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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Records of a Family of Engineers, by Robert
+Louis Stevenson
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Records of a Family of Engineers
+
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 3, 2010  [eBook #280]
+[This file was first posted on July 9, 1995]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECORDS OF A FAMILY OF ENGINEERS***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1912 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org.  Additional proofing by Peter Barnes.
+
+
+
+
+
+                               RECORDS OF A
+                           FAMILY OF ENGINEERS
+
+
+                                    BY
+
+                          ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+            [Picture: Decorative graphic for Chatto & Windus]
+
+                                  LONDON
+
+                             CHATTO & WINDUS
+
+                                   1912
+
+                          _All rights reserved_
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION: THE SURNAME OF STEVENSON
+
+
+From the thirteenth century onwards, the name, under the various
+disguises of Stevinstoun, Stevensoun, Stevensonne, Stenesone, and
+Stewinsoune, spread across Scotland from the mouth of the Firth of Forth
+to the mouth of the Firth of Clyde.  Four times at least it occurs as a
+place-name.  There is a parish of Stevenston in Cunningham; a second
+place of the name in the Barony of Bothwell in Lanark; a third on Lyne,
+above Drochil Castle; the fourth on the Tyne, near Traprain Law.
+Stevenson of Stevenson (co. Lanark) swore fealty to Edward I in 1296, and
+the last of that family died after the Restoration.  Stevensons of
+Hirdmanshiels, in Midlothian, rode in the Bishops’ Raid of Aberlady,
+served as jurors, stood bail for neighbours—Hunter of Polwood, for
+instance—and became extinct about the same period, or possibly earlier.
+A Stevenson of Luthrie and another of Pitroddie make their bows, give
+their names, and vanish.  And by the year 1700 it does not appear that
+any acre of Scots land was vested in any Stevenson. {2a}
+
+Here is, so far, a melancholy picture of backward progress, and a family
+posting towards extinction.  But the law (however administered, and I am
+bound to aver that, in Scotland, ‘it couldna weel be waur’) acts as a
+kind of dredge, and with dispassionate impartiality brings up into the
+light of day, and shows us for a moment, in the jury-box or on the
+gallows, the creeping things of the past.  By these broken glimpses we
+are able to trace the existence of many other and more inglorious
+Stevensons, picking a private way through the brawl that makes Scots
+history.  They were members of Parliament for Peebles, Stirling,
+Pittenweem, Kilrenny, and Inverurie.  We find them burgesses of
+Edinburgh; indwellers in Biggar, Perth, and Dalkeith.  Thomas was the
+forester of Newbattle Park, Gavin was a baker, John a maltman, Francis a
+chirurgeon, and ‘Schir William’ a priest.  In the feuds of Humes and
+Heatleys, Cunninghams, Montgomeries, Mures, Ogilvies, and Turnbulls, we
+find them inconspicuously involved, and apparently getting rather better
+than they gave.  Schir William (reverend gentleman) was cruellie
+slaughtered on the Links of Kincraig in 1582; James (‘in the mill-town of
+Roberton’), murdered in 1590; Archibald (‘in Gallowfarren’), killed with
+shots of pistols and hagbuts in 1608.  Three violent deaths in about
+seventy years, against which we can only put the case of Thomas, servant
+to Hume of Cowden Knowes, who was arraigned with his two young masters
+for the death of the Bastard of Mellerstanes in 1569.  John (‘in
+Dalkeith’) stood sentry without Holyrood while the banded lords were
+despatching Rizzio within.  William, at the ringing of Perth bell, ran
+before Gowrie House ‘with ane sword, and, entering to the yearde, saw
+George Craiggingilt with ane twa-handit sword and utheris nychtbouris; at
+quilk time James Boig cryit ower ane wynds, “Awa hame! ye will all be
+hangit”’—a piece of advice which William took, and immediately
+‘depairtit.’  John got a maid with child to him in Biggar, and seemingly
+deserted her; she was hanged on the Castle Hill for infanticide, June
+1614; and Martin, elder in Dalkeith, eternally disgraced the name by
+signing witness in a witch trial, 1661.  These are two of our black
+sheep. {3a}  Under the Restoration, one Stevenson was a bailie in
+Edinburgh, and another the lessee of the Canonmills.  There were at the
+same period two physicians of the name in Edinburgh, one of whom, Dr.
