The next day this was dropped in the post-office:--
"DEAR DAVE,--I saw your lantern, I know. Did you hang it out? Your friend, BART."
Dave answered this in person within a week.
"I'm having a holiday," he said to granny--"off for a day--and thought I would call. I want you, please, to say for me to Bart I got his note, and that I did hang out my lantern the night that he looked for it."
"Now, did you ever see sich a boy? He has been up every night to look for that lantern, and he says he feels easier if he don't see it."
"You tell him not to worry. We are very comfortable. A person might live there a century and nothing happen to them."
Notwithstanding this assertion about the safety of century-serving keepers, Bart would sometimes steal out in the dark and climb the bare, lonely hill. Then he would search the black horizon.
"There's the reg'lar light," he would say, "but I don't see anything more. All right!"
XV.
THE STORM GATHERING.