“No—I mean my uncle. Now, I’ll blow the candle out, like Moses; not to be in the dark, though, but to see into what it is. Look at the smoke rising from the wick. I’ll hold a bit of lighted paper in the smoke, so as not to touch the wick. But see, for all that, the candle lights again. So this shows that the melted wax sucked up through the wick is turned into vapour; and the vapour burns. The heat of the burning vapour keeps on melting more wax, and that is sucked up too within the flame, and turned into vapour, and burnt, and so on till the wax is all used up, and the candle is gone. So the flame, uncle, you see, is the last of the candle, and the candle seems to go through the flame into nothing—although it doesn’t, but goes into several things, and isn’t it curious, as Professor Faraday said, that the candle should look so splendid and glorious in going away?” “How well he remembers, doesn’t he?” observed Mrs. Wilkinson. “I dare say,” proceeded Harry, “that the flame of the candle looks flat to you; but if we were to put a lamp glass over it, so as to shelter it from the draught, you would see it is round,—round sideways, and running up to a peak. It is drawn up by the hot air; you know that hot air always rises, and that is the way smoke is taken up the chimney. What should you think was in the middle of the flame?” “I should say, fire,” replied Uncle Bagges. “Oh, no! The flame is hollow. The bright flame we see is something no thicker than a thin peel, or skin; and it doesn’t touch the wick. Inside of it is the vapour I told you of just now. If you put one end of a bent pipe into the middle of the flame, and let the other end of the pipe dip into a bottle, the vapour or gas from the candle will mix with the air there; and if you set fire to the mixture of gas from the candle and air in the bottle, it would go off with a bang.” “I wish you’d do that, Harry,” said Master Tom, the younger brother of the juvenile lecturer. “I want the proper things,” answered Harry. “Well, uncle, the flame of the candle is a little shining case, with gas in the inside of it, and air on the outside, so that the case of flame is between the air and the gas. The gas keeps going into the flame to burn, and when the candle burns properly, none of it ever passes out through the flame; and none of the air ever gets in through the flame to the gas. The greatest heat of the candle is in this skin, or peel, or case of flame.” “Case of flame!” repeated Mr. Bagges. “Live and learn. I should have thought a candle-flame was as thick as my poor old noddle.” “I can show you the contrary,” said Harry. “I take this piece of white paper, look, and hold it a second or two down upon the candle-flame, keeping the flame very steady. Now I’ll rub off the black of the smoke, and—there—you find that the paper is scorched in the shape of a ring; but inside the ring it is only dirtied, and not singed at all.” “Seeing is believing,” remarked the uncle.