"A secret!" cried Mr. Bossle. "Every body, I thought, knew--at least every body in the drysaltery line understands--what glass is made of. Why, I can repeat the recipe given by Dr. Ure, from memory: To every hundred parts of materials, there are of pure sand forty-three parts; soda twenty-five and a half (by-the-by, we have some capital carbonate coming forward _ex_ Mary Anne, that we could let you have at a low figure); quick-lime, four; nitre, one and a half; broken glass, twenty-six. The doctor calculates, if I remember rightly, that of the whole, thirty parts of this compound run to waste in fusing so that seventy per cent. becomes, on an average, glass." "That is all very true," was the answer; "but our glass is, we flatter ourselves, of a much better color, and stands annealing better, than that made from the ordinary admixture: from which, however, ours differs but little--only, I think, in the relative quantities. In that lies the secret." Mr. Bossle expressed great anxiety to behold an individual who was possessed of a secret worth several hundreds a year, paid weekly. Romance invariably associates itself with mystery; and we are not quite sure from the awful way in which Mr. Bossle dropped his voice to a soft whisper, that he did not expect, on entering the chamber of pre-vitrified chemicals, to find an individual clothed like the hermit in "Rasselas," or mingling his "elements" with the wand of Hermes Trismegistus. He looked as if he could hardly believe his spectacles, when he saw a plain, respectable-looking, indifferent-tempered man, not a whit more awe-inspiring--or more dusty--than a miller on a market-day. We do not insinuate that Mr. Bossle endeavored to "pluck out the heart of the mystery," though nothing seemed to escape the focus of his spectacles. But, although here lay, in separate heaps, the sand and soda and saltpetre and lime and _cullet_, or broken glass; while there, in a huge trough, those ingredients were mixed up (like "broken" in a confectioner's shop) ready to be pushed through a trap to fill the crucible or stomach of the furnace; yet, despite Mr. Bossle's sly investigations, and sonorous inquiries, he left the hall of "elements" as wise as he had entered.