One night Teddy the younger ascended to the lantern to trim the candles; he snuffed them all round and returned to the kitchen to have a pipe, his two mates being a-bed at the time. No one now knows how the thing happened, but certain it is that Teddy either dropped some of the burning snuff on the floor, or in some other way introduced more light into his lantern that night than it had ever been meant to contain, so that while he and his mates were smoking comfortably below, the lighthouse was smoking quietly, but ominously, above.
On shore, late that night, an elderly gentleman stood looking out of the window of a charmingly situated cottage in the village of Cawsand Bay, near Plymouth, which commanded a magnificent prospect of the channel.
“Father,” he said, turning to a very old man seated beside the fire, who, although shrunken and wrinkled and bald, was ruddy in complexion, and evidently in the enjoyment of a green old age, “Father, the lighthouse is beautifully bright to-night; shall I help you to the window to look at it?”
“Yes, Tommy: I’m fond o’ the old light. It minds me of days gone by, when you and I were young, Martha.”
The old man gave a chuckle as he looked across the hearthstone, where, in a chair similar to his own, sat a very stout and very deaf and very old lady, smoothing the head of her grandchild, a little girl, who was the youngest of a family of ten.
Old Martha did not hear John Potter’s remark, but she saw his kindly smile, and nodded her head with much gravity in reply. Martha had grown intellectually slow when she partially lost her hearing, and although she was not sad she had evidently become solemn. An English Dictionary and the Bible were the only books that Martha would look at now. She did not use the former as a help to the understanding of the latter. No one knew why she was so partial to the dictionary; but as she not unfrequently had it on her knee upside down while poring over it, her grandchild, little Nora, took up the idea that she had resolved to devote the latter days of her life to learning to read backwards! Perhaps the fact that the dictionary had once belonged to her son James who was wrecked and drowned on the Norfolk coast, may have had something to do with it.
With the aid of his son’s arm and a stick old John managed to hobble to the window.
“It is very bright. Why, Tommy,” he exclaimed, with a start, “it’s too bright: the lighthouse must be on fire!”
At that moment, “Tommy’s” wife, now “fat, fair, and fifty” (or thereabouts), entered the room hurriedly, exclaiming, “Oh, Tom, what can be the matter with the lighthouse, I never saw it so bright before?”
Tom, who had hastily placed his father in a chair, so that he could see the Eddystone, seized his hat, and exclaiming, “I’ll go and see, my dear,” ran out and proceeded to the shore.