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Wax-tapers, to throw their soft, luxurious light on my lady's delicate face, as she lies like a beautiful piece of marble-work on her dreamy couch; shaded lamps for the grave merchant, the virtual king of the present, as he sits in his still office, ruling nations by bale and bond, and guiding the tide of events by invoices and ship's papers; Palmer's candles, under green pent-houses, for students and authors, whose eyes must withstand a double strain; the mild house-light, with a dash of economy in the selection, whether of oil, sperm, long-fours, or short-sixes, for the family group; the white camphene flame for the artist: strange mechanisms for the curious; the flaunting brilliancy of the coloured chandeliers and cut-glass shades for our English Bedouins in the gin-palace; the flaring jet of the open butchers' shops; the paper-lantern of the street-stalls; the consumptive dip of the slop-worker; the glimmering rush-light for the sick-room; the resin torch for the midnight funeral: these, and countless other inventions not to mention the universal gas assert man's disinclination to transact his life in the dark, or to bound his powers by the simple arrangements of nature.
Now and again we picked up the faint glimmer of a house-light, or heard the rasp and rend of a cultivator being played across the fields, but Northern Illinois as a whole was one inky, apparently uninhabited, waste of high, forced woods. Only our illuminated map, with its little pointer switching from county to county as we wheeled and twisted, gave us any idea of our position.
But it had a peculiar quality of its own, even as the house-light would be tinged with yellow when the stars are cold and white. A small and distant sound, and yet it cut through the crashing of the storm more and more clearly; someone rode through the rain whistling. "It's him!" gasped Haw-Haw Langley. "My God A'mighty, Mac, he's whistlin'! It ain't possible!"
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