The tone in which the Johnsonian "Sir" was let off, left no doubt of it. Though a small man, the reader was what his favorite writer would have denominated a Stentor, and what the modern school would call a Stunner. When he re-opened the book and began to read, the words smote the ear as if they had been shot out of the mouth of a cannon. To give additional effect to the rounded periods of his author, he waved his arm in the air at each turn of a sentence, as if it had been a circular saw. "Who," he recited, "when he saw the first sand or ashes, by a casual intenseness of heat, melted into a metalline form, rugged with excrescences, and clouded with impurities, would have imagined, that in this shapeless lump lay concealed so many conveniences of life, as would in time constitute a great part of the happiness of the world? Yet by some such fortuitous liquefaction was mankind taught to procure a body at once in a high degree solid and transparent, which might admit the light of the sun, and exclude the violence of the wind: which might extend the light of the philosopher to new ranges of existence, and charm him at one time with the unbounded extent of the material creation, and at another with the endless subordination of animal life; and, what is yet of more importance, might supply the decays of nature, and succor old age with subsidiary sight. Thus was the first artificer in glass employed, though without his own knowledge or expectation. He was facilitating and prolonging the enjoyment of light, enlarging the avenues of science, and conferring the highest and most lasting pleasures; he was enabling the student to contemplate nature, and the beauty to behold herself. This passion for--" "Blackwall, gents! Blackwall, ladies! Boat for Gravesend!" We should, unquestionably, have been favored with the rest of the ninth number of the "Rambler" (in which the fore-going passage occurs) but for these announcements. "There is one thing, however," said the little man with the loud voice, as we walked from the platform to the pier, "which I can _not_ understand. What does the illustrious essayist mean by the 'fortuitous liquefaction' of the sand and ashes. Was glass found out by accident?" Luckily, a ray of school-day classics enlightened a corner of our memory, and we mentioned the well-known story, in Pliny, that some Phoenician merchants, carrying saltpetre to the mouth of the river Belus, went ashore; and, placing some lumps of the cargo under their kettles to cook food, the heat of the fire fused the nitre, which ran among the sand of the shore. The cooks finding this union to produce a translucent substance, discovered the art of making glass.