Following the lamplighter

Text 1: My uncle’s round, by Thomas Ridley Hext

An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

When I was eleven my uncle let me follow him on his evening round of the street lamps. He carried a long pole with a hook at one end and a small flame, shielded in brass, at the other. At each post he reached up, opened the little glass door and touched the flame to the burner, all without leaving the pavement. There were forty-two lamps between the church and the river, and he knew each one by its faults: one had a cracked pane, another a tap that stuck in frost. By the time we reached the bridge, the first lamp behind us was a small gold point in the dusk, and I felt that we had drawn a line of light across the town.

Give one phrase that shows the uncle knew the lamps on his round very well.