By the fireside, in health and disease, and in the separations and contingencies of family life, we must look for the drawbacks which our great-grandfathers had to put up with during that remarkable period which closed and opened the two centuries, when great changes ever seemed on the eve of being born, yet ever eluded the grasp of the reformer. What a sluggish, silent, nerveless world, it must have been as we now think! On the other side of the cloud, which shut out the future, were most of the contributories to the noisy current of our modern life--from express trains and steam hammers to lucifer matches and tram cars! Steel pens, photographs, postage stamps, and even envelopes, umbrellas, telegrams, pianofortes, ready-made clothes, public opinion, gas lamps, vaccination, and a host of other things which now form a part of our daily life, were all unknown or belonged to the future. But there were a few other things which found a place in the home which are not often met with now--the weather-house (man for foul weather and woman for fine)--bellows, child's pole from ceiling to floor with swing, candlestick stands, chimney pot-hook, spinning wheel, bottle of leeches, flint gun, pillow and bobbins for lace, rush-lights, leather breeches, and a host of other things now nearly obsolete. In the better class houses there was a grandfather's clock, and possibly a "windmill" clock, but in many villages if you could not fix the time by the sun "you might have to run half over the village to find a clock." One of the primal fountains of our grandfathers' domestic comforts was the tinder-box and flint and steel. Without this he could neither have basked in the warmth of the Yule-log nor satisfied the baby in {74} the night time. But even this was not sufficient without matches, and, as Bryant and May had not been heard of, this article was made on the spot. In Royston, as in other places, matches were made and sold from door to door by the paupers from the Workhouse, by pedlars driving dog carts, or by gipsies, and the trade of match-makers obtained the dignified title of "Carvers and Gilders." At by-ways where a tramp, a pedlar, or a pauper, did not reach, paterfamilias, or materfamilias, became "carver and gilder" to the household, and made their own matches. In one case I find the Royston Parish Authorities setting up one of the paupers with a supply of wood "to make skewers and matches to sell." [Illustration: TINDER-BOX, FLINT, STEEL, AND MATCHES.]