTTLES And the Story of How Sand is Melted into Glass

BY F. GREGORY HARTSWICK

Remedies for our manifold ills; the refreshment that our infant lips craved; coolness in time of heat; yes--even tho July 1st has come and gone--drafts to assuage our thirst; the divers stays and supports of our declining years--all these things come in bottles. From the time of its purchase to the moment of its consignment to the barrel in the cellar or the rapacious wagon of the rag-and-bone man the bottle plays a vital part in our lives. And as with most inconspicuous necessities, but little is known of its history. We assume vaguely that it is blown--ever since we saw the Bohemian Glass Blowers at the World's Fair we have known that glass is blown into whatever shape fancy may dictate--but that is as far as our knowledge of its manufacture extends.

As a matter of fact the production of bottles in bulk is one of the most important features of the glass industry of this country today. The manufacture of window glass fades into insignficance before the hugeness of the bottle-making business; and even the advent of prohibition, while it lessens materially the demand for glass containers of liquids, does not do so in such degree as to warrant very active uneasiness on the part of the proprietors of bottle factories.

The process of manufacture of the humble bottle is a surprizingly involved one. It includes the transportation and preparation of raw material, the reduction of the material to a proper state of workability, and the shaping of the material according to design, before the bottle is ready to go forth on its mission.

The basic material of which all glass is made is, of course, sand. Not the brown sand of the river-bed, the well remembered "sandy bottom" of the swimmin' hole of our childhood, but the finest of white sand from the prehistoric ocean-beds of our country. This sand is brought to the factory and there mixed by experts with coloring matter and a flux to aid the melting. On the tint of the finished product depends the sort of coloring agent used. For clear white glass, called flint glass, no color is added. The mixing of a copper salt with the sand gives a greenish tinge to the glass; amber glass is obtained by the addition of an iron compound; and a little cobalt in the mixture gives the finished bottle the clear blue tone that used to greet the waking eye as it searched the room for something to allay that morning's morning feeling. The flux used is old glass--bits of shattered bottles, scraps from the floor of the factory. This broken glass is called "cullet," and is carefully swept into piles and kept in bins for use in the furnaces.

The sand, coloring matter, and cullet, when mixed in the proper proportions, form what is called in bottle-makers' talk the "batch" or "dope." This batch is put into a specially constructed furnace--a brick box about thirty feet long by fifteen wide, and seven feet high at the crown of the arched roof. This furnace is made of the best refractory blocks to withstand the fierce heat necessary to bring the batch to a molten state. The heat is supplied by various fuels--producer-gas is the most common, tho oil is sometimes used. The gas is forced into the furnace and mixed with air at its inception; when the mixture is ignited the flame rolls down across the batch, and the burnt gases pass out of the furnace on the other side. The gases at their exit pass thru a brick grating or "checkerboard," which takes up much of the heat; about every half hour, by an arrangement of valves, the inlet of the gas becomes the outlet, and vice versa, so that the heat taken up by the checkerboard is used instead of being dissipated, and as little of the heat of combustion is lost as is possible. The batch is put into the furnace from the rear; as it liquefies it flows to the front, where it is drawn off thru small openings and blown into shape.

The temperature in the furnace averages about 2100 degrees Fahrenheit; it is lowest at the rear, where the batch is fed in, and graduates to its highest point just behind the openings thru which the glass is drawn off. This temperature is measured by special instruments called thermal couples--two metals joined and placed in the heat of the flame. The heat sets up an electric current in the joined metals, and this current is read on a galvanometer graduated to read degrees Fahrenheit instead of volts, so that the temperature may be read direct.

All furnaces for the melting of sand for glass are essentially the same in construction and principle. The radical differences in bottle manufacturing appear in the methods used in drawing off the glass and blowing it into shape.

Glass is blown by three methods: hand-blowing, semi-automatic blowing, and automatic blowing. The first used was the hand method, and tho the introduction of machines is rapidly making the old way a back number, there are still factories where the old-time glass blower reigns supreme.

