In the middle of the room was a large round furnace with a number of small doors, three or four feet from the ground, forming a sort of belt around the furnace. In front of these doors the glass-blowers were working. With long wrought-iron blowpipes the blowers deftly took from the furnace little wads of waxlike molten “metal” which they blew into balls and then rolled on their rolling boards. These elongated rolls they dropped into moulds and then blew again, harder than before, to force the half-shaped mass into its proper form. With a sharp, clicking sound they broke their pipes away and repeated the whole process. There was not, of course, the fascination about their work that the more artistic forms of glass-blowing possess. There was none of that twirling of the blowpipes till they looked like so many magic wands which for centuries has made the glass-blower’s art a delightful, half-mysterious thing to watch. But it was still wonderful to see the exactness of each man’s “dip,” and the deftness with which they manipulated the balls before casting them into the moulds. Then began the work of the boys. By the side of each mould sat a “take-out boy,” who, with tongs, took the half-finished bottles—not yet provided with necks—out of the moulds. Then other boys, called “snapper-ups,” took these bodies of bottles in their tongs and put the small ends into gas-heated moulds till they were red hot. Then the boys took them out with almost incredible quickness and passed them to other men, “finishers,” who shaped the necks of the bottles into their final form. Then the “carrying-in boys,” sometimes called “carrier pigeons,” took the red-hot bottles from the benches, three or four at a time, upon big asbestos shovels to the annealing oven, where they are gradually cooled off to insure even contraction and to prevent breaking in consequence of too rapid cooling. The work of these “carrying-in boys,” several of whom were less than twelve years old, was by far the hardest of all. They were kept on a slow run all the time from the benches to the annealing oven and back again. I can readily believe what many manufacturers assert, that it is difficult to get men to do this work, because men cannot stand the pace and get tired too quickly. It is a fact, however, that in many factories men are employed to do this work, especially at night. In other, more up-to-date factories it is done by automatic machinery. I did not measure the distance from the benches to the annealing oven, nor did I count the number of trips made by the boys, but my friend, Mr. Owen R. Lovejoy, has done so in a typical factory and very kindly furnished me with the results of his calculation.[118] The distance to the annealing oven in the factory in question was one hundred feet, and the boys made seventy-two trips per hour, making the distance travelled in eight hours nearly twenty-two miles. Over half of this distance the boys were carrying their hot loads to the oven.