+Archibald, appears to have been a famous man in his day and generation.
+The Court had continual need of him; it was he who reported, for
+instance, on the state of Rumbold; and he was for some time in the
+enjoyment of a pension of a thousand pounds Scots (about eighty pounds
+sterling) at a time when five hundred pounds is described as ‘an opulent
+future.’  I do not know if I should be glad or sorry that he failed to
+keep favour; but on 6th January 1682 (rather a cheerless New Year’s
+present) his pension was expunged. {4a}  There need be no doubt, at
+least, of my exultation at the fact that he was knighted and recorded
+arms.  Not quite so genteel, but still in public life, Hugh was
+Under-Clerk to the Privy Council, and liked being so extremely.  I gather
+this from his conduct in September 1681, when, with all the lords and
+their servants, he took the woful and soul-destroying Test, swearing it
+‘word by word upon his knees.’  And, behold! it was in vain, for Hugh was
+turned out of his small post in 1684. {4b}  Sir Archibald and Hugh were
+both plainly inclined to be trimmers; but there was one witness of the
+name of Stevenson who held high the banner of the Covenant—John,
+‘Land-Labourer, {4c} in the parish of Daily, in Carrick,’ that ‘eminently
+pious man.’  He seems to have been a poor sickly soul, and shows himself
+disabled with scrofula, and prostrate and groaning aloud with fever; but
+the enthusiasm of the martyr burned high within him.
+
+‘I was made to take joyfully the spoiling of my goods, and with pleasure
+for His name’s sake wandered in deserts and in mountains, in dens and
+caves of the earth.  I lay four months in the coldest season of the year
+in a haystack in my father’s garden, and a whole February in the open
+fields not far from Camragen, and this I did without the least prejudice
+from the night air; one night, when lying in the fields near to the
+Carrick-Miln, I was all covered with snow in the morning.  Many nights
+have I lain with pleasure in the churchyard of Old Daily, and made a
+grave my pillow; frequently have I resorted to the old walls about the
+glen, near to Camragen, and there sweetly rested.’  The visible band of
+God protected and directed him.  Dragoons were turned aside from the
+bramble-bush where he lay hidden.  Miracles were performed for his
+behoof.  ‘I got a horse and a woman to carry the child, and came to the
+same mountain, where I wandered by the mist before; it is commonly known
+by the name of Kellsrhins: when we came to go up the mountain, there came
+on a great rain, which we thought was the occasion of the child’s
+weeping, and she wept so bitterly, that all we could do could not divert
+her from it, so that she was ready to burst.  When we got to the top of
+the mountain, where the Lord had been formerly kind to my soul in prayer,
+I looked round me for a stone, and espying one, I went and brought it.
+When the woman with me saw me set down the stone, she smiled, and asked
+what I was going to do with it.  I told her I was going to set it up as
+my Ebenezer, because hitherto, and in that place, the Lord had formerly
+helped, and I hoped would yet help.  The rain still continuing, the child
+weeping bitterly, I went to prayer, and no sooner did I cry to God, but
+the child gave over weeping, and when we got up from prayer, the rain was
+pouring down on every side, but in the way where we were to go there fell
+not one drop; the place not rained on was as big as an ordinary avenue.’