One of the great centers of the bottle industry in the United States is down in the southern end of New Jersey. Good sand is dug there--New Jersey was part of the bed of the Atlantic before it literally rose to its present state status--and naturally the factories cluster about the source of supply of material. Within a radius of thirty miles the investigator may see bottles turned out by all three methods.

The hand-blowing, while it is the slowest and most expensive means of making bottles, is by far the most picturesque. Imagine a long, low, dark building--dark as far as daylight is concerned, but weirdly lit by orange and scarlet flashes from the great furnaces that crouch in its shelter. At the front of each of these squatting monsters, men, silhouetted against the fierce glow from the doors, move about like puppets on wires--any noise they may make is drowned in the mastering roar of the fire. A worker thrusts a long blowpipe (in glassworkers' terminology a wand) into the molten mass in the furnace and twirls 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 pounds, and when he blew something had to happen. I arrived at his place of labor just as the shifts were being changed--a glass-furnace is worked continuously, in three eight-hour shifts--and as the little whistle blew to announce the end of his day's toil the giant grabbed the last wand, dropped it into the waiting mold, and blew a mighty blast. A bubble of glass sprang from the mouth of the mold, swelled to two feet in diameter, and burst with a bang, filling the air with shimmering flakes of glass, light enough to be wafted like motes. When the shining shower had settled and I had opened my eyes--it would not be pleasant to get an eyeful of those beautiful scraps--the huge blower was diminishing in perspective toward his dinner, and the furnace door was, for the moment, without its usual hustling congregation of workers. I made bold to investigate the platform.

Close to me glared the mouth of the furnace, with masses of silver threads depending from it like the beard of some fiery gulleted ogre--the strings of glass left by the withdrawal of the wand. The heat three feet away was enough to make sand melt and run like water, but I was not unpleasantly warm. This was because I stood at the focus of three tin pipes, thru which streams of cold air, fan-impelled, beat upon me. Without this cooling agent it would be impossible for men to work so close to the heat of the molten glass.

Later, in the cool offices of the company, where the roar of the furnaces penetrated only as a dull undertone, and electric fans whizzed away the heat of the summer afternoon, I learned more of the technique of the bottle industry. Each shape demanded by the trade requires a special mold, made of cast iron and cut according to the design submitted. There are, of course, standard shapes for standard bottles; these are alluded to (reversing the usual practise of metonymy) by using thing contained for container, as "ginger ales," "olives," "mustards," "sodas" and (low be it spoken) "beers." But when a firm places an order for bottles of a particular shape, or ones with lettering in relief on the glass, special molds must be made; and after the lot is finished the molds are useless till another order for that particular design comes in. A few standard molds are made so that plates with lettering can be inserted for customers who want trademarks or firm names on their bottles; but the great majority of the lettered bottles have their own molds, made especially for them and unable to be used for any other lot.

All bottles are blown in molds; it is in the handling of the molten glass and the actual blowing that machinery has come to take the place of men in the glass industry. The first type of machine to be developed was for blowing the bottle and finishing it, thus doing away with three of the six men formerly employed in making one bottle. In appearance the bottle-blowing machine is merely two circular platforms, revolving in the same horizontal plane, each carrying five molds. One of the platforms revolves close to the furnace door, and as each mold comes around it automatically opens and the gatherer draws from the furnace enough glass for the bottle which is being made at the time, and places it in the mold. The mold closes, and the platform turns on, bringing around another mold to the gatherer. Meanwhile a nozzle has snapped down over the first mold, shaping the neck of the bottle, and beginning the blowing. As the mold comes to a point diametrically opposite the furnace door it opens again, and a handler takes the blank, as the bottle is called at this stage, and places it in a mold on the second revolving platform. This mold closes and compressed air blows out the bottle as the platform revolves. As the mold comes around to the handler again it opens and the handler takes out the finished bottle, replacing it with a new blank drawn from the mold on the first platform. This operation necessitates only three men--a gatherer, a handler, and a carrier-off. It is also much faster than the old method--an average of about forty bottles per minute as against barely twenty.

