DEAR SIR,--It is very fortunate that I caught sight of your
advertisement, for I am just the man you need. You want to know all
about bottles and things. I can tell you.
Let us begin with pottery.
Pottery is made in the Five Towns, a district in the Midlands to which
references may be found by the industrious, using a microscope, in the
works of Mr. ARNOLD BENNETT, the famous Caledonian Market salesman.
How it is made I have not room here to indicate, but its effect on
those who make it is to fill their lives with romance and excitement.
Thus, if they don't become Town Councillors for Hanbridge they join
the School Board at Hanley; and if they are not taking the new tram to
Burslem they are catching the fast train to Manchester at Knype.
And now for glass.
Glass is an invisible substance made in some mysterious way. It is
used for a multiplicity of things, but principally for windows and
bottles. It is when used for windows that its special quality of
transparency comes in so happily, for it enables you to see through.
This, when it is the window of a hat shop and you are out with your
wife or fiancee, is not an unmixed blessing, but at other times it
can be very convenient. Thus, when looking through the window, oneself
being carefully concealed behind the blind, one can see undesirable
callers approaching and beat a safe retreat. Windows can also be shut,
both in houses and railway carriages, and thus keep the place warm and
pleasantly insanitary and comfortable. It has been said that the pure
air of many German towns is due to the fact that the Germans keep
their windows shut.
Glass is also used for the chimneys of lamps, which, when the wick
is turned up too high, as it usually is, break. It is employed
furthermore in the manufacture of glass eyes, which, as all who have
visited _A Kiss for Cinderella_ know, do not always match the real
ones.
But the best thing that glass does is to become bottles. Bottles are
of two kinds: one kind for medicine, and the less said about those
the better; and the other for wine. It was a happy thought which
substituted glass for the skin and leather of which earlier bottles
were made, for one can now see, by holding it to the light, how little
the bottle contains, and order another. The principal fault of bottles
is that they are rarely big enough. A half-bottle does not contain
sufficient for one, and a whole bottle rarely satisfies two. Some men
are so lost to shame as to set only one bottle of wine before three or
even four persons.
Before the War old bottles were used chiefly as targets in rifle
saloons. Now that they have become scarce, and targets are made in
Germany, they are worth money and should be carefully saved.
Glass is useful also for making glasses--the receptacles from which
wine is drunk. Without glasses we should be hard put to it to consume
our liquor and should have to resort to half-cocoanuts, cups, the
hollow of the hand, or even sponges.
Just at the moment bottles--I mean the more genial variety--are under
a cloud. It is a penal offence to sell a bottle before noon, between
half-past two and half-past six, and after half-past nine at night.
But they are expected to come to their own again when Peace is
celebrated.