Pat the Lighthouse Boy

by Evelyn Everett-Green

For a moment it came into the child's head to wonder whether Jim was going to throw him over the gallery rail and into the sea, and he shut his eyes tight, and breathed a little prayer. But something in the strong clasp in which he was held stilled this fear almost before it had taken shape, and the next minute the child wonderingly opened his eyes and gazed with awe at the scene before him.

It did not seem dark now, for the silver moon rode high in the sky, and though the sea beneath looked black in places, there was a great track of silver light right across it where the moonlight lay, and sometimes a white sea-bird would fly athwart the silver track, and for that moment its beautiful white wings seemed to shine like silver too. The little plashing waves below were tipped and crested with phosphorescent light, and broke against the reef in a thousand ripples of molten silver. The whole world seemed as if it had been turned into ebony and silver, and the child looked and looked, drinking in the wonderful beauty, which was beyond his powers of comprehension.

He forgot all the questions he had meant to ask; he forgot the puzzle about the sun and its setting and rising; he could think of nothing but the strange majestic beauty of the summer night, and looking up into Jim's dark face, he wondered if it looked the same to him.

He was beautifully snug and warm wrapped up, and held close and safely. There was nothing to mar his happiness and wonder. He gazed, and gazed, and gazed again, till at last his confused thoughts found vent in words.

"I can't think how He thought of it!"

"Who thought of what, little master?" asked Jim, who had now found his tongue, and did not seem indisposed to use it more freely.

"Why, God to be sure," answered the child reverently. "You know that God made everything; and before He made it He'd have to think of it, and know what it would look like; and I can't think how He did!"

"I don't seem to know much about that," said the man, as Pat looked up at him as if for a suggestion. "It's a many years since I heard the name of God spoke—except to swear by," he added as an afterthought.

Now Pat knew very well what swearing sounded like, for he had heard a great deal too much of it in his small life. But his mother had always taught him to shun those people who used bad words, and he had never heard an oath pass his father's lips. He had been brought up to read his Bible, and to learn as much of the meaning of it as his mother was able to teach him. Neither his father nor his mother were able to do much more than read and write. They had not much education, and were ignorant of a great deal that they would have liked to know. But they were devout and simple-minded Christian folks, and had carefully trained their little boy in all they knew themselves. If Nat had something of the stern Puritan element in his creed, Eileen on her part had the vivid imagination and burning devotion of her warm-hearted race, and Pat had inherited much of her temperament, though not without some of his father's hard-headed shrewdness. Pat had begun to feel as though this lighthouse must be wonderfully near to God—much nearer than the crowded court where he had lived before. It seemed to him often as though God must be looking straight down out of heaven at the Lone Rock, and that there was nothing to come between Him and it, to hinder Him from seeing everything. So the child had got into the habit of thinking a great deal more than before of God; and it seemed very natural to think of Him to-night, with the great dome of star-spangled sky above, and the limitless black sea below, with the shining pathway across it that might be leading straight to heaven.