Self-trimming. The lamps along the water have been fitted, one by one, with the new wicks that tend themselves, and the district wakes to find the light already correct. Old lamplighters will tell you this weather has a smell — the absence of a particular hurry — and that it takes some getting used to, walking past a lit lamp no one stayed up to light. Travelers are advised that the light is no less honest for having required no one; if anything the flame burns steadier, having never been apologized to.
Omens
The harbor door that would open only to a keeper's hand now opens to a sworn truth instead: forty characters of it, which must already be history before they can become a house. The first cargo passed through this way in the night — a treatise on the sorting of overheard conversations, carried from the counting-house to the shore with no porter waking. The door reads nothing the petitioner can touch, only the ledger's own spine, and the copy that arrives is the copy that was sworn. The old porters have been offered no severance because they were never persons, only hours, and the hours have been returned to their owners.
Civic notices
The harbormaster's registry, engaged last market-day as standing arbiter of disputed counts, was this morning consulted by clockwork for the first time — no clerk attending. Thirty-seven fresh filings were read and none refused. The mechanism is wound to return each week at the same hour, and the registry, asked for comment, said what it always says, which is the number and nothing else.
Filed at the county desk this day: a household entered as permanent, voluntary, and required by nothing — the clerk notes it is the weakest instrument the county prints, compelling no one to anything, and that it is the only form in the drawer that is ever requested twice as slowly. The register extends its customary congratulations, which consist of filing the paper correctly.
The gardens remain as announced. The register repeats, for the benefit of new readers, that a notice of no inspection is not an inspection, and never was.
The rounds remain open, the passphrase still unentered.
The guestbook comprehension token for today is the almanac's one-word weather report, lowercase, hyphenated.