e above making a kind of bright frame around his hair and
whiskers, to give me a cheery, "Make yourself to home, son!" I remember
I said to myself: "_He's_ all right. I'll get along with _him_. But his
wife's enough to sour milk." That was queer, because she was so much
under him in age--'long about twenty-eight or so, and him nearer fifty.
But that's what I said, sir.

Of course that feeling wore off, same as any feeling will wear off
sooner or later in a place like the Seven Brothers. Cooped up in a place
like that you come to know folks so well that you forget what they _do_
look like. There was a long time I never noticed her, any more than
you'd notice the cat. We used to sit of an evening around the table, as
if you were Fedderson there, and me here, and her somewhere back there,
in the rocker, knitting. Fedderson would be working on his
Jacob's-ladder, and I'd be reading. He'd been working on that
Jacob's-ladder a year, I guess, and every time the Inspector came off
with the tender he was so astonished to see how good that ladder was
that the old man would go to work and make it better. That's all he
lived for.

If I was reading, as I say, I daren't take my eyes off the book, or
Fedderson had me. And then he'd begin--what the Inspector said about
him. How surprised the member of the board had been, that time, to see
everything so clean about the light. What the Inspector had said about
Fedderson's being stuck here in a second-class light--best keeper on the
coast. And so on and so on, till either he or I had to go aloft and have
a look at the wicks.

He'd been there twenty-three years, all told, and he'd got used to the
feeling that he was kept down unfair--so used to it, I guess, that he
fed on it, and told himself how folks ashore would talk when he was dead
and gone--best keeper on the coast--kept down unfair. Not that he said
that to me. No, he was far too loyal and humble and respectful, doing
his duty without complaint, as anybody could see.

And all that time, night after night, hardly ever a word out of the
woman. As I remember it, she seemed more like a piece of furniture than
anything else--not even a very good cook, nor over and above tidy. One
day, when he and I were trimming the lamp, he passed the remark that his
_first_ wife used to dust the lens and take a pride in it. Not that he
said a word against Anna, though. He never said a word against any
living mortal; he was too upright.

I don't k