The light given by the miner's lamp was bright when compared with that
given by one little candle in a cottage window, and yet that feeble ray,
quietly shining night after night, served to guide many a fisherman safely
past a dangerous rock, which juts out into the sea, on the coast of one of
the Orkney Isles. It was a young girl, the daughter of a fisherman, who
lighted that candle and kept it burning. Her father's boat had been wrecked
one wild dark night on "Lonely Rock," and his body washed ashore near his
cottage. The girl, in her grief, remembered other poor fishermen, and when
night came on she set a candle in the window, and watched it as she sat at
her spinning wheel. She did not do this once, or twice, but through long
years that coast was never without the light of her little candle, by which
the men at sea might be warned off the neighbourhood of the terrible rock.
In order to pay for her candles, this lonely girl with a faithful heart
spun every night an extra quantity of yarn--for she earned her own living
by her spinning wheel--and so the tiny flame was kept alight, and she found
comfort in her sorrow by doing what she could, in her unselfish care, for
"those in peril on the sea."
The meanest candle is a luminary in its way, for it possesses light, while
the most brilliant diamond has none in itself, and can give back only what
it receives.
And now that our lesson about the FIRST DAY is finished, we must not forget
what we have been learning.
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