The old man answered in a voice that trembled like a rusty flute: 

“Aye, aye!—­to walk up and down and hold my lanthorn so that folk can see where they be going.”

The Prince gathered up his reins; but the old man, lurching forward, touched his stirrup.

“How long be I to go on wi’ thiccy job?”

“Until you die!”

Cethru held up his lanthorn, and they could see his long, thin face, like a sandwich of dried leather, jerk and quiver, and his thin grey hairs flutter in the draught of the bats’ wings circling round the light.

“‘Twill be main hard!” he groaned; “an’ my lanthorn’s nowt but a poor thing.”

With a high look, the Prince of Felicitas bent and touched the old man’s forehead.

“Until you die, old man,” he repeated; and bidding his followers to light torches from Cethru’s lanthorn, he rode on down the twisting street.  The clatter of the horses’ hoofs died out in the night, and the scuttling and the rustling of the rats and the whispers of the bats’ wings were heard again.

Cethru, left alone in the dark thoroughfare, sighed heavily; then, spitting on his hands, he tightened the old girdle round his loins, and slinging the lanthorn on his staff, held it up to the level of his waist, and began to make his way along the street.  His progress was but slow, for he had many times to stop and rekindle the flame within his lanthorn, which the bats’ wings, his own stumbles, and the jostlings of footpads or of revellers returning home, were for ever extinguishing.  In traversing that long street he spent half the night, and half the night in traversing it back again.  The saffron swan of dawn, slow swimming up the sky-river between the high roof-banks, bent her neck down through the dark air-water to look at him staggering below her, with his still smoking wick.  No sooner did Cethru see that sunlit bird, than with a great sigh of joy he sat him down, and at once fell asleep.

Now when the dwellers in the houses of the Vita Publica first gained knowledge that this old man passed every night with his lanthorn up and down their street, and when they marked those pallid gleams gliding over the motley prospect of cesspools and garden gates, over the sightless hovels and the rich-carved frontages of their palaces; or saw them stay their journey and remain suspended like a handful of daffodils held up against the black stuffs of secrecy—­they said: 

“It is good that the old man should pass like this—­we shall see better where we’re going; and if the Watch have any job on hand, or want to put the pavements in order, his lanthorn will serve their purpose well enough.”  And they would call out of their doors and windows to him passing: 

“Hola! old man Cethru!  All’s well with our house, and with the street before it?”

But, for answer, the old man only held his lanthorn up, so that in the ring of its pale light they saw some sight or other in the street.  And his silence troubled them, one by one, for each had expected that he would reply: