The-Lamps-Of-Marrow-Lane
Eliab Quill had lit the lamps of the parish for twenty-six years, and he carried his trade the way other men carried their faith: quietly, in all weathers, and without expecting thanks. Each evening at the failing of the light he shouldered his ladder and his little brass igniter, and walked his round, and one by one the gas-mantles bloomed under his hand — a soft yellow exhalation, a held breath of warmth against the coming dark. The fog rolled in off the river thick as wool. The cobbles shone. He tipped his hat to the cab-men and the constables and the late servants hurrying home, and they tipped theirs to him, for a lamplighter is a respectable sort, a bringer of small mercies, and Mr. Quill was the most respectable of the lot.
He kept his manners polished because they were nearly all he had. His wife had died of the fever three winters past, and he and his daughter Sera lived narrow but clean in two rooms above the chandler's, where she did fine needlework by his lamp-glow and called him Papa in a voice so like her mother's that some nights he had to step out onto the landing to compose himself.
It was on Marrow Lane that he first heard it.
The lane was the oldest in the parish, crooked as a question, its lamps the original cast-iron columns from his grandfather's day. He had lit them ten thousand times. But on a raw November night, with the fog pressing close and the