“Nothing is more true,” replied he.  “These stones are common to the earth and to the moon; and some of those which have been so carefully analyzed by your most celebrated chemists, and pronounced different from any known mineral production of the earth, were small fragments of a very common rock in the mountains of Burma.  In our first voyages we had taken some of them with us as ballast; and those which we first threw over, we afterwards learnt from the public journals, fell in France, some of the others fell in India, but the greater number in the ocean.  Those which have fallen at other times, have been real fossils of the moon, and either such stones as this I hold in my hand, or such metallic substances as are repelled from that body, and attracted towards the earth; and it is the force with which they strike the earth, which first suggested the idea of a thunder-bolt.

“Our party were greatly amused at the disputations of a learned society in Europe, in which they undertook to give a mathematical demonstration that they could not be thrown from a volcano of the earth, nor from the moon, but were suddenly formed in the atmosphere.  I should as soon believe that a loaf of bread could be made and baked in the atmosphere.”

Finding that our landlord prided himself on his interior management, as well as on that without doors, we expressed a wish to see some of his household improvements.  He readily consented, and conducted us at once into his kitchen, and showed us inventions and contrivances out of number, for saving fuel, and meat, and labour; in short, for saving every thing but money.  The large room into which he carried us, appeared as a vast laboratory, from the infinite variety of pots, pans, skillets, knives, forks, ladles, mortars, sieves, funnels, and other utensils of metal, glass, pottery, and wood.  The steam which he used for cooking, was carried along a pipe under a succession of kettles and boilers, descending in regular gradation, by which a great saving of fuel was effected; and, to perfect this part of the apparatus, the pipe could be removed, to give place to one of the size suited to the occasion.

His seven-guest pipe was now in use.  The wood, which was all cut to the same length, and channelled out to admit the free passage of the air, was then duly placed in the stove, and set on fire; but the heat not passing very readily through all the sinuosities of the pipe, he ordered his head cook to screw on his exhauster.  The man, in less than ten minutes, unscrewed a plate at the farther end, and fixed on an air-pump, made for the purpose, on which the door of the stove suddenly slammed to.  Our host saw the accident, and hurrying to open the stove, fell over a heap of channelled logs, and cut a gash in his forehead.  The cook ran to help him up; and after he was on his legs, and his forehead wiped, the stove was opened, when the fire, which had been deprived of its aliment, was entirely extinguished.