He looked about the laboratory.  There were the beams and crossbeams, and the box would probably just fit into one of the shadowy interstices between two of the latter.  But they were twenty feet from the ground, he had no ladder, and if there had been one at hand he could not have mounted it yet.  His eye fell on the big earthen jar, more than half a man’s height and as big round as a hogshead, half full of broken glass from the experiments.  No one would think of it as a place for hiding anything, and it would not be emptied till it was quite full, several months hence.  Besides, no one would dare to empty it without Beroviero’s orders, as it contained nothing but fine red glass, which was valuable and only needed melting to be used at once.

It was not an easy matter to take out half the contents, and he was in constant danger of interruption.  At night it would have been impossible owing to the presence of the boys.  If Pasquale appeared and saw a heap of broken glass on the floor, he would surely suspect something.  Zorzi calculated that it would take two hours to remove the fragments with the care necessary to avoid cutting his hands badly, and to put them back again, for the shape of the jar would not admit of his employing even one of the small iron shovels used for filling the crucibles.

With considerable difficulty he moved a large chest, that contained sifted white sand, out of the dark corner in which it stood and placed it diagonally so as to leave a triangular space behind it.  To guard against the sound of the broken glass being heard from without, he shut the window, in spite of the heat, and having arranged in the corner one of the sacks used for bringing the cakes of kelp-ashes from Egypt, he began to fill it with the broken glass he brought from the jar in a bucket.  When he judged that he had taken out more than half the contents, he took the iron box from the annealing oven.  It was hard to carry it under the arm by which he walked with a stick, the other hand being necessary to move the crutch, and as he reached the jar he felt that it was slipping.  He bent forward and it fell with a crash, bedding itself in the smashed glass.  Zorzi drew a long breath of satisfaction, for the hardest part of the work was done.

He tried to heave up the sack from the corner, but it was far too heavy, and he was obliged to bring back more than half of what it held by bucketfuls, before he was able to bring the rest, dragging it after him across the floor.  It was finished at last, he had shaken out the sack carefully over the jar’s mouth, and he had moved the sand-chest back to its original position.  No one would have imagined that the broken glass had been removed and put back again.  The box was safely hidden now.