Pat the Lighthouse Boy

by Evelyn Everett-Green

But Jim's words troubled him rather. He didn't like to think that Jim did not think about God too. He didn't see how he could help it in his long lonely night-watches. Pat knew very well that he should be frightened of the loneliness and the darkness if he wasn't quite sure that God would take care of him somehow, though how He did it the child was not at all certain. He went off on this train of thought now; and instead of answering Jim's remark, or asking him why he had not heard or thought about God for many years, he looked up into his face in a meditative fashion, and said, slowly and reflectively—

"I think He must send the angels to fly about the lighthouses at night and keep them safe. Mother says perhaps the stars are the angels' eyes looking down at us; and don't you think it feels like as if there were angels flying all about here? I think perhaps they like to dip their big beautiful white wings in the moonlight, like the sea-gulls. I almost think I can feel them flying round; it seems like as if there was a sound of wings in the air!"

"May be, little master, may be," answered Jim, without much interest in his face and tone. "If there be anything of that sort about the place, I make no doubt you would be the one to hear and see it."

Pat did not quite know what these muttered words might mean, nor could he get Jim to talk to him or sustain his share in the conversation. In point of fact, the talk grew very broken and disjointed, for the night air blowing on his face made the child very sleepy, and Jim was never one to speak by himself. How that night's adventure ended Pat never knew. He seemed soon to be flying all round the lighthouse on a pair of beautiful white wings, and trying to coax Jim, who stood on the gallery watching, to come and fly with him too. But Jim, though he had wings too, did not seem to have any wish to use them, and only stood still watching his companion, and refusing to trust himself to the flight to which Pat urged him, and the child was just trying to make him believe that it would all be right if he would only believe, when he felt a hand upon his head, and a voice said in his ear—

"Little son, little son, it is time you were waking, honey. The day has begun hours ago, and I can't find your clothes anywhere. Where did you put them when you took them off, Pat?"

Pat opened his eyes to find that he had no beautiful wings after all, and that he was just in his own bed, covered up very snug and warm, but when he threw off the bed clothes, there he found himself all dressed in those very clothes for which his mother had been hunting everywhere.

"Why, whatever does it mean?" cried Eileen, "the child has been walking in his sleep. Saints preserve us! but if he takes to that in this place it's never a wink of quiet sleep I will get!"

"Oh, mother, it was not in my sleep!" cried Pat, remembering all the adventure now. "I was wide awake. I wanted to see the big lamp alight, and I went up, and Jim let me sit with him, and he wrapped me up in his coat by-and-by, and took me out on to the gallery. And I suppose I must have gone to sleep there, and he must have brought me back to bed and wrapped me up like that. Mother, Jim is a very kind man. He isn't a bit like what I thought; I'm going to have him for a friend. I think by-and-by he will like me perhaps. I like him very much. He was very kind last night."

"Well, if anybody can come at his heart, it will be the child," thought Eileen, whose own advances had been steadily rejected and ignored. She was sorry for the lonely man with the sad history, and was a little afraid of him too; but when she whispered a word of her fear to her husband, Nat stoutly declared it was "all right." Pat could do as he liked, and make what advances he chose. The worst that could happen would be that Jim would turn a deaf ear to him. He would never harm the child. He was not that sort. There were stories against him, it was true; but nothing they need fear as regards their own child. Nat was not troubled with a vivid imagination, and Eileen had long learnt to subdue her fears when her husband told her she was frightening herself about nothing. She would be glad enough to lighten the dreary lot of "Surly Jim," and watched with some curiosity the advances of Pat towards him.