“Some one has to,” he said aloud. “Burn away, Beast!” With this customary good-night, he clattered downstairs, locked the lighthouse door, caught up his lantern, and went whistling along the narrow path by the river. From below, to the left, stole the salt coolness of seaweed bared at low tide,--a sharp aroma that set him wide awake. From above, over a black phantom hill, peered Orion’s red shoulder-star. Hurtling shadows of undergrowth before his lantern rose magnified, parted in rout, wheeled slowly, fell prostrate and infinitely prolonged. The grass fringe of his smooth-beaten trail gleamed with a pearly rime of autumnal dew. “Nearly frost to-night,” thought the boy. He raced down into a steep gully, drummed across a little foot-bridge, took by scrambling assault the other bank, and on the crest, suddenly, as their black wall yawned to engulf him, entered a low grove of pines and cedars. The cold wet bristles bedewed his hands, as he skipped along, now scuffing loudly on a worn ledge, now over a stretch of wet touch-wood, the full, fern-bordered length of a vanished log, that made him advance silent as a ghost. A ghost--he often thought of that, for now came the one mild excitement. Three times every night, his grandfather’s unofficial deputy, he tramped this triangular beat, downhill, along the shore between the two fixed lights, uphill again to the farmhouse. At first a lark, this tramp had in the last year become dull monotony; his score, penciled in the back of his beloved atlas, showed over a thousand tours, on which nothing ever happened; and yet now and then, as he neared the Admiral’s deck, he felt the childhood presentiment that just ahead something would appear. Usually a nameless emotion, faint and swiftly obliterated, it came now, in the early morning darkness, almost as the pristine thrill. At the place which had helped to name the whole shore, his path widened into a clearing beside a low bluff. The lantern twirled its shadow-ribs across a floor of rotten wood,--old ship’s planking, the few solid remnants auger-bored. Here, beside a stout rail which now tottered over the dark gulf, Admiral Bissant, the boy’s great-uncle, had walked the quarter-deck in his dotage. Miles’s grandfather never mentioned the tradition; but old Fisherman Bull had often told how, dropping down river in the Mystic Tie, he had seen an aged figure pacing the verge above, in faced uniform and cocked hat. “Givin’ orders he was,” said the fisher, “to nobody--trompin’ an’ mumblin’ amongst the trees, bossin’ hemlocks fer men.” To prove the story there remained uniform, cocked hat, and sword as well, rescued by Uncle Christopher when the old Bissant house burned, and now hung in the “front hall” of their cottage. And these mouldering planks still outlined the landfast quarter-deck. A ghost there must be, Ella said. Of course that was her nonsense. Only a faint breeze of dawn sighed through the drooping needles.