I guess I did laugh when I went aloft to clean the lamp and found everything so free and breezy, gulls flying high and little whitecaps making under a westerly.  It was like feeling a big load dropped off your shoulders.  Fedderson came up with his dust-rag and cocked his head at me.

“What’s the matter, Ray?” said he.

“Nothing,” said I. And then I couldn’t help it.  “Seems kind of out of place for society notes,” said I, “out here at Seven Brothers.”

He was the other side of the lens, and when he looked at me he had a thousand eyes, all sober.  For a minute I thought he was going on dusting, but then he came out and sat down on a sill.

“Sometimes,” said he, “I get to thinking it may be a mite dull for her out here.  She’s pretty young, Ray.  Not much more’n a girl, hardly.”

“Not much more’n a girl!” It gave me a turn, sir, as though I’d seen my aunt in short dresses.

“It’s a good home for her, though,” he went on slow.  “I’ve seen a lot worse ashore, Ray.  Of course if I could get a shore light——­”

“Kingdom Come’s a shore light.”

He looked at me out of his deep-set eyes, and then he turned them around the light-room, where he’d been so long.

“No,” said he, wagging his head.  “It ain’t for such as me.”

I never saw so humble a man.

“But look here,” he went on, more cheerful.  “As I was telling her just now, a month from yesterday’s our fourth anniversary, and I’m going to take her ashore for the day and give her a holiday—­new hat and everything.  A girl wants a mite of excitement now and then, Ray.”

There it was again, that “girl.”  It gave me the fidgets, sir.  I had to do something about it.  It’s close quarters for last names in a light, and I’d taken to calling him Uncle Matt soon after I came.  Now, when I was at table that noon I spoke over to where she was standing by the stove, getting him another help of chowder.

“I guess I’ll have some, too, Aunt Anna,” said I, matter of fact.

She never said a word nor gave a sign—­just stood there kind of round-shouldered, dipping the chowder.  And that night at prayers I hitched my chair around the table, with its back the other way.

You get awful lazy in a lighthouse, some ways.  No matter how much tinkering you’ve got, there’s still a lot of time and there’s such a thing as too much reading.  The changes in weather get monotonous, too, by and by; the light burns the same on a thick night as it does on a fair one.  Of course there’s the ships, north-bound, south-bound—­wind-jammers, freighters, passenger-boats full of people.  In the watches at night you can see their lights go by, and wonder what they are, how they’re laden, where they’ll fetch up, and all.  I used to do that almost every evening when it was my first watch, sitting out on the walk-around up there with my legs hanging over the edge and my chin propped on the railing—­lazy.  The Boston boat was the prettiest to see, with her three tiers of port-holes lit, like a string of pearls wrapped round and round a woman’s neck—­well away, too, for the ledge must have made a couple of hundred fathoms off the Light, like a white dog-tooth of a breaker, even on the darkest night.