The several kinds of _burners_ are pierced or cut in such a way as to make the flame from the gas of different shapes, such as _fish tail_, _cock spur_, _star_, or _argand_, the names of which tell pretty well in what shape they appear. Small rooms are sometimes fitted with “telescopes” instead of chandeliers, the telescope being one tube sliding within another, and the space carefully filled with a properly adjusted cork or some other flexible and impervious substance. Bedrooms, and apartments where light is required at the walls or chimney pieces, are furnished with brackets, which either simply project from the wall, or are made with an arm moving on a ball and socket joint. The manufacture of the various portions of the apparatus used in gas fitting will be mostly found described under the trade of the Brassfounder. [Illustration] MANUFACTURE OF GAS. [Illustration: GASOMETERS.] Very few of the readers of this book will remember the appearance presented by London streets before the introduction of gas; when all the thoroughfares were darker than even the commonest streets are now, and the only light emanated either from the shop windows or from dim oil lamps, which the rain or the wind would frequently put out, even when they did not burn out of themselves for want of being trimmed and replenished. A century ago these oil lamps were quite insufficient to light even the main streets, and people who walked out at night generally hired a “link boy” to light them as they went, with a great flambeau of hemp and pitch, which smoked and smelt insufferably. The nobility and gentlefolks who rode in carriages were also attended by footmen with flambeaux of a better sort, and outside the doors of some of the oldest houses in London there may still be seen the great iron extinguishers attached to the railings, where the torch-bearers put out their lights till it was time to escort their masters and mistresses home. The poet Gay, who wrote the celebrated fables, describes the link boys, and gives them rather a bad character for so often being connected with the bands of thieves and footpads which infested London streets, and robbed people with impunity in the dark. He says:— “Though thou art tempted by the link man’s call, Yet trust him not along the lonely wall; In the midway he’ll quench the flaming brand, And share the booty with the pilfering band. Still keep the public streets, where oily rays, Shot from the crystal lamp, o’erspread thy ways.”