ow getting to be an elderly man.
We may, however, relieve the mind of the sympathetic reader, by saying
that Teddy, senior, was not dead. He was still alive and hearty; though
bent nearly double with extreme age; and dwelt on the borders of one of
the Irish bogs, at the head of an extensive colony of Maroons.

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 on