It was during my infancy, if I am not mistaken, that there lived at Hampstead (a very unfit place for such a resident), a man whose name I suppress lest there should be possessors of it surviving, and who was a famous cock-fighter. He was rich and idle, and therefore had no bounds to set to the unhappy passions that raged within him. It is related of this man, that, having lost a bet on a favorite bird, he tied the noble animal to a spit in his kitchen before the fire, and notwithstanding the screams of the sufferer and the indignant cries of the beholders, whose interference he wildly resisted with the poker, actually persisted in keeping it there burning, till he fell down in his fury and died. Let us hope he was mad. What, indeed, is more probable? It is always a great good, when the crimes of a fellow-creature can be traced to madness; to some fault of the temperament or organization; some "jangle of the sweet bells;" some overbalance in the desired equipoise of the faculties, originating, perhaps in accident or misfortune. It does not subject us the more to their results. On the contrary, it sets us on our guard against them. And, meantime, it diminishes one of the saddest, most injurious, and most preposterous notions of human ignorance--the belief in the wickedness of our kind. But I have said enough of these barbarous customs. [From Household Words.] GLOBES, AND HOW THEY ARE MADE. One of the most remarkable of self-educated men, James Ferguson, when a poor agricultural laborer, constructed a globe. A friend had made him a present of "Gordon's Geographical Grammar," which, he says, "at that time was to me a great treasure. There is no figure of a globe in it, although it contains a tolerable description of the globes and their use. From this description I made a globe in three weeks, at my father's, having turned the ball thereof out of a piece of wood; which ball I covered with paper, and delineated a map of the world upon it, made the meridian ring and horizon of wood, covered them with paper, and graduated them; and was happy to find that by my globe (which was the first I ever saw) I could solve the problems." "But," he adds, "this was not likely to afford me bread."