Superintendent of His Royal Highness's Household Thus for the first time in the history of an industry almost as old as humanity, glass adorns alike the person of a Royal Princess and the person of a charming actress. Produced at the Court of Spain and on the American stage, am I not justified in calling this memory of a far and near past "The Drama of Glass"? KATE FIELD THE DRAMA OF GLASS BY KATE FIELD In every story told of the sights worth seeing at the Columbian Exposition the factory of the Libbey Glass Company, of Toledo, Ohio, has had an important part. It was more than a mere exhibit; it was a practical education in the art of glass making, which, like an easy lesson that follows step by step, from the mixing of the crude material to the completion of the finest piece of cut glass, impressed itself upon the minds of hundred of thousands of visitors. [Illustration] Recall in your memory your visit to the World's Fair in 1893. Place yourself upon the Midway Plaisance, directly opposite the Woman's Building. Does your mind picture a stately, beautiful building, with central dome and graceful towers? This was the building of the glass factory to whom the exclusive right to manufacture and sell its products was awarded over many competitors by the Ways and Means Committee of the World's Columbian Exposition. This concession was given because the plan of the Libbey Glass Company was a plan of broad ideas, fully meeting the requirement that America should show that the whole world followed her in the manufacture of cut glass. [Illustration] How well that Company fulfilled its mission is known to the two million visitors who passed under the deep-recessed semicircular archway, rich with sculptured ornament, that covered the grand entrance to this palace; within, it was like a theatre, where the scenes in the beautiful drama of glass were ever changing. Do you remember that the sides, the dome, the ceiling, were all glitter and sheen with the products of this mystic art, and that from thousands of cut-glass pieces, as from brilliant diamonds, sparkled the prismatic hues? [Illustration] Do you remember the roaring furnace a hundred feet high, the melting pots made of the clays of the Old and the New Worlds, mixed by the bare feet in order that they have the requisite consistency? The products of this factory were born of fire. The plastic molten mass that came from the melting furnace, with its heat of 2200 degrees Fahrenheit, was thirty hours before a mixture called by glass makers a "batch," whose chief ingredient was sand from the hills of Massachusetts. [Illustration]