d "information" to the vulgar, has been, we flatter ourselves,
successfully imitated in our articles on the Stars and the Thermometer.
They are by writers engaged expressly for the respective subjects,
because they will work cheaply and know but little of what they are
writing about, and therefore make themselves the better understood by
the equally ignorant. We do hope that they have not proved themselves
behindhand in popular humbug and positive error, and that the blunders
in "the Thermometer"[3] are equally as amusing as those of the then
big-wig who wrote the treatise on "Animal Mechanics," published by our
rival Society for Diffusing Useful Knowledge.

[3] One of these blunders the author must not be commended for; it is
attributable to a facetious mistake of the printer. In giving the
etymology of the Thermometer, it should have been "measure of _heat_,"
and not "measure of _feet_." We scorn to deprive our devil of a joke so
worthy of him.

Another of their methods for obtaining cheap knowledge it is now our
intention to adopt. Having got the poorest and least learned authors we
could find (of course for cheapness) for our former pieces of
information, we have this time engaged a gentleman to mystify a few
common-place subjects, in the style of certain articles in the "Penny
Cyclopaedia." As his erudition is too profound for ordinary
comprehensions--as he scorns gain--as the books he has hitherto
published (no, privated) have been printed at his own expense, for the
greater convenience of reading them himself, for nobody else does
so--as, in short, he is in reality a cheap-knowledge man, seeing that
he scorns pay, and we scorn to pay him--we have concluded an engagement
with him for fourteen years.

The subject on which we have directed him to employ his vast scientific
acquirements, is one which must come home to the firesides of the
married and the bosoms of the single, namely, the art of raising a
flame; in humble imitation of some of Young's Knights' Thoughts, which
are directed to the object of lightening the darkness of servants,
labourers, artisans, and chimney-sweeps, and in providing guides to the
trades or services of which they are already masters or mistresses. We
beg to present our readers with

PUNCH'S GUIDE TO SERVICE;

OR,

[Illustration: THE HOUSEMAID'S BEST FRIEND.]

CHAPTER 1.

ON THE PROCESS AND RATIONALE OF LIGHTING FIRES.

Take a small cylindrical aggregation of parallelopedal se