hand, and asked him why he had not made more?  He replied, ‘it was all the lead I could find.’  She then commanded her daughter to bring a parcel of lead which lay in the closet, and giving it to the Chymist, desired him to transmute it into gold on the morrow.  He undertook it, and the next day brought her an ingot which weighed two ounces, which with the utmost solemnity he avowed was the very individual lead she gave him, transmuted to gold.

She began now to engage him in serious discourse; and finding by his replies, that he wanted money to make more powder, she enquired how much would make a stock that would maintain itself?  He replied, one fifty pounds after nine months would produce a million.  She then begged the ingot of him, which he protested had been transmuted from lead, and flushed with the hopes of success, hurried to town to examine whether the ingot was true gold, which proved fine beyond the standard.  The lady now fully convinced of the truth of the empyric’s declaration, took fifty pounds out of the hands of a Banker, and entrusted him with it.

The only difficulty which remained, was, how to carry on the work without suspicion, it being strictly prohibited at that time.  He was therefore resolved to take a little house in another county, at a few miles distance from London, where he was to build a public laboratory, as a professed Chymist, and deal in such medicines as were most vendible, by the sale of which to the apothecaries, the expence of the house was to be defrayed during the operation.  The widow was accounted the housekeeper, and the Dr. and his man boarded with her; to which she added this precaution, that the laboratory, with the two lodging rooms over it, in which the Dr. and his man lay, was a different wing of the building from that where she and her little daughter, and maid-servant resided; and as she knew some time must elapse before any profit could be expected, she managed with the utmost frugality.  The Dr. mean time acted the part of a tutor to miss, in Arithmetic, Latin, and Mathematics, to which she discovered the strongest propensity.  All things being properly disposed for the grand operation, the vitriol furnace was set to work, which requiring the most intense heat for several days, unhappily set fire to the house; the stairs were consumed in an instant, and as it surprized them all in their first sleep, it was a happy circumstance that no life perished.  This unlucky accident was 300 l. loss to Mrs. Thomas:  yet still the grand project was in a fair way of succeeding in the other wing of the building.  But one misfortune is often followed by another.  The next Sunday evening, while she was reading to, and instructing her little family, a sudden, and a violent report, like a discharge of cannon was heard; the house being timber, rocked like a cradle, and the family were all thrown from their chairs on the ground.  They looked with the greatest amazement on each other, not guessing the cause, when the operator pretending