Tale 1: The Lamplighter of the Harbor Town
1Long ago, in a seaside town in Portugal, an old man named Tomás lit the street lamps every evening. He carried a long pole with a tiny flame at the tip, and he climbed the steep streets from the market to the harbor. Most people hardly noticed him. "Anyone could do that job," the shopkeepers said.
2One autumn, Tomás caught a bad cold and stayed in bed. That night, no lamps were lit. A cart rolled into a ditch on the dark hill. Children could not find their way home from the square. Worst of all, the fishing boats coming back from sea could not see the harbor, so they had to wait out on the water until sunrise.
3The next morning, the townspeople climbed to Tomás's little house with bowls of warm soup. "We did not know how much your light helped us," they said. From then on, a different child walked beside Tomás each evening to learn the way from lamp to lamp, and no one called his job small after that.