Bell-Founders of the Given-Over Casting-Pit — an age of a river-delta bell-guild whose masterworks are cast in a great sunken clay pit, and the Founder-of-Record is the one who rides the pour: harnessed by a waxed hemp cradle above the mould so she can read the flow of molten bronze as it fills, her whole apprenticeship spent learning to HOLD the cradle-line steady against the rising heat-column that boils up out of the pit; but the craft's true rite is the one appointed slackening at the brim-instant, when the mould is full and she lets the cradle-rope run so the thermal up-draft off the cooling bronze catches her heavy casting-robes and lifts her clear of the glowing lip — and this Founder is caught in the first three heartbeats of the going-up, no longer bracing over the pour but rising through the copper-lit air, the finished bell singing its first cooling note beneath her