Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/223

 out; but what might she not thus have shut in? Clasping her hands about her throbbing temples, "I must not faint," she said mentally; "no, I must not—I must not, and I will not!"

Fully aware that in this terrible emergency she had no one but herself to depend upon, she summoned up all her resolution, and creeping with fearful and uncertain steps in the direction of the fire-place, she groped blindly about for the means of procuring a light.

In those early times, the dangerous but efficient lucifer matches, which we bless and anathematize almost in the same breath, had never been thought of, and thousands who now in moments of need or terror obtain an instantaneous light by a mere scratch upon the wall, have never realized the blessing of this much-abused invention. At the close of the seventeenth century, and long afterward, it was a work of time, skill, and patience to gain a light; and now Mrs. Browne, having found her tinder-box, and secured the necessary apparatus of flint and steel, began to strike a light; but her trembling hands,