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Updated: June 10, 2025
The beautiful fireworks, with their streams of coloured fire; the crackling of the squibs; the gorgeous catherine-wheels and the coloured Roman candles; the great rockets that shoot up into the air with a swish, leaving behind them a long tail of golden fire, and then burst into showers of stars all these may be seen on the fifth of November; and if you are really lucky children, there will follow the great bonfire, with barrels of tar poured over it to make the flames roar upward.
And then comes evening and benediction, and the fireworks, without which the procession would go for nothing, catherine-wheels spinning in the Piazza, and big crackers bursting amidst a chorus of pretty outcries of terror and delight. Delight however ends with the festa, and the parting of the morning is a strange contrast in its sadness with this Sunday joy.
Let's see how it feels to be blind. Dick shut his eyes, and flaming commas and Catherine-wheels floated inside the lids. Yet when he looked across the Park the scope of his vision was not contracted. He could see perfectly, until a procession of slow-wheeling fireworks defiled across his eyeballs. 'Little dorglums, we aren't at all well. Let's go home. If only Torp were back, now!
Dick could not sleep that night, partly for pure joy, and partly because the well-known Catherine-wheels inside his eyes had given place to crackling volcanoes of many-coloured fire. 'Spout away, he said aloud.
We filled our hats and pockets with crackers and Catherine-wheels, piled the rest into one great heap, threw a dozen or so of lighted fusees into the midst of them, and just as the voices of our pursuers were growing momentarily louder and nearer, darted away again down a fresh turning, and saw the river gleaming at the end of it.
Knowing that they are masses of solid or liquid fire, we are tempted to see in them gigantic Catherine-wheels, the fireworks of the gods. What is their relation to the stars? In the first place, their mere existence has provided a solid basis for the nebular hypothesis, and their spiral form irresistibly suggests that they are whirling round on their central axis and concentrating.
Tom meanwhile, joyous at heart, warm in temperature, and excited in mind, was groping on his knees on the damp grass outside the drawing- room window, fixing his two threepenny Roman candles in reversed flower pots, and planting his starlights, crackers, and Catherine-wheels in advantageous positions in the vicinity, casting now and again a delighted glance at the animated scene within, and wondering if he had ever spent a jollier evening anywhere.
Upon their return to headquarters, men were covering the front with sheets of coral limestone, two balls having passed through the house in the interval. Mataafa sat within, over his kava bowl, unmoved. The picture is of a piece throughout: excellent courage, super-excellent folly, a war of school-children; expensive guns and cartridges used like squibs or catherine-wheels on Guy Fawkes's Day.
But the most useful of all volcanic productions is native sulphur, in which Mount Etna has been very prolific. It is to this mountain chiefly, therefore, that we are indebted for our beautiful fire-works our squibs, crackers, Roman candles, serpents, Catherine-wheels, and sky-rockets. Would it had produced nothing more harmful than these!
One of the Catherine-wheels was also prevailed upon to give a few languid rotations on its axis, and some of the squibs, which had unfortunately got damp, condescended, after being inserted bodily into the lantern, to go off.
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