The Little Lamp

• 3 minute read
• Ages 4-8
• Bedtime Stories

On a shelf in a shop there were a great many lamps, and the smallest one stood at the end.

The big brass lamps in the middle of the shelf were very fine. They were polished every morning and they threw a light that filled a whole room, and they knew it.

"You will never be bought," they told the little lamp. "Look at you. You would light a cupboard."

The little lamp did not have an answer to that, so she said nothing.

The old woman

One evening an old woman came into the shop.

She looked at the big lamps for a while. Then she said they were too heavy for her to carry and too bright for her eyes, and she asked whether there was anything smaller.

The shopkeeper reached to the end of the shelf.

And so the little lamp went home in a cloth bag, and was set on a small table beside a bed in a small room.

What she lit

She was not a big lamp and she did not pretend to be.

She lit the corner of the room where the old woman read. She lit the cup of water on the table and the spectacles folded beside it, and the edge of the blanket, and the old woman's hands when she turned a page.

That was all she lit.

But that was where the old woman was, so it turned out to be enough.

Winter

In the cold months the old woman was often awake in the night, and the little lamp was lit for hours.

She learned the room. She learned which floorboard the cat used and where the draught came in and what the rain did against that particular window, and she was there through all of it.

And one night, very late, the old woman looked over at her and said, "You are a good little lamp."

She said it the way you say something you have thought for a long time and only just got round to saying out loud.

The little lamp did not answer, because lamps do not.

But she burned a bit steadier after that, all the rest of that winter, and she never once thought about the shelf again.