“Where do they go?”
“O they drop on the hills but ye can never find ’em.”
“Don’t Heaven ever?”
“What, drop down! no,” said Mr. Tincler, “it don’t. I have not heard of it doing that, but maybe it all just stoops down sometimes, Faylix, until it’s no higher than the crown of your hat. Let us be going home now and ye’ll see something this night.”
“What is it?”
“Wait, Faylix, wait!”
As they crossed from the hill Mary drawing down the blinds signalled to them from the window.
“Come along, Felix,” she cried, and the child ran into the darkened room. Upon the table was set a little church of purest whiteness. Kevin had bought it from an Italian hawker. It had a wonderful tall steeple and a cord that came through a hole and pulled a bell inside. And that was not all; the church was filled with light that was shining through a number of tiny arched windows, blue, purple, green, violet, the wonderful windows were everywhere. Felix was silent with wonder; how could you get a light in a church that hadn’t got a door! then Mary lifted the hollow building from the table; it had no floor, and there was a night-light glowing in one of her patty-pans filled with water. The church was taken up to bed with him in the small chamber next his parents’ room and set upon a bureau. Kevin and Mary then went off to the “bit of devilment” in the town gardens. Felix kept skipping from his bed, first to gaze at the church, and then to lean out of the window in his nightshirt, looking for the lamplighter who would come to the street lamp outside. The house was the very last, and the lamp was the very last lamp, on one of the roads that led from the town and thence went poking out into the steady furze-covered downs. And as the lamp was the very last to be lit darkness was always half-fallen by the time the old man arrived at his journey’s end. He carried a pole with a brass tube at one end. There were holes in the brass tube showing gleams of light. The pole rested upon his shoulders as he trudged along humming huskily.
“Here he is,” cried Felix, leaning from the window and waving a white arm. The dull road, empty of traffic and dim as his mother’s pantry by day, curved slightly, and away at the other end of the curve a jet of light had sprung suddenly into the gloom like a bright flower bursting its sheath; a black figure moved along towards him under the Orphanage wall. Other lamps blossomed with light and the lamplighter, approaching the Tinclers’ lamp, thrust the end of his pole into the lantern, his head meanwhile craning back like the head of a horse that has been pulled violently backwards. He deftly turned the tap; with a tiny dull explosion that sounded like a doormat being beaten against the wall in the next street the lamp was lit and the face of the old man sprang into vague brilliance, for it was not yet utterly dark. Vague as the light was, the neighbouring hills at once faded out of recognition and became black bulks of oblivion.
“Oi.... Oi....” cried the child, clapping his hands. The old man’s features relaxed, he grunted in relief, the pole slid down in his palm. As the end of it struck the pavement a sharp knock he drew an old pipe from his pocket and lit it quite easily although one of his hands was deficient of a thumb and some fingers. He was about to travel back into the sparkling town when Felix called to him: