two men holding a fresh, impatient steed that was to bear him further on. The transfer of rider and mailbag was made in the twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eager pair, and were out of sight before the spectator could get hardly a ghost of a look. 5. Both horse and rider went "flying light." The rider's dress was thin and he was cumbered with no waste of cloth. Weight and bulk were economized in everything he wore. He carried no arms; he carried nothing that was not absolutely necessary, for even the postage on his literary freight was five dollars a letter. 6. His horse was stripped of all unnecessary weight, too. He wore light shoes or none at all. The little flat mail pockets strapped under the rider's thigh would each hold about the bulk of a child's primer. They held many and many an important business chapter and newspaper letter, but these were written on paper as airy and thin as gold-leaf, so as to be packed in the smallest space. 7. The pony-rider traveled about two hundred and fifty miles a day. There were about eighty pony riders in the saddle all the time, night and day, stretching in a long scattering line from Missouri to California, forty flying eastward and forty toward the west, and among them making four hundred gallant horses do wondrous work. 8. We had a burning desire from the beginning, to see a pony rider, but somehow or other all that passed us, and all that we met, managed to streak by in the night. We heard only a whiz and a hail, and the swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out of the window. 9. But now we were expecting one along every moment, and would see him in broad daylight. Presently the driver exclaims, "Here he comes!" and every neck is stretched further, and every eye strained wider. Away across the dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky, and we can see that it moves! 10. In a second or two, it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling, sweeping toward us nearer and nearer, and coming plainer into view, till soon the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear. In another instant a whoop and a hurrah from the upper deck of our coach, a wave of the rider's hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm. MARK TWAIN. LESSON II, HOW LAMP-CHIMNEYS ARE MADE. PART FIRST. Spacious, roomy. Ärched, curved. TH Pōrt'-hōles, holes made in the Di ăm ́e ter, a straight linə HE old gentleman led the way into a spacious building, full of strange lights and flames and human life. Furnaces were glowing; men and boys were at work before the fires, or darting to and fro. Some were blowing fiery bubbles, which put to shame all the soap-bubbles in the world. 2. Others were shaping the glowing metal; there were noises like the reports of pocket pistols, and sounds of clanging iron, where boys were occupied in knocking off cold glass from the ends of iron rods into small sheet-iron carriages. Altogether the scene was so dazzling and confusing, that Lawrence at first thought there was little chance of his learning any more about glass-making than he already knew. 3. First, one had a bubble, then another had it; then it had disappeared, and the man who, as he thought, had it, was quietly at work upon a lamp-chimney or a goblet, while he knew no more how he came by it than if it had been produced by magic. 4. It seemed to him that these men and boys, common as they were in personal appearance, must be true sorcerers in the disguise of ordinary humanity, so deftly and yet indifferently did they move about in this scene of wonder, working spell-like transformations with a substance which is usually associated in our minds with all that is frail, brittle, and unmanageable. This illusion dissolved, however, when he noticed that a man with a pug nose, who was carelessly shaping some object of crystalline splendor, had a pipe in his mouth! 5. He counted four separate furnaces. Two were on one side, and seemed to be merely large ovens with flaming mouths. These, he was told, were the leers where the newly-made glass-ware was annealed. Then, near each end of the building, standing by the great chimneys, like dwarfs beside giants, were two small, round furnaces, blazing at several mouths, called "glory-holes." At these men and boys were constantly beating and reheating articles of glass to be worked. 6. The great chimneys themselves looked like circular brick towers, with port-holes of fire. Into the port-holes men were thrusting iron rods, and taking out lumps of melted metal. 7. These masses of melted metal were shaped on tables or blown into globes, or dropped into moulds. These, then," he thought, "are the big furnaces; and those port-holes must be the necks of the melting pots." A workman took his long iron pipe-it was, perhaps, five feet long and an inch in diameter-and thrust one end of it into the neck of a pot and commenced turning it, which process is called, "gathering." 8. When the workman had got what he judged to be a sufficient quantity of the melted ore on the end of the iron-it was a lump somewhat larger than a butternut he took it out and rolled it on a small polished iron table, which the old gentleman said was a marver. 9. The workman having reduced the soft lump to a shape suitable for his purpose, put the other end of the pipe to his lips and began to blow. Lawrence, watching him closely, could see a little bubble of air push out into the lump, which at the same time began to swell into a bulb. 10. He continued to blow, and the lump continued to expand. Now he held it down near the floor, and swung it gently to and fro. Still he kept blowing at intervals, and increasing its size, while the motion stretched it until it had become a larger bulb with a long neck. 11. Then he touched the end to the ground, to prevent it from expanding further in that direction; in the meanwhile the thin glass of the neck had become cool, and ceased to enlarge; so that now, when he blew again, the thicker and softer glass of the sides of the bulb swelled out into a more spherical form. LESSON III. HOW LAMP-CHIMNEYS ARE MADE. PART SECOND. Trans pâr'ent, clear. light. Con vinced', satisfied by Pre ĕm'i nent ly, with supe riority over others. Lūʼrid, glowing with a murky In'stry ment, that by which proof. Process, series of acts; opera tion. Lathe, a turning machine for shaping wood or metal. TH work is done; a tool. Sim'i lar, nearly like. Ex changed', one taken in place of the other. In sert'ed, put within. HE metal was now shaped something like a small gourd, hanging by its straight stem from the end of the pipe, and the glass which had been at a white. heat at first, had become transparent at the neck, and a dull, lurid red in the bulb. The workman now took an instrument in his hand and pinched the thick, soft glass at the end of the bulb into a button, like a blow at the end of a gourd. 2. All this was done in scarcely more than a minute's time, and Lawrence was amused to observe that the blower, while producing these magical effects, had never once taken his clay pipe from his mouth. 3. "How can you blow and smoke at the same time?" he asked, as the man stood twirling his glass gourd in the air, waiting for a boy to come and take it. "I should think you would blow the smoke and tobacco out of your pipe." 4. "O, I just clasp my tongue over the end of it, and stop the hole when I blow," was the answer. A |