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Here's a find from Ben Rapaport that he's uncovered in the piles of
reading sources... It's another bit of the Meerschaum experience.
http://books.google.com/books?pg=PA61&dq=meerschaum%20carving&ei=cGOrTMjRFoiksQOvstmeAw&ct=result&id=5YkCAAAAYAAJ&output=text
If that's not enough, then here's more from Ben's research...
A TALE OF THE MEERSCHAUM.
(From Day Dreams, by Ida Eckert Lawrence [The Robert Clarke Company, Cincinnati, 1900)
In seventeen hundred and twenty-three,
On a shoemaker's bench in Hungary,
There sat an old man with a curious knack
Of carving with such an artistic whack
That he won the love of a Count.
One day as Count Andrassy happened to roam
On a mission to Turkey, he brought with him home
A curious relic, a white, porous clay,
With no further value, he said, but that they
Presented it unto a Count.
So, languidly, lazily sauntering around,
He came to the shoemaker's place, underground;
Just dropped in awhile to gaze on his art
And cheer with a word his old tireless heart,
That always revived with the Count.
With jesting and chatting, the hours flew away,
At parting the Count gave Kowatee the clay—
His eyes twinkled merrily; now he would try
His long-pent-up artistic taste to descry
And divide up square with the Count.
The shoemaker toiled, in his old dingy room,
Thro' the hours of the twilight, the hours of the gloom—
And he puffed, and he puffed, with a sweet, pure delight—
The rest of the long but to him blissful night—
And he eagerly watched for the Count.
As he toiled with the thread and the wax the next day
He smoked his new pipe of the pure meerschaum clay,
And the wax from his hand o'er the meerschaum spread warm
Giving polish and sweetness—a typical charm—
And he gave a "meerschaum" to the Count.
Fred
reading sources... It's another bit of the Meerschaum experience.
http://books.google.com/books?pg=PA61&dq=meerschaum%20carving&ei=cGOrTMjRFoiksQOvstmeAw&ct=result&id=5YkCAAAAYAAJ&output=text
If that's not enough, then here's more from Ben's research...
A TALE OF THE MEERSCHAUM.
(From Day Dreams, by Ida Eckert Lawrence [The Robert Clarke Company, Cincinnati, 1900)
In seventeen hundred and twenty-three,
On a shoemaker's bench in Hungary,
There sat an old man with a curious knack
Of carving with such an artistic whack
That he won the love of a Count.
One day as Count Andrassy happened to roam
On a mission to Turkey, he brought with him home
A curious relic, a white, porous clay,
With no further value, he said, but that they
Presented it unto a Count.
So, languidly, lazily sauntering around,
He came to the shoemaker's place, underground;
Just dropped in awhile to gaze on his art
And cheer with a word his old tireless heart,
That always revived with the Count.
With jesting and chatting, the hours flew away,
At parting the Count gave Kowatee the clay—
His eyes twinkled merrily; now he would try
His long-pent-up artistic taste to descry
And divide up square with the Count.
The shoemaker toiled, in his old dingy room,
Thro' the hours of the twilight, the hours of the gloom—
And he puffed, and he puffed, with a sweet, pure delight—
The rest of the long but to him blissful night—
And he eagerly watched for the Count.
As he toiled with the thread and the wax the next day
He smoked his new pipe of the pure meerschaum clay,
And the wax from his hand o'er the meerschaum spread warm
Giving polish and sweetness—a typical charm—
And he gave a "meerschaum" to the Count.
Fred