+And so great a saint was the natural butt of Satan’s persecutions.  ‘I
+retired to the fields for secret prayer about mid-night.  When I went to
+pray I was much straitened, and could not get one request, but “Lord
+pity,” “Lord help”; this I came over frequently; at length the terror of
+Satan fell on me in a high degree, and all I could say even then
+was—“Lord help.”  I continued in the duty for some time, notwithstanding
+of this terror.  At length I got up to my feet, and the terror still
+increased; then the enemy took me by the arm-pits, and seemed to lift me
+up by my arms.  I saw a loch just before me, and I concluded he designed
+to throw me there by force; and had he got leave to do so, it might have
+brought a great reproach upon religion. {7a}  But it was otherwise
+ordered, and the cause of piety escaped that danger. {7b}
+
+On the whole, the Stevensons may be described as decent, reputable folk,
+following honest trades—millers, maltsters, and doctors, playing the
+character parts in the Waverley Novels with propriety, if without
+distinction; and to an orphan looking about him in the world for a
+potential ancestry, offering a plain and quite unadorned refuge, equally
+free from shame and glory.  John, the land-labourer, is the one living
+and memorable figure, and he, alas! cannot possibly be more near than a
+collateral.  It was on August 12, 1678, that he heard Mr. John Welsh on
+the Craigdowhill, and ‘took the heavens, earth, and sun in the firmament
+that was shining on us, as also the ambassador who made the offer, and
+_the clerk who raised the psalms_, to witness that I did give myself away
+to the Lord in a personal and perpetual covenant never to be forgotten’;
+and already, in 1675, the birth of my direct ascendant was registered in
+Glasgow.  So that I have been pursuing ancestors too far down; and John
+the land-labourer is debarred me, and I must relinquish from the trophies
+of my house his _rare soul-strengthening and comforting cordial_.  It is
+the same case with the Edinburgh bailie and the miller of the Canonmills,
+worthy man! and with that public character, Hugh the Under-Clerk, and,
+more than all, with Sir Archibald, the physician, who recorded arms.  And
+I am reduced to a family of inconspicuous maltsters in what was then the
+clean and handsome little city on the Clyde.
+
+The name has a certain air of being Norse.  But the story of Scottish
+nomenclature is confounded by a continual process of translation and
+half-translation from the Gaelic which in olden days may have been
+sometimes reversed.  Roy becomes Reid; Gow, Smith.  A great Highland clan
+uses the name of Robertson; a sept in Appin that of Livingstone; Maclean
+in Glencoe answers to Johnstone at Lockerby.  And we find such hybrids as
+Macalexander for Macallister.  There is but one rule to be deduced: that
+however uncompromisingly Saxon a name may appear, you can never be sure
+it does not designate a Celt.  My great-grandfather wrote the name
+_Stevenson_ but pronounced it _Steenson_, after the fashion of the
+immortal minstrel in _Redgauntlet_; and this elision of a medial
+consonant appears a Gaelic process; and, curiously enough, I have come
+across no less than two Gaelic forms: _John Macstophane cordinerius in
+Crossraguel_, 1573, and _William M’Steen_ in Dunskeith (co. Ross), 1605.
+Stevenson, Steenson, Macstophane, M’Steen: which is the original? which
+the translation?  Or were these separate creations of the patronymic,
+some English, some Gaelic?  The curiously compact territory in which we
+find them seated—Ayr, Lanark, Peebles, Stirling, Perth, Fife, and the
+Lothians—would seem to forbid the supposition. {9a}
+
+‘STEVENSON—or according to tradition of one of the proscribed of the clan
+MacGregor, who was born among the willows or in a hill-side
+sheep-pen—“Son of my love,” a heraldic bar sinister, but history reveals
+a reason for the birth among the willows far other than the sinister
+aspect of the name’: these are the dark words of Mr. Cosmo Innes; but
+history or tradition, being interrogated, tells a somewhat tangled tale.
