‘And perhaps, Sir,’ said the vice, holding up his glass, and rising a little way off his seat and sitting down again, in token that he recognised and returned the compliment, ‘perhaps you will add to that condescension by telling us who Tom Grig was, and how he came to be connected in your mind with Francis Moore, Physician.’ ‘Hear, hear, hear!’ cried the lamplighters generally. ‘Tom Grig, gentlemen,’ said the chairman, ‘was one of us; and it happened to him, as it don’t often happen to a public character in our line, that he had his what-you-may-call-it cast.’ ‘His head?’ said the vice. ‘No,’ replied the chairman, ‘not his head.’ ‘His face, perhaps?’ said the vice. ‘No, not his face.’ ‘His legs?’ ‘No, not his legs.’ Nor yet his arms, nor his hands, nor his feet, nor his chest, all of which were severally suggested. ‘His nativity, perhaps?’ ‘That’s it,’ said the chairman, awakening from his thoughtful attitude at the suggestion. ‘His nativity. That’s what Tom had cast, gentlemen.’ ‘In plaster?’ asked the vice. ‘I don’t rightly know how it’s done,’ returned the chairman. ‘But I suppose it was.’ And there he stopped as if that were all he had to say; whereupon there arose a murmur among the company, which at length resolved itself into a request, conveyed through the vice, that he would go on. This being exactly what the chairman wanted, he mused for a little time, performed that agreeable ceremony which is popularly termed wetting one’s whistle, and went on thus: ‘Tom Grig, gentlemen, was, as I have said, one of us; and I may go further, and say he was an ornament to us, and such a one as only the good old times of oil and cotton could have produced. Tom’s family, gentlemen, were all lamplighters.’ ‘Not the ladies, I hope?’ asked the vice. ‘They had talent enough for it, Sir,’ rejoined the chairman, ‘and would have been, but for the prejudices of society. Let women have their rights, Sir, and the females of Tom’s family would have been every one of ’em in office. But that emancipation hasn’t come yet, and hadn’t then, and consequently they confined themselves to the bosoms of their families, cooked the dinners, mended the clothes, minded the children, comforted their husbands, and attended to the house-keeping generally. It’s a hard thing upon the women, gentlemen, that they are limited to such a sphere of action as this; very hard. ‘I happen to know all about Tom, gentlemen, from the circumstance of his uncle by his mother’s side, having been my particular friend. His (that’s Tom’s uncle’s) fate was a melancholy one. Gas was the death of him. When it was first talked of, he laughed. He wasn’t angry; he laughed at the credulity of human nature. “They might as well talk,” he says, “of laying on an everlasting succession of glow-worms;” and then he laughed again, partly at his joke, and partly at poor humanity.