A China Cup and Other Stories for Children
9781465675262
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
A waggon drove to the great pit dug in the clay—not common clay, but such as china vessels are made of. A man with an iron spade jumped from the waggon; he entered the pit and began to dig the clay. After the first stroke of the spade a little lump fell out of the native ground, and with a bitter, plaintive murmur rolled down. Nobody heard the murmur; it seemed to the workman that the Lump in rolling down made a slight noise, whereas it was groaning: it was hard to be torn away from mother earth. 'All is over,' it whispered; 'oh, how hard it is to live in the world!' The workman took it up on his spade with the other clay, and threw it into the waggon. 'Oh!' groaned the bit of clay from pain, as it fell on the bottom of the waggon; 'not only was I torn away from my mother, but thrown far away from her. Alas! is there any one more unhappy in this world than I? I should like to die!' But the Lump did not die. The workman had soon filled up his waggon, jumped in himself, and drove away, carrying it to the china factory. It was pretty well while they were going along an even place, but when they went down a steep mountain-side, the horse ran fast, and our Lump was jolted, thrown from side to side, and knocked against the waggon. Nor did all its torments end then. As soon as it was brought to the china factory, it was thrown with other clay into a large tub with water in it, and it felt with horror how it began gradually to get soft, and to be transformed into a sort of soft mud. It had no time to recover, as it was taken out with a great ladle and poured somewhere—it was into the funnel of the great millstones. The driver shouted, the horses went on, pulled one end of a bar, which was fastened by the other end to a big axle standing erect in the middle of the great millstones; the bar again turned the axle to which the upper millstone was fastened, and the millstones began to grind the water-softened clay, crushing its smallest particles. Our Lump no longer existed, but all its little particles which before formed it were now like clay-jelly, and kept close together. Ah, how they suffered! The awful millstone pressed upon them with its whole weight—squeezed, flattened, ground them. They shrivelled, groaned, cried from pain and said: 'Oh-o-o! what a torture! it is all over with us!' But that was not all. After the grinding the clay-jelly was poured by means of gutters into the empty wooden tub to settle. There the hard particles, heavier than water, sank.... On the bottom was the sand, next the reddish clay, mixed with iron-rust, then the coarser parts of the white clay, and finally its lightest particles, quite free from all other mixture. All the particles of our Lump happened to be of the same weight and to be nicely ground; they sank together and formed again the same Lump, only soft, delicate, and free from all unnecessary admixture. It was very nice, of course, but the little Lump was so tired from all it suffered, so exhausted, that it did not wish to live in the world. 'I would rather death would come!' it said. Death, however, did not come. A workman came instead, poured off the water which was on the surface of the clay, cut the clay to the bottom, separated it into layers, and assorted them, so that the upper, more delicate layer was for the best china vessels, and the lower for the coarser plates. As our Lump was in the upper layer, it was taken to a workman who made the finest vessels.