+The heir of Macgregor of Glenorchy, murdered about 1858 by the Argyll
+Campbells, appears to have been the original ‘Son of my love’; and his
+more loyal clansmen took the name to fight under.  It may be supposed the
+story of their resistance became popular, and the name in some sort
+identified with the idea of opposition to the Campbells.  Twice
+afterwards, on some renewed aggression, in 1502 and 1552, we find the
+Macgregors again banding themselves into a sept of ‘Sons of my love’; and
+when the great disaster fell on them in 1603, the whole original legend
+reappears, and we have the heir of Alaster of Glenstrae born ‘among the
+willows’ of a fugitive mother, and the more loyal clansmen again rallying
+under the name of Stevenson.  A story would not be told so often unless
+it had some base in fact; nor (if there were no bond at all between the
+Red Macgregors and the Stevensons) would that extraneous and somewhat
+uncouth name be so much repeated in the legends of the Children of the
+Mist.
+
+But I am enabled, by my very lively and obliging correspondent, Mr.
+George A. Macgregor Stevenson of New York, to give an actual instance.
+His grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and
+great-great-great-grandfather, all used the names of Macgregor and
+Stevenson as occasion served; being perhaps Macgregor by night and
+Stevenson by day.  The great-great-great-grandfather was a mighty man of
+his hands, marched with the clan in the ‘Forty-five, and returned with
+_spolia opima_ in the shape of a sword, which he had wrested from an
+officer in the retreat, and which is in the possession of my
+correspondent to this day.  His great-grandson (the grandfather of my
+correspondent), being converted to Methodism by some wayside preacher,
+discarded in a moment his name, his old nature, and his political
+principles, and with the zeal of a proselyte sealed his adherence to the
+Protestant Succession by baptising his next son George.  This George
+became the publisher and editor of the _Wesleyan Times_.  His children
+were brought up in ignorance of their Highland pedigree; and my
+correspondent was puzzled to overhear his father speak of him as a true
+Macgregor, and amazed to find, in rummaging about that peaceful and pious
+house, the sword of the Hanoverian officer.  After he was grown up and
+was better informed of his descent, ‘I frequently asked my father,’ he
+writes, ‘why he did not use the name of Macgregor; his replies were
+significant, and give a picture of the man: “It isn’t a good _Methodist_
+name.  You can use it, but it will do you no _good_.”  Yet the old
+gentleman, by way of pleasantry, used to announce himself to friends as
+“Colonel Macgregor.”’
+
+Here, then, are certain Macgregors habitually using the name of
+Stevenson, and at last, under the influence of Methodism, adopting it
+entirely.  Doubtless a proscribed clan could not be particular; they took
+a name as a man takes an umbrella against a shower; as Rob Roy took
+Campbell, and his son took Drummond.  But this case is different;
+Stevenson was not taken and left—it was consistently adhered to.  It does
+not in the least follow that all Stevensons are of the clan Alpin; but it
+does follow that some may be.  And I cannot conceal from myself the
+possibility that James Stevenson in Glasgow, my first authentic ancestor,
+may have had a Highland _alias_ upon his conscience and a claymore in his
+back parlour.
+
+To one more tradition I may allude, that we are somehow descended from a
+French barber-surgeon who came to St. Andrews in the service of one of
+the Cardinal Beatons.  No details were added.  But the very name of
+France was so detested in my family for three generations, that I am
+tempted to suppose there may be something in it. {12a}
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I: DOMESTIC ANNALS
+
+
+It is believed that in 1665, James Stevenson in Nether Carsewell, parish
+of Neilston, county of Renfrew, and presumably a tenant farmer, married
+one Jean Keir; and in 1675, without doubt, there was born to these two a
+son Robert, possibly a maltster in Glasgow.  In 1710, Robert married, for
+a second time, Elizabeth Cumming, and there was born to them, in 1720,
+another Robert, certainly a maltster in Glasgow.  In 1742, Robert the
+second married Margaret Fulton (Margret, she called herself), by whom he
+had ten children, among whom were Hugh, born February 1749, and Alan,
+born June 1752.
