Surely, no man ever knocked with such pertinacity at the door of knowledge. He met his first success by trying a glass-maker’s furnace. One of the pieces came out “white and polished.” This was food to live upon, and he began to build a furnace of his own, doing all the work himself--three masons in one. At length it was finished, and the first attempt ended in failure. He tried again, becoming poorer and poorer, so that he could not buy wood for his furnace. In his strait, he took the tree-props from his garden, his furniture, and house-flooring for fuel. “My shirt had not been dry for more than a month; and also, to console me, they laughed at me, and even those who ought to have helped me went crying about the town that I was burning my floor, and by these means made me lose my credit; and they thought me mad.” He was evidently in a bad way when he dropped into wearing a wet shirt for a month, and thinking that any one ought to have helped him. After a short rest, he turned his attention to the preparation of a new furnace. To carry out this new plan, he was compelled to mortgage his credit by employing a potter to assist him. His assistant he kept in food by the friendly offices of a tavern-keeper, who seems not to have shared in the madness theory. After six months he felt himself obliged to pay off his help, and did so--in clothes, part of his own scanty wardrobe. Still he was not to be beaten. He finished his furnace single-handed, put in his pieces, and started the fire; but still the gods were inexorable. The pebbles in the mortar used in building the furnace cracked under the heat and flew in splinters, sticking in the glaze of his pieces, and spoiling them. Remorselessly, he broke them all, declining even to give his importunate creditors a single specimen in part payment of his debts. One can imagine the storm such conduct raised, and to make matters worse, “I met with nothing in my house but reproaches, and received maledictions instead of consolation.” The ashes spoiled his next batch, and when he resorted to seggars the unequally distributed heat marred the enamels. He was now, however, too near victory to be altogether discouraged, and finally, after fifteen or sixteen years of unheard-of struggle and misery, this indomitable genius produced the long-sought enamel, and the secret of his well-known rustic pottery was discovered. [Illustration: Fig. 228.--Palissy Dish. (Rothschild Coll.)]