This translucent confection is pushed upon a flat wooden platform on wheels--sparkling, as it touches the wood, like innumerable diamonds--and is then run rapidly to an oven, there to be baked or annealed. The bed or "sole" of this _carquèse_ is heated to a temperature exactly equal to that of the glass; which is now so much cooled that you can stand within a yard or so of it without fear of scorching off your eyelashes. The pot out of the furnace is cooled, too, out in the rain, and lies there, burst into a hundred pieces. It has been a good one: for it has withstood the fire seventy days. So rapidly are all these casting operations performed, that, from the moment when Mr. Bossle thought his spectacles were melting off his nose, to the moment when the sheet of glass is shut up in the oven, about five minutes have elapsed. The operations are repeated, until the oven is full of glass-plates. When eight plates are put into the _carquèse_, it is closed up hermetically; for the tiniest current of cold air would crack the glass. The fire is allowed to go out of its own accord, and the cooling takes place so gradually, that it is not completed until eight days are over. When drawn forth, the glass is that "rough plate" which we see let into the doors of railway stations, and forming half-transparent floors in manufactories. To make it completely transparent for windows and looking-glasses, elaborate processes of grinding and polishing are requisite. They are three in number: roughing down, smoothing, and polishing. "I perceive," said Mr. Bossle, when he got to the roughing-down room, where steam machinery was violently agitating numerous plates of glass, one upon the other, "that the diamond-cut-diamond principle is adopted." "Exactly; the under-plate is fastened to a table by plaster-of-paris, and the upper one--quite rough--is violently rubbed by machinery upon it, with water, sand, and other grinding-powders between. The top-plate is then fastened to a table, to rough down another first plate; for the under one is always the smoother." Then comes the "smoothing." Emery, of graduated degrees of fineness, is used for that purpose. "Until within the last month or so, smoothing could only be done by human labor. The human hand alone was capable of the requisite tenacity, to rub the slippery surfaces over each other; nay, so fine a sense of touch was requisite, that even a man's hand had scarcely sensitiveness enough for the work; hence females were, and still are employed."