advantageous: he further said, that as the vein of the mine with which I
had made him acquainted turned out better than he expected, he had added
the value of fifty guineas more than my annuity; and that if I would go
to Mr. Ramsden's, mathematical instrument maker, in Piccadilly, I should
receive all he had ordered to be ready for me. At Mr. Ramsden's I found
ready to be packed up for me two small globes, siphons, prisms, an
air-gun and an air-pump, a speaking trumpet, a small apparatus for
showing the gases, and an apparatus for freezing water. Mr. Ramsden
informed me that these were not all the things Mr. R---- had bespoken;
that he had ordered a small balloon, and a portable telegraph, in form
of an umbrella, which would be sent home, as he expected, in the course
of the next week. Mr. Ramsden also had directions to furnish me with a
set of mathematical instruments of his own making. 'But,' added he
with a smile, 'you will be lucky if you get them soon enough out of my
hands.' In fact, I believe I called a hundred times in the course of a
fortnight upon Ramsden, and it was only the day before the fleet sailed
that they were finished and delivered to me.

"I cannot here omit to mention an incident that happened in one of my
walks to Ramsden's: I was rather late, and was pushing my way hastily
through a crowd that was gathered at the turning of a street, when a
hawker by accident flapped a bundle of wet hand-bills in my eyes, and
at the same instant screamed in my ears, '_The last dying speech and
confession of Jonathan Clarke, who was executed on Monday, the 11th
instant._'--Jonathan Clarke! The name struck my ears suddenly, and the
words I shocked me so much that I stood fixed to the spot; and it was I
not till the hawker had passed by me some yards, and was beginning with
'_The last dying speech and confession of Jonathan Clarke, the Cornwall
miner_,' that I recollected myself enough to speak: I called after the
hawker in vain: he was bawling too loud to hear me, and I was forced to