There was a queer cry from the lighthouse window ledge, and Teeny looked out. There, hunched against the shutter, were two young sea gulls. They didn’t seem to be there from choice.
Teeny was the lighthouse keeper’s daughter, and she understood the sea well enough to guess what had happened. There had been a bad storm the night before. These gulls had been caught in it and hurt.
She opened the window and took them in. They hadn’t been hurt badly, but they had been very frightened. All day Teeny looked after them, and by evening they had grown quite tame, as though they understood that she was a child of the sea like themselves.
Late that afternoon, Teeny remembered she had been planning a magic lantern show.
“This will be perfect,” she said to herself. “I have an audience. Usually I have to be stage manager and audience both. Sometimes Daddy and Mother come, but they’re busy today—and usually I am alone. I do have lots of companions in the pictures, of course, and I leave them up on the sheet for a long time and talk to them.”
She arranged a large cushion and settled the sea gulls on it.
“Tomorrow you’ll be strong enough to go back to the sea,” she told them. “I know you hate being cooped up when you’re used to flying over all that water.”
The sea gulls paid no attention whatsoever to the magic lantern show.
This disappointed Teeny a little. But still—they did make an audience. And that was quite a treat.