A newer development of this machine does away with the gatherer. A long rod of refractory clay is given a churning movement in the mouth of the furnace, forcing the molten glass thru a tube. As enough glass for one bottle appears at the mouth of the tube a knife cuts the mass and the blob of glass falls into a trough which conveys it to the blank mold. By an ingenious device the same trough is made to feed three or four machines at one time. As many as fifty bottles a minute can be turned out by this combination blowing machine and feeder.

But the apotheosis of bottle-making is to be seen in another factory in the south Jersey district. Here it is the boast of the superintendents that from the time the sand goes out of the freight cars in which it is brought to the plant till the finished bottle is taken by the packer, no human hand touches the product; and their statement is amply confirmed by a trip thru the plant. The sand, coloring matter and cullet are in separate bins; an electrical conveyor takes enough of each for a batch to a mixing machine; from there the batch goes on a long belt to the furnace. At the front of the furnace, instead of doors or mouths, is a revolving pan, kept level full with the molten glass. Outside the furnace revolves a huge machine with ten arms, each of which carries its own mold and blowpipe. As each arm passes over the pan in the furnace the proper amount of glass is sucked into the mold by vacuum; the bottle is blown and shaped in the course of one revolution, and the mold, opening, drops the finished bottle into a rack which carries it to the lehr on a belt. It passes thru the lehr to the packers; and as each rack is emptied of its bottles the packers place it again on the belt, which carries it up to the machine, where it collects its cargo of hot bottles and conducts it again thru the lehr. The entire plant--mixing, feeding, actually making the bottles, delivery to the lehr, and packing--is synchronized exactly. Men unload the cars of sand--men pack the bottles. The intermediate period is entirely mechanical. The plant itself is as well lighted and ventilated as a department store, and except in the immediate vicinity of the furnace there is no heat felt above the daily temperature. The machines average well over a bottle a second, and by an exceedingly clever arrangement of electrical recording appliances an accurate record of the output of each machine, as well as the temperatures of the furnaces and lehrs, is kept in the offices of the company. The entire equipment is of the most modern, from the boilers and motors in the power-plant and producer-gas-plant to the packing platforms. In addition, the plant boasts a complete machine shop where all the molds are made and the machines repaired.

It is a far cry from human lung-power to the super-efficient machinery of the new plants; but it is the logical progress of human events, applying to every product of man's hands, from battleships to--bottles.

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SPECIAL FEATURE ARTICLES

(_New York World_)

One illustration, a half-tone reproduction of a photograph of the exterior of the theater.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD PLAYHOUSE

A GIFT TO THE EAST SIDE--HOW THE SETTLEMENT WORK OF MISSES IRENE AND ALICE LEWISOHN HAS CULMINATED AT LAST IN A REAL THEATRE--ITS ATTRACTIONS AND EDUCATIONAL VALUE

The piece is the Biblical "Jephthah's Daughter," adapted from the Book of Judges. The hero, "a mighty man of valor," has conquered the enemies of his people. There is great rejoicing over his victory, for the tribe of Israel has been at its weakest. But now comes payment of the price of conquest. The leader of the victorious host promised to yield to God as a burnt sacrifice "whatsoever cometh forth from the doors of my house to meet me when I return from battle." And his daughter came forth.

In the last act, the girl herself, young and beautiful, advances toward the altar on which fagots have been piled high. In her hand is the lighted torch which is to kindle her own death fire.

The chorus chants old Hebraic melodies. Even the audience joins in the singing. The play takes on the aspect of an ancient religious ceremonial. Old men and women are in tears, moved by the sad history of their race, forgetful of the horror of human sacrifice in the intensity of their religious fervor.

Such is the artistry of the piece; such the perfection of its production.

Yet this is no professional performance, but the work of amateurs. It is the opening night of the new community theatre of New York's densely populated East Side.

