There they stood, side by side, Bart and his father, while the keeper was rising to hand the box to Thomas Trafton. The lighthouse kitchen never presented a more interesting scene than that of the reformed sailor in the presence of his oft-abused child, taking into his hands this gift, that had survived a wrecking storm, to be not only a pledge of the friendship of the dead, but to the living a stimulus to right-doing and a warning against wrong.
Thomas Trafton rowed back to the vessel that night. Bart was carried to town the next day. Bart reached home at sundown, and first told granny about the affair of the box as far as he had been able to pick up the threads of the details and weave them into a story; then he asked, "Where is father’s spy-glass?"
"Behind the clock, Bartie," said granny. "What do you want it for?"
"Just to look off," he said, seizing the glass and bearing it out-doors. Granny followed him into the yard and there halted; for Bart was going farther, already bestriding the fence.
"Where is that boy going?" wondered granny.
"Bartie!" she called aloud, "it is a-gittin’ too late to see things clear."
He was now mounting a hill beyond the yard.
She soon saw his figure standing out, clear and distinct, against the western sky, and he was elevating the glass.
"Too soon to see anything yet," he said, when he returned.
"You want to see the light? You won’t have to take a glass for that; you just wait."
"I want to see something else. You come with me, granny, when I go again."
Later two figures crept up the hill, one carrying a spy-glass.
"There, granny!" said the bearer of the glass. "Now you look off to the light at Black Rocks, and right under it see if you can’t see another light--a little one."
"La, child," declared granny, vainly looking through the glass, "I can’t see nothin’. This thing pokes out what there is there."
"Eh? can’t you, granny?" replied Bart, levelling the glass toward the harbour. "I see the light. And--and--I think--I see a--something else underneath. Seems like a little star under a moon."
The next day this was dropped in the post-office:--
"DEAR DAVE,--I saw your lantern, I know. Did you hang it out? Your friend, BART."
Dave answered this in person within a week.