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FIRE IN THE EARTH
pensive. There was not then, as there is not today, any duty on rough stones, but this didn't help, since you cannot sell rough stones to the public. So Mr. Baumgold and his two sons, Louis, now the president of the firm, and Jack, who is treasurer, went about hiring cutters for their own firm. After the 1905 depression they were able to get a few, and by 1915, scarce as they were in this country at that time, they were employing thirty cutters.
Today they have two plants, the one in West 47th Street employing nearly 100 expert cutters of the large-size stones, and another modern plant in East 45th Street which expects soon to be employing upward of 300 apprentice cutters. As you begin the tour of the main plant you first are shown a batch of rough stones that have just been received by ordinary mail from Europe or South Africa. They are ugly-looking things with less attraction than an ordinary marble.
Then you are taken into the sorting, marking, and cleaving room. There you find the superintendent of the factory, an assistant, the cleaver who has come in to per­form a special job, and two or three girls who are engaged in sorting the stones and registering their classifications in ledgers. The superintendent has just finished studying a 4-carat stone and has decided it must be cleaved. He has had another alternative: to saw it. But the initial and funda­mentally important step is to make certain whether the piece is sufficiently well shaped to saw or to cleave. Nowadays, in the first operation, most cutting is done by sawing. But once in a while the first step found necessary is to cleave (or split) the diamond. You saw against the grain, just as you would against the grain of a log; you cleave with the grain, just as you would split a log with an ax.
The piece is carefully examined in order to determine
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