Some lively French writer, whose name has quite escaped us, once wrote a vivid sketch, entitled, "_L'Homme Rouge_," or "The Red Man." There was an under-plot of sentiment in the story, we well remember, but the great feature of the romance was, that whenever there was a fire to happen in any part of Paris, whether by accident or design, there suddenly appeared "_L'Homme Rouge;_" sometimes in the midst of a party of revelers at a masked-ball; sometimes surprising nuns at their devotions, and not unfrequently where crime was hatching, or unnatural orgies making night hideous. But he was a good, benevolent deity, and always came to warn against or to suppress conflagration. Such, it would appear, and without fable, hereafter, will be the man who can command the great "Fire-Annihilator," which is making such a sensation, and proving so unerringly effective in England. A man, bearing one of these easily-carried machines, enters his blazing domicil, all a-glow with a bright flame, which is curling its forked tongues around every thing which resists its progress, and touching a spring, a cloud of smoke-like vapor issues forth, before which the flame flickers, grows pale, and at once fades entirely out, and the conflagration is stopped. It has been tested in so many instances, that its success is now considered wholly infallible. A company for the sale of the "Annihilator" has been formed in this country, the "central bureau" of which is in New York, the president being Hon. Elisha Whittlesey, of the American Congress. The age of rail-roads, magnetic telegraphs, and fire-exterminators, will signalize this era as one of the most remarkable in the world's history. * * * * * Seneca complains that the ancients had compelled him to borrow from them what they would have taken from him, had he been lucky enough to have preceded them! "Every one of my writings," says Goethe, in the same candid spirit, "has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand different things: the learned and the ignorant, the wise and the foolish, infancy and old age have come in turn, generally without having the least suspicion of it, to bring me the offering of their thoughts, their faculties, their experience. Often have they sowed the harvest I have reaped. My works are an aggregation of human beings, taken from the whole of nature." It is in the power of any writer, says a commentator upon this passage, to be original, by deserting nature, and seeking the quaint and the fantastical. "When I was a young man," says Goldsmith, "being anxious to distinguish myself, I was perpetually starting new propositions; but I soon gave this over, for I found that generally what was new was false." * * * * *