At No. 466 Grand Street it stands, far away from Broadway's theatrical district--a low-lying, little Georgian building. It is but three stories high, built of light red brick, and finished with white marble. All around garish millinery shops display their showy goods. Peddlers with pushcarts lit by flickering flames, vie with each other in their array of gaudy neckties and bargain shirtwaists. Blazing electric signs herald the thrills of movie shows. And, salient by the force of extreme contrast, a plain little white posterboard makes its influence felt. It is lit by two iron lanterns, and reads simply, "The Neighborhood Playhouse."

The Misses Irene and Alice Lewisohn of No. 43 Fifth Avenue have built this theatre. It is their gift to the neighborhood, and symbolizes the culmination of a work which they have shared with the neighborhood's people.

Eight years ago the Henry Street Settlement started its scheme of festivals and pantomimes, portraying through the medium of color, song, and dance such vague ideas as "Impressions of Spring." It was the boys and girls of the Settlement who performed in these pantomimes. It was they who made the costumes, painted the necessary scenery, sang and danced.

And both daughters of the late Leonard Lewisohn were always interested and active in promoting this work.

Out of it, in due time, there developed, quite naturally, a dramatic club. Plays were given in the Settlement gymnasium--full-grown pieces like "The Silver Box," by John Galsworthy, and inspiring dramas like "The Shepherd," a plea for Russian revolutionists, by an American author, Miss Olive Tilford Dargan. Such was the emotional response of the neighborhood to this drama that four performances had to be given at Clinton Hall; and as a result a substantial sum of money was forwarded to "The Friends of Russian Freedom."

Then, in 1913, came the famous Pageant, which roused the entire district to a consciousness of itself--its history, its dignity and also its possibilities.

That portion of the East Side which surrounds the Henry Street Settlement has seen many an invasion since the days when the Dutch first ousted the Indians. English, Quakers, Scotch have come and gone, leaving traces more or less distinct. The Irish have given place to the Italians, who have been replaced by the Russians. In the Pageant of 1913 all these settlers were represented by artistically clad groups who paraded the streets singing and dancing. No hall could have held the audience which thronged to see this performance; no host of matinée worshippers could have rivalled it in fervor of appreciation.

When the Misses Lewisohn, then, built their new playhouse in Grand Street, it was not with the intention of rousing, but rather of satisfying, an artistic demand among the people of the neighborhood. And in the new home are to be continued all the varied activities of which the Henry Street Settlement festival and dramatic clubs were but the centre. It is to be a genuine community enterprise in which each boy and girl will have a share. Miss Alice Lewisohn herself thus expresses its many-sided work:

"The costume designers and makers, fashioners of jewelry, painters and composers, musicians and seamstresses, as well as actors and directors, will contribute their share in varying degree.

"Putting aside for a moment the higher and artistic development which such work must bring, there is the craftsman side, too, which has practical value. The young men will become familiar with all the handiwork of the theatre, the construction and handling of scenery, the electrical equipment and its varied uses. It will be conceded, I think, that in this respect the community playhouse is really a college of instruction in the craft of the stage."

It is a college with a very efficient and well-trained staff of professors. Mrs. Sarah Cowell Le Moyne, already well known as a teacher of elocution and acting, will be one of its members. Miss Grace Griswold, an experienced co-worker of the late Augustine Daly, will act as manager.

The pupils of this novel school are to have amusement as well as work. The third floor has been planned to meet many more requirements than are usually considered in a theatre. Across the front runs a large rehearsal room, large enough to make a fine dance hall when occasion demands. Here, too, is a kitchenette which will be used to serve refreshments when social gatherings are in progress or when an over-long rehearsal tires out the cast. In warm weather the flat-tiled roof will be used as a playground. It will be the scene, too, of many open air performances.

The Neighborhood Playhouse has been open only a few weeks. Already it is in full swing. On the nights when the regular players do not appear the programme consists of motion pictures and music. There is a charming informality and ease about these entertainments; there is also genuine art, and a whole-hearted appreciation on the part of the neighborhood's people.

