"I talked with him for several minutes and told him that I had made the pieces he had been admiring. He praised my skill and expressed interest in seeing more of my works the next time they came to port. I knew what to do after that.

"During the day I worked on the regular quota of mirrors and plate glass, and at night I would fire up the furnace alone and work on my own pieces. I worked alone at night for the next month, producing nineteen pieces including an incredibly difficult mirrored glass ball about the size of an orange. When his boat returned, I carried my special crates from the back of the warehouse again. He stopped me on my first pass and told me to place my crates in the back corner of the ship's hold. He went below and inspected each piece in every crate as I carried them in. He admired each work covetously and seemed blind to his position and responsibility while he held them. I sat down and made my pitch after I carried in the last crate.

"I offered him nineteen pieces of better quality than the ones he had arranged on the crates around us, in exchange for a small boat to be brought to me at midnight three weeks from tonight at the west end of the island. He would pick up his pieces when he delivered the boat. He looked at the glass around him. We both knew it was worth a king’s ransom in any other Mediterranean city.

"I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out the mirrored ball. His eyes glazed over when he saw it. 'Three weeks from tonight at midnight. Don't be early, don't be late,' I said to him as I placed the ball in his hand.

"I completed a piece a night, every night until the night I left. The twenty pieces fit in five crates, which I hid in some underbrush at the shore. I had told my father and the other blowers that I was experimenting late at night. They grew used to seeing the furnace smokestack belching red embers into the night sky and usually left me alone. On my last night on the island, I stoked up the furnace as usual but left my tools in their racks. I sat on a high stool in front of the furnace's open frowning mouth and pulled on the rope that moved the bellows. The only possessions I had with me were my clothes, some small pieces of gold from the shop, and the journal I had kept through my seventeenth and eighteenth years.