The nightlamp and the rushlight were for the comparatively luxurious. In the bedrooms of the cottager, the artisan, and the small tradesman, the infant at its mother's side too often awoke, like Milton's nightingale, "darkling"--but that "nocturnal note" was something different from "harmonious numbers." The mother was soon on her feet; the friendly tinder-box was duly sought. Click, click, click; not a spark tells upon the sullen blackness. More rapidly does the flint ply the sympathetic steel. The room is bright with the radiant shower. But the child, familiar enough with the operation, is impatient at its tediousness, and shouts till the mother is frantic. At length one lucky spark does its office--the tinder is alight. Now for the match. It will not burn. A gentle breath is wafted into the murky box; the face that leans over the tinder is in a glow. Another match, and another, and another. They are all damp. The toil-worn father "swears a prayer or two," the baby is inexorable; and the misery is only ended when the goodman has gone to the street door, and after long shivering has obtained a light from the watchman. In this, the beginning of our series of Illustrations of Cheapness, let us trace this antique machinery through the various stages of its production. The tinder-box and the steel had nothing peculiar. The tinman made the one as he made the saucepan, with hammer and shears; the other was forged at the great metal factories of Sheffield and Birmingham; and happy was it for the purchaser if it were something better than a rude piece of iron, very uncomfortable to grasp. The nearest chalk quarry supplied the flint. The domestic manufacture of the tinder was a serious affair. At due seasons, and very often if the premises were damp, a stifling smell rose from the kitchen, which, to those who were not intimate with the process, suggested doubts whether the house were not on fire. The best linen rag was periodically burnt, and its ashes deposited in the tinman's box, pressed down with a close fitting lid, upon which the flint and steel reposed. The match was chiefly an article of itinerant traffic. The chandler's shop was almost ashamed of it. The mendicant was the universal match-seller. The girl who led the blind beggar had invariably a basket of matches. In the day they were vendors of matches--in the evening manufacturers. On the floor of the hovel sit two or three squalid children, splitting deal with a common knife. The matron is watching a pipkin upon a slow fire. The fumes which it gives forth are blinding as the brimstone's liquifying. Little bundles of split deal are ready to be dipped, three or four at a time. When the pennyworth of brimstone is used up, when the capital is exhausted, the night's labor is over. In the summer, the manufacture is suspended, or conducted upon fraudulent principles. Fire is then needless; so delusive matches must be produced--wet splints dipped in powdered sulphur. They