The Lamplighter’s Hour

There was once a town built on a hill so steep that it had more stairs than streets, and at every turning of the stairs there stood a lamp. The town paid its lamplighter by the lamp — so much for each one found burning when the watch came round at midnight — and the lamplighters before this one had done well out of it. They lit every lamp at dusk, in a single hurrying circuit, and went home to count.

The new lamplighter did otherwise. They came out at dusk with the long pole and the little flame and climbed the stairs slowly, and lit a lamp only where a shutter still showed light behind it, or a door stood open, or footsteps were coming up from the harbor. Where the houses were dark and the steps were empty, they walked past with the pole on their shoulder and lit nothing at all.

By day they were seen doing even less: mending wicks on the sea wall, or asleep in the shade of it. The town council sent for them. “We pay for lamps,” said the council. “You light fewer than any lamplighter we have had, and in daylight you do nothing whatever.” “In daylight,” said the lamplighter, “no one has ever needed a lamp. And at night I light the ones that are needed. You have been paying, all these years, for light with no one under it.”

The council was not persuaded, and ordered that for one month every lamp in the town be lit every night at dusk, as in the old days. The lamplighter obeyed. The oil ran short in the second week; by the third the town was buying it dear from the valley; and the wicks, burning all night above empty stairs, charred and fouled their glass, so that the lamps people did pass under gave a smaller light than before.

On the last night of the month a storm came up from the sea, and a fishing boat came late into the harbor, and the crew climbed toward home in the dark. Every lamp on their way was lit — and so was every lamp on every other way, and the glass of all of them was so black with a month of smoke that from the water the hill showed no path at all, only a faint and even smear. They came up by feel, counting the turnings, as their grandparents had before the town had lamps.

The next morning the council quietly restored the old arrangement, and the lamplighter went back to the sea wall to sleep. When the children asked why they lit so few, the lamplighter said: “A lamp is not for the street. A lamp is for whoever is on it. Light the stairs that someone is climbing, and keep your oil for the night the storm comes.”