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Western Reserve. With the ancient matches in the studio are also two old pioneer tinder boxes with flints and steels. The tinder boxes are made of tin and contain a lot of baked rags. The inside lid acts as an extinguisher with which to cover up the punk or tinder in the box after you have lighted the candle in the tin lid of the box (Fig. 32).

      The matches we use today are evolved from these old sulphur spunks. When the writer was a little fellow up in the Western Reserve on the shores of Lake Erie, he was intensely interested in an old lady making sulphur matches. Over the open fire she melted the sulphur in an iron kettle in which she dipped the ends of some pine slivers. The sulphur on the end of the sticks was then allowed to cool and harden. These matches were about the length of a lead pencil and could only be lighted by thrusting the sulphur into the flame. So, although having been born in the age of Lucifer matches, the writer was yet fortunate enough to see manufactured and to remember the contemporary ancestors of our present-day "safety" match.

      The Real Lucifer Match

      That is, the match which lights from friction, is the invention of Isaac Holden, M. P. According to the Pall Mall Gazette, Mr. Holden said, "In the morning I used to get up at 4 o'clock in order to pursue my studies, and I used at that time the flint and steel, in the use of which I found very great inconvenience. Of course, I knew, as other chemists did, the explosive material that was necessary in order to produce instantaneous light, but it was very difficult to obtain a light on wood by that explosive material, and the idea occurred to me to put sulphur under the explosive mixture. I did that and showed it in my next lecture on chemistry, a course of which I was delivering at a large academy."

      Because every real woodsman is a student, as well as a sentimentalist, a brief history is given of these fire implements to entertain him as we jog along the "trace." All these things are blazes which mark the trail to the button in our wall which now produces the electric light. Some of them, like the clay cylinders found in the ruins of Babylon, are only useful in a historical sense, but many of them are essentially practical for woodcraft.

      How to Make a Chucknuck

      The slow match or punk rope to fit in the brass cylinder may be made of candle wick or coach wick purchased at the hardware store; such wick is about three-eighths of an inch in diameter. Scout Commissioner John H. Chase of Youngstown, Ohio, suggests that the rope may be made from the wastes of a machine shop or a garage; but one of the best woodsmen I know is Mr. Frederick K. Vreeland, and he uses the apparatus shown by Fig. 34, which is made of the yellow fuse rope, or punk rope, which may be purchased at cigar stores. He fastens a cork in one end of the rope by a wire, he pulls the other end of the rope through the end of the brass cartridge shell which has been filed off for that purpose. The end of the fuse rope must be charred, so as to catch the spark. To get the spark he takes the back of the blade of his knife (Fig. 35), and strikes the bit of flint as you would with flint and steel, holding the charred end of the punk against the flint, as shown by the diagram (Fig. 29). Loose cotton and various vegetable fibers twisted into a rope soaked in water and gunpowder will make good punk when dry.

      To Get the Spark

      Place the charred end of the rope on the flint, the charred portion about one thirty-second of an inch back of the edge of the flint where the latter is to be struck by the steel; hold the punk in place with the thumb of the left hand, as in the diagram (Fig. 29). Hold the knife about six inches above at an angle of about forty-five degrees from the flint, turn your knife so that the edge of the back of the blade will strike, then come down at an angle about thirty-five degrees with a sharp scraping blow. This should send the spark into the punk at the first or second blow. Now blow the punk until it is all aglow and you are ready to set your tinder afire. Push the punk into the middle of a handful of tinder and blow it until it is aflame, and the deed is done!

      All these pocket contrivances for striking fire were formerly known as "striker-lights" or "chucknucks."

      A Substitute for Flint and Steel

      The Malays having neither flint nor steel ingeniously substitute for the flint a piece of broken chinaware, and for the steel a bamboo joint, and they produce a spark by striking the broken china against the joint of the bamboo, just as we do with the flint and steel.

      FOOTNOTE:

       Table of Contents

      [C] Today flint may be obtained at Bannermans, 501 Broadway, New York City, where they also have ancient steels which were used by the U. S. soldiers. The flints may also be purchased from Wards Natural Science Establishment at Rochester, New York, and the author found a plentiful supply of flints at one of the Army and Navy stores in New York.

CHAPTER III

       HOW TO BUILD A FIRE

       Table of Contents

       HOW TO LAY AND LIGHT A FIRE

       AN EXPERIENCE WITH TENDERFEET

       MODERN FEAR OF DOING MANUAL LABOR

       MATCHES

       FIRE-MAKERS AND BABYLONIANS

       THE PALPITATING HEART OF THE CAMP

       GUMMY FAGOTS OF THE PINE

       HOW TO MAKE A FIRE IN WET WEATHER

       BACKWOODSMEN'S FIRE

       THE NECESSITY OF SMALL KINDLING WOOD

       GOOD FIREWOOD

       ADVANTAGE OF SPLIT WOOD

       FIRE-DOGS

       HOW TO OPEN A KNIFE

       HOW TO WHITTLE; HOW TO SPLIT A STICK WITH A KNIFE

       BONFIRES AND COUNCIL FIRES

       CAMP MEETING TORCH FIRES

       EXPLODING STONES

       CHARACTER IN FIRE

       SLOW FIRES, SIGNAL FIRES AND SMUDGES

      CHAPTER III

       HOW TO BUILD A FIRE

       "By thy camp-fire they shall know thee."

      A party of twenty or thirty men once called at the author's studio and begged that he would go with them on a hike, stating that they intended to cook their dinner out-of-doors. We went on the hike. The author asked the gentlemen to collect the wood for the fire; they did so enthusiastically and heaped up about a quarter of a cord of wood. There was no stick in the pile less than the thickness of one's arm, and many as thick as one's leg. A fine misty rain was falling and everything was damp. While all the other hikers gathered around, one of them carefully lighted a match and applied it to the heap of damp cord wood sticks. Match after match he tried, then turned helplessly to the writer with the remark, "It won't light, sir," and none there saw the humor of the situation!

      Had anyone told the writer that from twenty-five to thirty men could be found, none of whom could build a fire, he would have considered the statement as highly improbable, but if he had been told that any intelligent man would try to light cord wood sticks, wet or dry, by applying a match to them, he would have branded the story as utterly beyond belief. It is, however, really astonishing how few people there are who know how to build a fire even when supplied

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