Why, Mr. Asmodeus, you frighten me! What! Mr. Brown and Mrs. Smith?--My dear Madam, I mentioned no names, did I? But you may be sure that expensive candles are burned in houses where you think gas only is used. How do you know how Jones lights his house? I don't mean the parlor, where you and Mrs. Asmodeus display the family jewels on grand occasions, and where Mrs. Jones exhibits the splendor of her beauty and the radiance of her smiles. That is gas,--bright, beaming, brilliant gas. What else should irradiate the loving tenderness which unites Mr. and Mrs. Jones on such occasions? You don't suppose that Jones is goose enough to show his decayed home-grown fruit to you, when he invites you to sup with him in that frescoed dining-room? He picks out the rosy-cheeks for your entertainment; and the sour grapes, the spotted pomes, the mildewed berries are tucked away up-stairs. Now you are not invited into that store-room. You are, in fact, jealously kept out of it. Let us creep round the corner and look up at that window, now the company is all gone. You see a light there, don't you? Do you know what is burning? Is it gas, or oil, or kerosene, or spermaceti, or wax, or tallow? You will never know, Mrs. G.; for Jones trims that light himself. Bridget never saw it yet. Strange, isn't it, that Jones, a rich man, with plenty of servants, should humble himself to such a menial occupation? My own impression is, that he uses a candle in that room, and has paid so high a price for it that he doesn't dare to trust any one else with it.
There are many such lighted windows; and who knows the game that is going on behind the curtain? _Va-lent-ils la chandelle?_ When Pinxit looks around on the accumulating canvases gathering dust in his unfrequented studio, and thinks of the dreams which gave fairy tints to his palette, that none else could perceive,--when he feels that his genius is unacknowledged, and his toil in vain,--when he sees Dorb's crudities in every window, and Dorb's praises in the "Art-Journals," while Pinxit is starving unknown,--doesn't he take down the old saw from his easel, and try its edge over his proud, swelling heart? When Scripsit, who has dipped his pen in his soul to inscribe those glowing lines which were to bear him up and set him across the golden spire of the pinnacle of Fame, and whose fine frenzy has as yet given him but a scurvy mundane support, when Scripsit brings home his modest rasher, and finds, on unfolding it, that it is wrapped in the unsold sheets of his last lyric,--doesn't he think that the tallow which helped him to pen the thoughts in the midnight watches was the costliest of _feu sacré_? When Senator Patriota sits brooding over the speech which has carried the opposition against him, and sees his honorable friend slipping into the place he has manoeuvred for at the expense of manliness, truth, consistency, and honesty, does he not conjugate the verb _valoir_ negatively? When Madame Favorita has made her last curtsy for the night behind the foot-lights, has thrown off her tawdry frippery, and sits in her lonely chamber, glowering at the image of the young rival who has won all the applause,--when she bemoans her waning charms and the wearisome life which has lost its sparkle, and sees its emptiness and hollowness,--does she not look wistfully at that little flame which flickers on her hollowing cheek, from which the stage-blush has been washed, and think the game a losing one? The Senator lives near by, and that is Madame's room over the way. Did not Cæsar have a candle that he bought of Brutus? And how many Mesdames have cursed the name of Mademoiselle!