Alas! for the patent Excavator, neither it nor Tom’s genius could separate the particles. An action was brought against him for obstructing the river front, as soon as it was found he was not backed by government, and was backing himself, out of his contracts. Tom coolly replied, “that he was devilish sorry, the _Patent Steam Sand Excavator and Elevator_ had not been originally designed to run on land, as it might be used, now, to shovel it back again; but as for himself, he had been thrown so high by the Elevator, that it was doubtful if he would ever come down, in time to attend to it.” I know another gentleman of the quill—who perpetrated errors of the press of this sort—who, in addition to instructing mankind, took it into his head to teach the hens something that nature never knew. An invention of some gigantic Yankee genius, styled “_The Patent Chicken Hatcher, and Grand Cluck to the whole Commonwealth_” was irresistible, and he bought it. It was demonstrated upon paper, that a certain number of chickens, ate but a given quantity of corn-meal. That any number of hens laid any number of eggs. That these produced any number of chickens, which, in a very short period of time, sold for any amount of money, or produced other eggs, after eating the aforesaid corn-meal. Now the “Chicken Hatcher,” proposed to improve upon nature by a sort of double rule of three proposition, and to show the result by logarithms as a sort of short-hand process, in the arithmetical progression of profits. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” and she had therefore given up half the argument to the Hatcher—for the proposition was, to keep the hens continually at work, producing eggs for the Hatcher; while the Hatcher was continually working for them, in a sort of compound ratio producing chickens which should go on laying eggs to produce other chickens, _ad infinitum_. The thing was as plain as the nose on your face. To reason about it was to be absurd. To doubt, was to be scorned. Barbecues looked cheap and plentiful in perspective—roasts abundant, but rather more of a delicacy, as interfering somewhat more with progressive profits.