The Fight for the Light.
Facts are constantly stranger than fiction. The newspapers once printed in an obscure fashion the story of a desperate encounter in a lighthouse. It contained all the elements of deep tragedy.
It was in the light of Stratford shoals, that guides the big steamers of Long Island Sound. Two men were keepers of it,—Merrill Halse and Julius Coster. One day the latter became violently insane.
Coster made a fearful weapon,—a razor lashed to the end of a long pole. Thus attacked, Halse got the better of his frantic antagonist. For two days his life was a running battle against a frenzied foe.
Then, Coster turned his mad rage against the light itself. Halse found him one afternoon with a hammer and chisel trying to cut away the light-house walls. "That night," the account goes on, "the light suddenly stopped revolving, and its keeper ran to the lamp-room to find Coster with an ax about to destroy the lenses. He fought his way into the room and saved the light, but from that time, or for fully five days, doing two men's work, the brave keeper was forced both to guard the lenses day and night and to fight many times for his own life."
In those tragic scenes you may read an epitome of human life—of your own life. You are set to guard a light. Every life should be a lighthouse. And often—how often!—you are obliged to struggle for the light with a madman.
You know who the madman is—your other self, your worse self. He tries to batter down the house. He tries to smash the light. He tries to kill your better self. It is a running fight with him. Sometimes the fight is for years.
But lo! over the smiling sea comes a lifeboat! The Inspector is in it, and a force of the coast guard. He will grasp the situation at a glance. He will overpower the madman, and carry him away in chains, to imperil your lighthouse no longer. Until he comes, keep up a bold heart, and—just hold on!