goblins as he went; and, curfew being struck, he
found no light but that he travelled in throughout the township.

Closely following on this epoch of migratory lanthorns in a world of
extinction, came the era of oil-lights, hard to kindle, easy to
extinguish, pale and wavering in the hour of their endurance. Rudely
puffed the winds of heaven; roguishly clomb up the all-destructive
urchin; and lo! in a moment night re-established her void empire, and
the cit groped along the wall, suppered but bedless, occult from
guidance, and sorrily wading in the kennels. As if gamesome winds and
gamesome youths were not sufficient, it was the habit to swing these
feeble luminaries from house to house above the fairway. There, on
invisible cordage, let them swing! And suppose some crane-necked general
to go speeding by on a tall charger, spurring the destiny of nations,
red-hot in expedition, there would indubitably be some effusion of
military blood, and oaths, and a certain crash of glass; and while the
chieftain rode forward with a purple coxcomb, the street would be left
to original darkness, unpiloted, unvoyageable, a province of the desert
night.

The conservative, looking before and after, draws from each
contemplation the matter for content. Out of the age of gas lamps he
glances back slightingly at the mirk and glimmer in which his ancestors
wandered; his heart waxes jocund at the contrast; nor do his lips
refrain from a stave, in the highest style of poetry, lauding progress
and the golden mean. When gas first spread along a city, mapping it
forth about evenfall for the eye of observant birds, a new age had begun
for sociality and corporate pleasure-seeking, and begun with proper
circumstance, becoming its own birthright. The work of Prometheus had
advanced by another stride. Mankind and its supper-parties were no
longer at the mercy of a few miles of sea-fog; sundown no longer emptied
the promenade; and the day was lengthened out to every man's fancy. The
city-folk had stars of their own; biddable, domesticated stars.

It is true that these were not so steady, nor yet so clear, as their
originals; nor indeed was their lustre so elegant as that of the best
wax candles. But then the gas stars, being nearer at hand, were more
practically efficacious than Jupiter himself. It is true, again, that
they did not unfold their rays with the appropriate spontaneity of the
planets, coming out along the firmament, one after another, a