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(_New York Evening Post_)

THE SINGULAR STORY OF THE MOSQUITO MAN

BY HELEN BULLITT LOWRY

"Now you just hold up a minute"--the bungalow-owner waved an indignant hand at the man in the little car chug-chugging over the bumpy road. "Now I just want to tell you," he protested, "that a mosquito got into my room last night and bit me, and I want you to know that this has happened three times this week. I want it to stop."

The man in the car had jumped out, and was turning an animated, and aggressive, but not at all provoked, face on the complainer.

"Are you certain your drains are not stopped up?" he asked.

"Oh, those drains are all right. It's that damp hollow over in Miss K's woods that's making the trouble."

"I'll go there immediately," said the aggressive one. "She promised me she would fill that place this week."

"All right, then," answered the placated bungalow-owner, "I thought you'd fix it up if you found out about it. I certainly wouldn't have bought around Darien if you had not cleared this place of mosquitoes."

The aggressive one plunged into the Connecticut woods and began his search for possible mosquito-breeding spots. He was the "Mosquito Man," the self-appointed guardian of the Connecticut coast from Stamford to Westport.

He was not born a Mosquito Man at all--in fact, he did not become one until he was forty years old and had retired from business because he had made enough money to rest and "enjoy life." But he did not rest, and did not get enjoyment, for the mosquitoes had likewise leased his place on the Sound and were making good their title.

Came then big fat mosquitoes from the swamp. Came mosquitoes from the salt marshes. Some lighted on the owner's nose and some looked for his ankles, and found them. Three days of this sort of rest made him decide to move away. Then, because he was aggressive, he became the Mosquito Man. The idea occurred to him when he had gone over to a distant island and was watching the building of houses.

"This place," he said to the head carpenter, "is going to be a little heaven."

"More like a little other place," growled the head carpenter. "Here they've dug out the centre of the island and carted it to the beach to make hills for the houses to be built on. One good rain will fill their little heaven with mosquitoes. Why don't the people around here drain their country?"

That night the Mosquito Man telephoned to a drainage expert in New York and demanded that he come out the next day.

"I don't like to work on Sunday," the expert objected.

"It is absolutely essential that you come at once," he was told. "Can you take the first train?"

The first train and the expert arrived in Darien at 5:51. Before the day was over a contract had been drawn up to the purport that the expert would drain the salt marshes between Stamford and South Norwalk for $4,000.

The Mosquito Man now began to talk mosquitoes to every one who would listen and to many who did not want to listen. "That bug," the old settlers called him at the time--for old settlers are very settled in their ways. The young women at the Country Club, whenever they saw him coming, made bets as to whether he would talk mosquitoes--and he always did. Every property-owner in the township was asked for a subscription, and some gave generously and some gave niggardly and some did not give at all. The subscriptions were voluntary, for no one could be forced to remove a mosquito-breeding nuisance from his property. This was in 1911, and only in 1915 has a mosquito law been passed in Connecticut. The Mosquito Man was forced to use "indirect influence," which does not expedite matters.

A subscription of $1,000 came from the big land corporation of the neighborhood, after the "indirect influence" had rather forcibly expressed itself.

"I want $1,000 from you," said the Mosquito Man to the representative of the president--the president was in South America. The representative laughed, so the Mosquito Man spent several days explaining to him why property is more valuable when it is not infested with pests. But every time that the $1,000 was mentioned, the representative could not restrain the smile.

"Well," the Mosquito Man said, at last, "I will make the drainage on your property anyway, and it will cost me $2,000. If you want it left you will have to pay me every cent of the $2,000, not just the $1,000 that I am asking now. Otherwise I shall fill up my ditches and let you enjoy your mosquitoes."

The representative did not laugh at this, but cabled the president in South America. As the president had just been at Panama, and had seen the mosquito extermination work, the $1,000 subscription came back by return cable.