Pat the Lighthouse Boy

by Evelyn Everett-Green

"Perhaps He would if you were going to Him," said Pat reflectively. "I don't know if He would for anything else. You see, He'd said 'Come' to Peter, and so he could do it, until he got frightened and forgot the Lord had called him. Mother says that was why he began to sink—because he'd begun to think about himself, instead of trusting it all to Jesus. If he were to say 'Come' to you, Jim, and you were to go out to meet Him, I expect it would be all right. But He don't seem to call folks in that sort of way now."

New experiences were becoming common enough in Pat's life now, but he never forgot one curious sight which he was once called up from his bed to see in the middle of the night. He had gone to bed amid an unusual tumult of sound—moaning wind and dashing spray, and sometimes such a bang as a great wave struck the wall of the tower—that for some time he could scarcely get off to sleep, seasoned though he was to such sounds.

Then, in the middle of the night, he was awakened by Jim coming to fetch him, and when he was once fairly awake, he was delighted to hurry into his warm suit of weather-proof clothes, and follow Jim upstairs, for he thought that the time had surely come when the services of the third man were required, and very grand and important he felt to occupy that proud position.

But it was not quite what he thought, after all; for though his father was on watch as well as Jim whilst the storm raged round the lighthouse, there was nothing very much to be done, save to see that the light burned brightly, and Pat wondered for a moment why he had been summoned.

"Jim said you'd like to see the birds, sonny," said his father, taking him in his strong arms, and holding him up near to the glass: "so I said he could fetch you. Look! do you see them flying against the glass? It's the light as brings them these stormy nights. They know they'll get perching-room somewhere round, if they get nothing else. See their white wings flitting to and fro, Pat? Jim says in the morning we shall pick up a score or so of dead birds in the gallery, as have dashed their lives out flying straight against the glass."

Pat looked and began to see, for at first his eyes were dazzled. It was just as his father had said: outside the glass house were multitudes of wild sea birds, flitting to and fro like ghosts in the black darkness, and every now and then dashing themselves against the strong dome of glass with a noise which told of the violence of the effort. There seemed to the child to be an endless myriad of white and grey birds circling round his sea-girt home, and he looked at them in wonder and awe, for he had never before seen so strange a sight.

"Do they want to get in, father?" he asked softly. "Oh, let us open the door and take them in. They are frightened at the storm. Why should we not let them come in and warm themselves here?"

"They would only be worse scared than they are, Pat," answered his father, "and would fly into the lamp and hurt themselves and it. Poor foolish things! they don't know what they come for themselves; it's just the light attracts them. We'll get feathers enough to stuff a pillow for your mother to-morrow, if Jim is right about what we shall find outside."

But Pat was quite unhappy about the poor foolish wild birds driven seawards by the gale, and coming to the lighthouse, as it were, for shelter.

"Let me go outside and see them there," he said; and Jim wrapped him up warmly and carried him out for a few minutes.