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."

In a few years this ingenious man discovered the conditions upon which
he could earn his bread, by a skill which did not suffer under the
competition of united labor. He had made also a wooden clock. He carried
about his globe and his clock, and "began to pick up some money about
the country" by cleaning clocks. He became a skilled clock-cleaner. For
six-and-twenty years afterward he earned his bread as an artist. He then
became a scientific lecturer, and in connection with his pursuits, was
also a globe maker. His name may be seen upon old globes, associated
with that of Senex. The demand for globes must have been then very
small, but Ferguson had learned that cheapness is produced by
labor-saving contrivances. A pretty instrument for graduating lines upon
the meridian ring, once belonging to Ferguson, is in use at this hour in
the manufactory of Messrs. Malby and Son. The poor lad "who made a globe
in three weeks" finally won the honors and riches that were due to his
genius and industry. But he would never have earned a living in the
continuance of his first attempt to turn a ball out of a piece of wood,
cover it with paper, and draw a map o