dueña, employed to watch over her young mistress, being disturbed in the night, is obliged to take her candle, and go into the kitchen to light it; from whence we may suppose that it was the custom to keep the kitchen fire in all night. [Illustration: _No. 177. The Cellarer in a Panic._] [Illustration: _No. 178. Man with Lantern._] An old poem on the troubles of housekeeping, printed by M. Jubinal in his “Nouveau Recueil de Contes,” enumerates candles and a lantern among the necessaries of a household-- _Or faut chandeles et lanterne._ A manuscript of the thirteenth century in the French National Library (No. 6956) contains an illumination, which has furnished us with the accompanying cut (No. 178), representing a man holding a lantern of the form then in use, and lanterns are not unfrequently mentioned in old writers. It appears to have been a common custom, at least among the better classes of society, to keep a lamp in the chamber to give light during the night. In one of the fabliaux printed in Meon, a man entering the chamber of a knight’s lady, finds it lit by a lamp which was usually left burning in it-- _Une lampe avoit en la chambre,_ _Par costume ardoir i siaut._ In the English romance of “Sir Eglamour,” several lamps are described as burning in a lady’s chamber-- _Aftur sopur, as y yow telle,_ _He wendyd to chaumbur with Crystyabelle,_ _There laumpus were brennyng bryght._ We may suppose, notwithstanding these words, that a lamp gave but a dim light; and accordingly we are told in another fabliau that there was little light, or, as it is expressed in the original, “none,” in a chamber where nothing but a lamp was burning,-- _En la chambre lumiere n’ot,_ _Hors d’un mortier qu’iluec ardoit,_ _Point de clarté ne lor rendoit._ In the accompanying cut (No. 179), taken from an illumination in a manuscript of the fourteenth century, in the National Library in Paris (No. 6988), a nun, apparently, is arranging her lamp before going to bed. The lamp here consists of a little basin of oil, in which, no doubt, the wick floated; but the use of the stand under it is not easily explained. [Illustration: _No. 179. A Bedroom Chamber Scene._]