On the outskirts, he knocked at the door of a shanty, a log-built hut with earthen floor, such as the Mexican peasantry, and even their betters, often reside in; and in answer to a gruff challenge from within—for the inmates were in bed, or stretched on such pallets as served for beds—he returned an answer which seemed to satisfy the questioner, for after a little more gruff grumbling, the door was opened, and he was admitted. In answer to his inquiry, the gruff voice said: ‘No; nary drop of anything but water; ye kin have that. Your voice sounds all of a tremble, Absalom; and if ye don’t get shot over the cards or drown yourself, I guess ye won’t last long as a miner, anyhow.’ Absalom, as he was called, hesitated for a moment, as though about to say something in his defence, but eventually decided on making no reply to this rather unpleasant speech, and threw himself down on a buffalo skin which the other man pushed towards him. No further conversation took place, and the shanty was as dark and silent as were the remainder of the scattered dwellings on the outskirts of Flume City. CURIOSITIES OF THE ELECTRIC LIGHT. The first curiosity of the electric light was of course its discovery in 1802 by Humphry Davy, then an assistant-lecturer at the Royal Institution. With one of the new batteries which Volta had invented two years before, Davy was surprised to get a brilliant white light when the poles of the battery were joined through two pieces of carbon. Later on, his astonishment was increased when he found how intensely hot was this ‘arch’ of carbon light—the hottest known artificial source. ‘Platinum,’ he wrote, ‘was melted as readily as is wax in the flame of a common candle; quartz, the sapphire, magnesia, lime, all entered into fusion.’ Even the diamond swells out into a black mass in the electric arc, and carbon itself has been known to soften. Dr Siemens, as is well known, utilised this fervent heat to fuse metals in a crucible. With the arc from a dynamo capable of giving a light of five thousand candles, he fused fifteen pounds of broken files in as many minutes. Indeed, the temperature of the arc ranges from two thousand to five thousand degrees Centigrade. Another curiosity of the arc is that it can be shown in water or other liquids without quenching. Liquids have a diffusive action on the light; and a globule of fused oxide of iron between platinum wires conveying the current, produces a very fine golden light. The fused plaster of Paris between the carbons of the Jablochkoff candle also forms a brilliant source of light in the arc; as does the marble separator which answers the same purpose in the _lampe soleil_. Indeed, this white-hot marble, rendered luminous by the arc, gives out a mellow radiance so closely resembling sunshine as to give the lamp its name. Such a light is very suitable for illuminating picture-galleries.