However, the Devil, who crosses and blesses himself at such treaties of peace, managed so to play his cards, that on this very day Siebenkæs chanced, in his reading, to come upon the touching anecdote of the younger Pliny's wife holding the lamp for her husband that he might see to write. And it occurred to him that, now that he was getting along so swimmingly with his selection from the said Devil's Papers, it would be a splendid arrangement, and save him many interruptions, if Lenette would snuff the candle always instead of his doing it himself. "Of course," said she, "I shall be delighted." The first fifteen or twenty minutes passed, and everything seemed to be all right. The above period having elapsed, he cocked up his chin towards the candle, by way of reminder to her to snuff it. Next, he gently touched the snuffers with the tip of his pen, with the like object, not saying anything however; and a little while after that, he moved the candlestick a little bit, and said softly, "The candle." Matters now began to assume a more serious aspect; he began to observe and watch with greater attention the gradual obscuration of his paper, and consequently the very snuffers which, in Lenette's hands, had promised to throw so much light on his labours, became the means of impeding his progress quite as effectually as the crabs did Hercules in his battle with the hydra. The two wretched ideas, "snuff" and "snuffers," took bodily shape, and danced hand in hand, with a sprightly pertness up and down on every letter of his most biting satires. "Lenette," he had soon to say again, "please to amputate that stupid black stump there, on both our accounts." "Dear me, have I been forgetting it?" she said, and snuffed it in a great hurry. Readers of a historical turn--such as I should wish mine to be--can now see that things couldn't but get worse and worse, and more and more out of joint. He had often to stop, making letters a yard or so in length, waiting till some beneficent hand should remove the black thorn from the rose of light, till, at length, he broke out with the word "Snuff!" Then he took to varying his verbs, saying, "Enlighten!" or "Behead!" or "Nip-off." Or he endeavoured to introduce an agreeable variety by using other forms of speech, such as "The candle's cap, Capmaker;" "There's a long spot in the sun again;" or, "This is a charming _chiaroscuro_, well adapted for night thoughts in a beautiful Correggio-night; but snuff away all the same."