Zorzi had not poured out the specimen on the table as he had done when the glass was coloured; on the contrary he had taken some on the blow-pipe and had begun to work with it at once, for the three great requisites were transparency, ductility, and lightness.  In a few minutes he had convinced himself that his glass possessed all these qualities in an even higher degree than the master’s own, and that was immeasurably superior to anything which the latter’s own sons or any other glass-maker could produce.  Zorzi had taken very little at first, and he made of it a thin phial of graceful shape, turned the mouth outward, and dropped the little vessel into the bed of ashes.  He would have set it in the annealing oven, but he wished to try the weight of it, and he let it cool.  Taking it up when he could touch it safely, it felt in his hand like a thing of air.  On the shelf was another nearly like it in size, which he had made long ago with Beroviero’s glass.  There were scales on the table; he laid one phial in each, and the old one was by far the heavier.  He had to put a number of pennyweights into the scale with his own before the two were balanced.

His heart almost stood still, and he could not believe his good fortune.  He took the sheet of rough paper on which he had written down the precise contents of the three crucibles, and he carefully went over the proportions of the ingredients in the one from which he had just taken his specimen.  He made a strong effort of memory, trying to recall whether he had been careless and inexact in weighing any of the materials, but he knew that he had been most precise.  He had also noted the hour at which he had put the mixture into the crucible on Saturday, and he now glanced at the sand-glass and made another note.  But he did not lay the paper upon the table, where it had been lying for two days, kept in place by a little glass weight.  It had become his most precious possession; what was written on it meant a fortune as soon as he could get a furnace to himself; it was his own, and not the master’s; it was wealth, it might even be fame.  Beroviero might call him to account for misusing the furnace, but that was no capital offence after all, and it was more than paid for by the single crucible of magnificent red glass.  Zorzi was attempting to reproduce that too, for he had the master’s notes of what the pot had contained, and it was almost ready to be tried; he even had the piece of copper carefully weighed to be equal in bulk with the ladle that had been melted.  If he succeeded there also, that was a new secret for Beroviero, but the other was for himself.

All that morning he revelled in the delight of working with the new glass.  A marvellous dish with upturned edge and ornamented foot was the next thing he made, and he placed it at once in the annealing oven.  Then he made a tall drinking glass such as he had never made before, and then, in contrast, a tiny ampulla, so small that he could almost hide it in his hand, with its spout, yet decorated with all the perfection of a larger piece.  He worked on, careless of the time, his genius all alive, the rest a distant dream.