riginally a
verb--to snite the candle, or put it out. In the inventory of property
of John Gager, of Norwich, in 1703, appears "One Snit."

Snuffer-boats or slices were snuffer-trays. Another curious illuminating
appurtenance was called a save-all or candle-wedge. It was a little
frame of rings or cups with pins, by which our frugal ancestors held up
the last dying bit of burning candle. They were sometimes of pewter with
iron pins, sometimes wholly of brass or iron. They have nearly all
disappeared since new and more extravagant methods of illumination
prevail.

The argand lamps of Jefferson's invention and the various illuminating
and heating contrivances of Count Rumford must have been welcome to the
colonists.

The discomfort of a colonial house in winter-time has been ably set
forth by Charles Francis Adams in his "Three Episodes of Massachusetts
History." Down the great chimneys blew the icy blasts so fiercely that
Cotton Mather noted on a January Sabbath, in 1697, as he shivered before
"a great Fire, that the Juices forced out at the end of short billets of
wood by the heat of the flame on which they were laid, yett froze into
Ice on their coming out." Judge Sewall wrote, twenty years later, "An
Extraordinary Cold Storm of Wind and Snow. Bread was frozen at Lords
Table.... Though 'twas so Cold yet John Tuckerman was baptized. At six
oclock my ink freezes so that I can hardly write by a good fire in my
Wives Chamber"--and the pious man adds (we hope with truth) "Yet was
very Comfortable at Meeting." Cotton Mather tells, in his pompous
fashion, of a cold winter's day four years later. "Tis Dreadful cold, my
ink glass in my standish is froze and splitt in my very stove. My ink in
my pen suffers a congelation." If sitting-rooms were such refrigerators,
we cannot wonder that the chilled colonists wished to sleep in beds
close curtained with heavy woollen stuffs, or in slaw-bank beds by the
kitchen fire.

The settlers builded as well as they knew to keep their houses warm; and
while the vast and virgin forests supplied abundant and accessible wood
for fuel, Governor Eaton's nineteen great fireplaces and Parson
Davenport's thirteen, could be well filled; but by 1744 Franklin could
write of these big chimneys as the "fireplace of our fathers;" for the
forests had all disappeared in the vicinity of the towns, and the
chimneys had shrunk in size. Sadly did the early settlers need warmer
houses, for, as all antiquarian