Now Pat knew very well what swearing sounded like, for he had heard a great deal too much of it in his small life. But his mother had always taught him to shun those people who used bad words, and he had never heard an oath pass his father's lips. He had been brought up to read his Bible, and to learn as much of the meaning of it as his mother was able to teach him. Neither his father nor his mother were able to do much more than read and write. They had not much education, and were ignorant of a great deal that they would have liked to know. But they were devout and simple-minded Christian folks, and had carefully trained their little boy in all they knew themselves. If Nat had something of the stern Puritan element in his creed, Eileen on her part had the vivid imagination and burning devotion of her warm-hearted race, and Pat had inherited much of her temperament, though not without some of his father's hard-headed shrewdness. Pat had begun to feel as though this lighthouse must be wonderfully near to God--much nearer than the crowded court where he had lived before. It seemed to him often as though God _must_ be looking straight down out of heaven at the Lone Rock, and that there was nothing to come between Him and it, to hinder Him from seeing everything. So the child had got into the habit of thinking a great deal more than before of God; and it seemed very natural to think of Him to-night, with the great dome of star-spangled sky above, and the limitless black sea below, with the shining pathway across it that might be leading straight to heaven. But Jim's words troubled him rather. He didn't like to think that Jim did not think about God too. He didn't see how he could help it in his long lonely night-watches. Pat knew very well that he should be frightened of the loneliness and the darkness if he wasn't quite sure that God would take care of him somehow, though how He did it the child was not at all certain. He went off on this train of thought now; and instead of answering Jim's remark, or asking him why he had not heard or thought about God for many years, he looked up into his face in a meditative fashion, and said, slowly and reflectively-- "I think He must send the angels to fly about the lighthouses at night and keep them safe. Mother says perhaps the stars are the angels' eyes looking down at us; and don't you think it feels like as if there were angels flying all about here? I think perhaps they like to dip their big beautiful white wings in the moonlight, like the sea-gulls. I almost think I can feel them flying round; it seems like as if there was a sound of wings in the air!" "May be, little master, may be," answered Jim, without much interest in his face and tone. "If there be anything of that sort about the place, I make no doubt you would be the one to hear and see it."