I now conclude, submissively craving “a word and a blow” from any of the readers or writers of the Irish Penny Journal who may be able to give them to me in the shape of facts or fancies likely to lend to the full solution of a question which has been for years my torment, namely--“What makes men blow?” G. D. * * * * * HEAPING UP WEALTH.--It is often ludicrous as well as pitiable to witness the miserable ends in which the heaping up of wealth not unusually terminates. A life spent in the drudgery of the counting-house, warehouse, or factory, is exchanged for the dignified ease of a suburban villa; but what a joyless seclusion it mostly proves! Retirement has been postponed until all the faculties of enjoyment have become effete or paralysed. “_Sans_ eyes, _sans_ teeth, _sans_ taste, _sans_ everything,” scarcely any inlet or pulsation remains for old, much less new pleasures and associations. Nature is not to be won by such superannuated suitors. She is not intelligible to them; and the language of fields and woods, of murmuring brooks, mountain tops, and tumbling torrents, cannot be understood by men familiar only with the noise of crowded streets, loaded vans, bustling taverns, and postmen’s knocks. The chief provincial towns are environed with luckless pyrites of this description, who, dropped from their accustomed sphere, become lumps and dross in a new element. Happily their race is mostly short; death kindly comes to terminate their weariness, and, like plants too late transplanted, they perish from the sudden change in long-established habits, air, and diet. * * * * *