Oh, ye heads of families! and oh, ye thrifty, middle-aged bachelors, boarding with families, or growing mouldy by yourselves, never, while ye live, forget the terrible end of Stephen Curlew. And oh, ye heads of families—and oh, ye aforesaid bachelors, albeit ye have only one bottle left, never, NEVER NAIL UP THE WINE CELLAR! [Illustration] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration] RECOLLECTIONS OF GUY FAWKES “When a man has once been very famous for jests and merry adventures, he is made to adopt all the jests that want a father, and many times such as are unworthy of him.”—Motteux’s _Life of Rabelais_. AT midnight, on the fifth of November, in the year of grace one thousand six hundred and five, Guido Fawkes, “gentleman,” was discovered, “booted and spurred,” in the vicinity of St Stephen’s Chapel, having on his person “three matches, a tinder-box, and a dark lantern”; and purposing by means of gunpowder to blow up, says King James, “the whole nobility, the most part of the knights and gentry, besides the whole judges of the land, with _most of the lawyers_ and the whole clerks!” For the one indiscretion Guido Fawkes forfeited his gentility, and became a proverb of wickedness. In boyhood we looked upon Guido Fawkes, gentleman, as one little lower than the devil; he had four horns, and a dozen tails. “Years that bring the philosophic mind” have divested him of these excrescences and appendages, and Guido Fawkes now appears to matured charities merely a person of a singularly eccentric disposition. Some five and twenty years ago it was the patriotic custom of the authorities of an Isle of Sheppy dockyard to bestow upon their apprentices a few waggon-loads of resinous timber, that a bonfire worthy of the cause it celebrated might be kindled from the public purse—that the effigy of the arch-fiend Guy might be consumed in a fire three times hotter than the fire of a furnace. Such fierce liberality was not lost upon the townspeople; their ardour in the burning business smouldered not; every man subscribed his plank or log; and, from the commissioner in his uniform, to Bobby in his pinafore, the fifth of November glowed, in the calendar of their minds, a pillar of fire. For a month before that day, the coming anniversary busied the thoughts of boyish executioners, resolved to show their patriotism in the appointments of the Guy—in the grotesque iniquity of his face—in the cumbrous state of his huge arm-chair. To beg clothes from door to door was the business of every lover of Church and State. To ask for a coat—a pair of breeches—a shirt (the frill could be made of paper)—hose and hat, was not mendicity, but the fulfilment of a high social duty.