Excerpt.....Thrusting his tousled head through the trap-door, Miles made his third and last inspection for the night. Fierce yellow light flooded the glass cage; against the panes, like restless, irritated snowflakes, a few belated moths fluttered in ... Read more

Excerpt.....Thrusting his tousled head through the trap-door, Miles made his third and last inspection for the night. Fierce yellow light flooded the glass cage; against the panes, like restless, irritated snowflakes, a few belated moths fluttered in vain. The circular base of the lamp cast downward a shadow so black as almost to appear a solid supporting cone. At the edge of this Miles reared his shoulders higher. Under the blue flannel shirt their weary movement was that of a sleepy boy; but his thin, dark face shone grave as a man’s. He sniffed the familiar smell of oil and hot brass, and glanced perfunctorily; the lamp burned as bright as it had three hours ago, at midnight, or as it would burn three hours hence, at sunrise,—with the same provoking virtue that made his nocturnal rounds a waste of labor and sleep. “Some one has to,” he said aloud. “Burn away, Beast!” With this customary good-night, he clattered downstairs, locked the lighthouse door, caught up his lantern, and went whistling along the narrow path by the river. From below, to the left, stole the salt coolness of seaweed bared at low tide,—a sharp aroma that set him wide awake. From above, over a black phantom hill, peered Orion’s red shoulder-star. Hurtling shadows of undergrowth before his lantern rose magnified, parted in rout, wheeled slowly, fell prostrate and infinitely prolonged. The grass fringe of his smooth-beaten trail gleamed with a pearly rime of autumnal dew. “Nearly frost to-night,” thought the boy. He raced down into a steep gully, drummed across a little foot-bridge, took by scrambling assault the other bank, and on the crest, suddenly, as their black wall yawned to engulf him, entered a low grove of pines and cedars. The cold wet bristles bedewed his hands, as he skipped along, now scuffing loudly on a worn ledge, now over a stretch of wet touch-wood, the full, fern-bordered length of a vanished log, that made him advance silent as a ghost. A ghost—he often thought of that, for now came the one mild excitement. Three times every night, his grandfather’s unofficial deputy, he tramped this triangular beat, downhill, along the shore between the two fixed lights, uphill again to the farmhouse. At first a lark, this tramp had in the last year become dull monotony; his score, penciled in the back of his beloved atlas, showed over a thousand tours, on which nothing ever happened; and yet now and then, as he neared the Admiral’s deck, he felt the childhood presentiment that just ahead something would appear. Usually a nameless emotion, faint and swiftly obliterated, it came now, in the early morning darkness, almost as the pristine thrill. Less