AGE OF FUSEES. 285 
ashes in his thick-skinned palm, that ‘massa? ma i 
cigar! Or the travelling peddler or tinker, who, ae 
by the way-side, patiently wooes the sun with a ‘burning- 
glass’ till his tobacco ignites, or uses with equal prudence 
and skill the ancient but inimitable tinder-box. 
_ “But this is the age of Fusees. What a name! When 
in our youth, those longitudinal strips of tinder, semi-divided 
BRINGING A LIGHT, 
into innumerable transverse slips, all tipped with harmless, 
ignitable matter, first assumed the title, we had little notion 
of the atrocities which would come to be dignified by their 
name. This was soon after the world had been delighted by 
the Congreves, which drove Lucifer to the wall, and before 
English and German ingenuity had taught us to find ‘death’ 
in the box, as well as ‘the pot.’ The innocent old fusee had 
his faults, certainly. He would not always light; he hada 
bad habit of turning back on your finger-nail and. burning its 
quick when you struck him; and he would occasionally light 
up, all by himself, and set fire to fifty of his fellows in your 
waist-coast pocket, or the tail of your best dress-coat. (Those 
were the days when waist-coats were gorgeous and tail-coats 
immense.) But what were these peccadilloes compared with 
the sins of the modern ‘cigar-light?’ ‘Fusees,’ forsooth! 
More like bomb-shells, military mines, torpedoes, and nitro- 
glycerine trains. Who has not had them explode in his eye, 
