Half an hour later the keeper and his assistants were busily engaged on their respective tasks. Captain Eph sat in the watch-room laboring over his report; Uncle Zenas was cooking as if his very life depended upon getting the largest amount of provisions prepared for eating in the shortest possible space of time, and on the rocks Mr. Peters was measuring and figuring on the shattered boat, confident that he could soon put her in a seaworthy condition, provided he should be able to find the proper material. The cook was spearing doughnuts out of a kettle of hot fat with a long-handled fork, bringing into play all his professional knowledge to the end that each one should be of the proper color and degree of crispness, when he was startled so badly that he actually squeaked, by hearing a light footstep on the floor directly behind him. "I'll be roasted if I didn't think you was a ghost!" he cried as, turning quickly, he saw Sidney standing near the foot of the staircase. "Why didn't you stay in bed, lad, since that's where you belong for the next four an' twenty hours?" "I guess I've slept long enough, for I wakened without being called, and those doughnuts smelled so good I had to come after one. What a nice kitchen this is!" "It's a bit small for so big a cook," Uncle Zenas said with a laugh as he held the pan half-filled with delicately browned cakes toward the boy. "Help yourself to whatever you want so long as you're on Carys' Ledge, for everything here that don't belong to the Government is the same as yours." "You have all been awfully kind to me, and if father could only know where I am, it would be very nice to stay here a while, for I was never in a light-house before." "Where do you live when you're at home?" Uncle Zenas asked, as he speared more doughnuts from the kettle of fat. "I haven't got any home now. I did board with a very nice family in Malden; but they moved out west, and father said I might stay on the schooner until spring, when I'm to go somewhere to school. Is there another room under this?" and Sidney tapped with his foot on a trap-door directly in the center of the floor. "Wa'al, I don't reckon you can call it a room, seein's it's our cellar," and Uncle Zenas raised the door that the lad might look beneath. In the middle was what appeared to be a well, while around the sides of the aperture were stores of all kinds, stacked up neatly with a view to economy of space. "Yes, that's our well," Uncle Zenas said in reply to Sidney's question. "Least-ways it's a hole in the masonry which is filled every once in a while by the water-boat from the harbor, which comes out here for that purpose. Yonder is the oil, and our lamp eats lots of it. This 'ere is what is known as a first order light, an' we use somewhere over eight hundred gallons of oil in a year. The Light-House Board sends all our supplies, for it stands to reason we can't run out to the shop whenever we're needin' anythin' extra."