Lighthouse Keeper Reports Sea "Unusually Polite"

By Edmund Ashgrove · Staff Correspondent

MARLOW-ON-TIDE — For eleven nights running the waters off Gull Point have lain so flat that the keeper of the Saltmarsh Light, Mr. Abel Penhallow, has taken to logging the stars reflected in them, and has now filled a second ledger with what he describes as "an entire upside-down sky, quite intact."

The Harbour Board, convened Tuesday in the upper room of the Customs House, heard testimony from three fishermen, a schoolmistress and one exceedingly tired ferryman, all of whom agreed that the sea had not raised its voice in living memory of the week.

"I have rung the bell, I have lit the lamp, I have sounded the horn twice nightly as the regulations require," Mr. Penhallow told the Board. "The sea has simply declined to make any trouble. One begins to feel rather unnecessary."

Board chairman Mrs. Hester Quayle said a surveyor would be dispatched to confirm the foghorn remains audible, and that the keeper's wages would continue regardless, "since calm is precisely what we have been paying for all along."

Fishmongers along Cooper's Row report record catches of mackerel, which they attribute to the fish being "able to hear themselves think." The ferry has run to time for the first time since the Coronation.

Meteorologists at the Marlow Observatory decline to speculate, noting only that the barometer has been "stubbornly content" and that fog is expected at dusk, as it is most evenings, out of habit.