"Should you?" replied the keeper. "Well, the sea is smooth, and we can all go easily in two boats.--James, you manage one, and I'll cap'n the other. It won't take more than twenty minutes to row there."
The two boats now commenced their journey.
The two boats from the lighthouse were quickly at the bell-buoy. It was a bell hung in a frame, which was swung by the waves. It was an object of deep interest to the visitors, and they lingered about it, and then rowed back to the lighthouse.
IX.
THAT OPEN BOOK.
Toby Tolman, keeper of the light at Black Rocks, sat by the kitchen stove in this lighthouse on the frothing, stony rim of the sea. He liked the seclusion of this kitchen in the strong rock tower. He liked to hear the steady beating of the clock--"tick, tick, tick, tick." He liked the feeling, too, of the warm fire, and especially on this cool, windy day. True it was August, but then the wind was blowing from the north-west as if from an ice-floe up in Alaska, and the air was chilly. As he glanced out of either of the two windows--the deep recessed windows in the kitchen--he saw a cold, angry sea broken up into little waves, each seeming to carry a white snow-flake of the size of the crest of the wave. The distant ships, too, had a cold look, as if they also were snowflakes.
"A cool day," thought the light-keeper; "and the fire feels good."
While he was in the kitchen Dave was up in the watch-room, hunting in the little library for a history he meant to read, in accordance with a plan suggested by the keeper, "a little every day, and to keep at it."
Mr. Tolman had a book in his lap--"The best book in the world," he said to himself. It was his big-print Bible, and especially did he rejoice in that sense of protection, its promises give on days like this, when he heard the wind rushing and storming at the window, suggestive of the wild tempests that might blow any hour.
Just this moment the keeper was not reading. He was thinking, and the Bible was the occasion of his meditation about Dave Fletcher.