"Dear me! Well, I suppose there is a
reason for everything," exclaimed the young
philosopher's mamma.

"What should you say, now," continued
Harry, "if I told you that the smoke that
comes out of a candle is the very thing that
makes a candle light? Yes; a candle shines
by consuming its own smoke. The smoke of
a candle is a cloud of small dust, and the little
grains of the dust are bits of charcoal, or
carbon, as chemists call it. They are made
in the flame, and burnt in the flame, and,
while burning, make the flame bright. They
are burnt the moment they are made; but
the flame goes on making more of them as
fast as it burns them; and that is how it
keeps bright. The place they are made in, is
in the case of flame itself, where the strongest
heat is. The great heat separates them from
the gas which comes from the melted wax,
and, as soon as they touch the air on the
outside of the thin case of flame, they burn."

"Can you tell how it is that the little bits
of carbon cause the brightness of the flame?"
asked Mr. Wilkinson.

"Because they are pieces of solid matter,"
answered Harry. "To make a flame shine,
there must always be some solid—or at least
liquid—matter in it."

"Very good," said Mr. Bagges,—"solid stuff
necessary to brightness."

"Some gases and other things," resumed
Harry, "that burn with a flame you can
hardly see, burn splendidly when something
solid is put into them. Oxygen and hydrogen
—tell me if I use too hard words, uncle—
oxygen and hydrogen gases, if mixed together
and blown through a pipe, burn with plenty
of heat but with very little light. But if
their flame is blown upon a piece of quick-
lime, it gets so bright as to be quite dazzling.
Make the smoke of oil of turpentine pass
through the same flame, and it gives the flame
a beautiful brightness directly."

"I wonder," observed Uncle Bagges, "what
has made you such a bright youth."

"Taking after uncle, perhaps," retorted his
nephew. "Don't put my candle and me out.
Well, carbon or charcoal is what causes the
brightness of all lamps, and candles, and
other common lights; so, of course, there is
carbon in what they are all made of."

"So carbon is smoke, eh? and light is owing
to your carbon. Giving light out of smoke,
eh? as they say in the classics," observed
Mr. Bagges.

"But what becomes of the candle," pursued
Harry, "as it burns away? where does it go?"

"Nowhere," said his mamma, "I should
think. It burns to nothing."

"Oh, dear, no!" said Harry, "everything—
everybody goes somewhere."

"Eh!—rather an important consideration
that," Mr. Bagges moralised.

"You can see it goes into smoke, which makes
soot for one thing," pursued Harry. "There
are other things it goes into, not to be seen by
only looking, but you can get to see them by
taking the right means, just put your hand
over the candle, uncle."

"Thank you, young gentleman, I had rather
be excused."

"Not close enough down to burn you, uncle;
higher up. There,—you feel a stream of hot
air; so something seems to rise from the
candle. Suppose you were to put a very long
slender gas-burner over the flame, and let the
flame burn just within the end of it, as if it
were a chimney,—some of the hot steam would
go up and come out at the top, but a sort of
dew would be left behind in the glass chimney,
if the chimney was cold enough when you put
it on. There are ways of collecting this sort
of dew, and when it is collected it turns out
to be really water. I am not joking, uncle.
Water is one of the things which the candle
turns into in burning,—water coming out of
fire. A jet of oil gives above a pint of water
in burning. In some lighthouses they burn,
Professor Faraday says, up to two gallons of
oil in a night, and if the windows are cold
the steam from the oil clouds the inside ot
the windows, and, in frosty weather, freezes
into ice."

"Water out of a candle, eh?" exclaimed
Mr. Bagges. "As hard to get, I should have
thought, as blood out of a post. Where does
it come from?"

"Part from the wax, and part from the
air, and yet not a drop of it comes either
from the air or the wax. What do you make
of that, uncle!"

"Eh? Oh! I'm no hand at riddles. Give
it up."

"No riddle at all, uncle. The part that
comes from the wax isn't water, and the part
that comes from the air isn't water, but when
put together they become water. Water is a
mixture of two things, then. This can be
shown. Put some iron wire or turnings into
a gun-barrel open at both ends. Heat the
middle of the barrel red-hot in a little furnace.
Keep the heat up, and send the steam of
boiling water through the red-hot gun-barrel.
What will come out at the other end of the
barrel won't be steam; it will be gas, which
doesn't turn to water again when it gets cold,
and which burns if you put a light to it. Take
the turnings out of the gun-barrel, and you will
flnd them changed to rust, and heavier than
when they were put in. Part of the water is
the gas that comes out of the barrel, the other
part is what mixes with the iron turnings, and
changes them to rust, and makes them
heavier. You can fill a bladder with the gas
that comes out of the gun-barrel, or you can
pass bubbles of it up into a jar of water
turned upside down in a trough, and, as I
said, you can make this part of the water
burn."

"Eh?" cried Mr. Bagges. "Upon my word!
One of these days, we shall have you setting
the Thames on fire."

"Nothing more easy," said Harry, "than