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In Baden bonfires are still kindled in the churchyards on Easter Saturday, and ecclesiastical refuse of various sorts, such as candle-ends, old surplices, and the wool used by the priest in the application of extreme unction, is consumed in the flames. At Zoznegg down to about 1850 the fire was lighted by the priest by means of a flint which had never been used before.
I am drawing at a nice tallow-chandler's door, and to-day, for the first time had to go inside for rain. He was very courteous and nice, and warned me against running against the candle-ends or bottoms, as they were piled on the shelves, saying 'You must take care, you see, not to steal any of my candles' or 'steal from my candles, meaning not to rub them off on my coat.
He moved away from the window, shut it, lighted the candle, put on his waistcoat, his overcoat and his hat and went out, carrying the candle, into the passage to look for the ragged attendant who would be asleep somewhere in the midst of candle-ends and all sorts of rubbish, to pay him for the room and leave the hotel. "It's the best minute; I couldn't choose a better."
He often wished, for the look of the thing, that people would sometimes burn candles at his shrine; but as they had forgotten who he was it was not considered a profitable speculation to pay him that attention. "Candles would be more orthodox," said the Goblin. "More orthodox, certainly," agreed the Saint, "and the mice could have the ends to eat; candle-ends are most fattening."
So, when he returned into the bedroom, and, having fastened his box and a carpet-bag, put on his walking gaiters, and his great-coat, and his hat, and taken his stick in his hand, looked round it for the last time. Early on summer mornings, and by the light of private candle-ends on winter nights, he had read himself half blind in this same room.
Once back in his kennel, its door closed and bolted, Marcel was free to squirm out of the window and roam and range Paris at will. And it was thus that he came by most of his knowledge of the city. But for the most part Marcel preferred to lie abed and read himself half-blind by the light of purloined candle-ends.
There, bethinking himself that all the candle-ends he got by way of offertory in all the year were not worth the half of five crowns, himseemed he had done ill and repenting him of having left the cloak, he fell to considering how he might have it again without cost.
Though the corporal had been as good as his word in putting my uncle Toby's great ramallie-wig into pipes, yet the time was too short to produce any great effects from it: it had lain many years squeezed up in the corner of his old campaign trunk; and as bad forms are not so easy to be got the better of, and the use of candle-ends not so well understood, it was not so pliable a business as one would have wished.
He says: "We went to school even in the winter at seven in the morning, and three days a week remained till five in the afternoon; some artificial light was necessary, and this was effected by the primitive method of every boy bringing his own candle or candle-ends with any kind of candlestick he liked.
They were the first books I ever owned long, long before I could appreciate or even understand them. But at last I realized what a treasure they were. In my boyhood I read them by surreptitious candle-ends in the dead of the night, when the sense of crime added a new zest to the story. Perhaps you have observed that my "Ivanhoe" is of a different edition from the others.
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