Our first house was a little white one on the harbour shore, halfway between the village and the point, and at the end of the point was the lighthouse, and in the lighthouse was Captain Jim.
He was old when we met him, and he had been everywhere: shipwrecked, becalmed, stranded, once very nearly married. He kept the Four Winds light as if the whole coast depended on it, which in a way it did. Every evening, when the lamp was lit and the beam went round, I felt that our house was being looked after.
Captain Jim had written his adventures down in an old book, badly, as he said himself — the stories were all there, but not the knack of telling them. I read it by his fire and it was the best book I had ever held. Later a writer who came to stay at the Glen turned it into a proper book. Captain Jim waited for the copy at the post office every day for a month.
Our other neighbours were Miss Cornelia Bryant, who disapproved of men in general and was kind to every one of them in particular, and Leslie Moore, who lived up the brook and had had a harder life than anyone I have known. It took me a long time to become Leslie’s friend. It was worth every day of it.
Captain Jim crossed the bar, as he would have said, while we still lived by the harbour. I have never since seen a lighthouse without looking for him in the window.