+
+With these two brothers my story begins.  Their deaths were simultaneous;
+their lives unusually brief and full.  Tradition whispered me in
+childhood they were the owners of an islet near St. Kitts; and it is
+certain they had risen to be at the head of considerable interests in the
+West Indies, which Hugh managed abroad and Alan at home, at an age when
+others are still curveting a clerk’s stool.  My kinsman, Mr. Stevenson of
+Stirling, has heard his father mention that there had been ‘something
+romantic’ about Alan’s marriage: and, alas! he has forgotten what.  It
+was early at least.  His wife was Jean, daughter of David Lillie, a
+builder in Glasgow, and several times ‘Deacon of the Wrights’: the date
+of the marriage has not reached me; but on 8th June 1772, when Robert,
+the only child of the union, was born, the husband and father had scarce
+passed, or had not yet attained, his twentieth year.  Here was a youth
+making haste to give hostages to fortune.  But this early scene of
+prosperity in love and business was on the point of closing.
+
+There hung in the house of this young family, and successively in those
+of my grandfather and father, an oil painting of a ship of many tons
+burthen.  Doubtless the brothers had an interest in the vessel; I was
+told she had belonged to them outright; and the picture was preserved
+through years of hardship, and remains to this day in the possession of
+the family, the only memorial of my great-grandsire Alan.  It was on this
+ship that he sailed on his last adventure, summoned to the West Indies by
+Hugh.  An agent had proved unfaithful on a serious scale; and it used to
+be told me in my childhood how the brothers pursued him from one island
+to another in an open boat, were exposed to the pernicious dews of the
+tropics, and simultaneously struck down.  The dates and places of their
+deaths (now before me) would seem to indicate a more scattered and
+prolonged pursuit: Hugh, on the 16th April 1774, in Tobago, within sight
+of Trinidad; Alan, so late as 26th May, and so far away as ‘Santt
+Kittes,’ in the Leeward Islands—both, says the family Bible, ‘of a
+fiver’(!).  The death of Hugh was probably announced by Alan in a letter,
+to which we may refer the details of the open boat and the dew.  Thus, at
+least, in something like the course of post, both were called away, the
+one twenty-five, the other twenty-two; their brief generation became
+extinct, their short-lived house fell with them; and ‘in these lawless
+parts and lawless times’—the words are my grandfather’s—their property
+was stolen or became involved.  Many years later, I understand some small
+recovery to have been made; but at the moment almost the whole means of
+the family seem to have perished with the young merchants.  On the 27th
+April, eleven days after Hugh Stevenson, twenty-nine before Alan, died
+David Lillie, the Deacon of the Wrights; so that mother and son were
+orphaned in one month.  Thus, from a few scraps of paper bearing little
+beyond dates, we construct the outlines of the tragedy that shadowed the
+cradle of Robert Stevenson.
+
+Jean Lillie was a young woman of strong sense, well fitted to contend
+with poverty, and of a pious disposition, which it is like that these
+misfortunes heated.  Like so many other widowed Scots-women, she vowed
+her son should wag his head in a pulpit; but her means were inadequate to
+her ambition.  A charity school, and some time under a Mr. M’Intyre, ‘a
+famous linguist,’ were all she could afford in the way of education to
+the would-be minister.  He learned no Greek; in one place he mentions
+that the Orations of Cicero were his highest book in Latin; in another
+that he had ‘delighted’ in Virgil and Horace; but his delight could never
+have been scholarly.  This appears to have been the whole of his training
+previous to an event which changed his own destiny and moulded that of
+his descendants—the second marriage of his mother.
+
+There was a Merchant-Burgess of Edinburgh of the name of Thomas Smith.
+The Smith pedigree has been traced a little more particularly than the
+Stevensons’, with a similar dearth of illustrious names.  One character
+seems to have appeared, indeed, for a moment at the wings of history: a
+skipper of Dundee who smuggled over some Jacobite big-wig at the time of
+the ‘Fifteen, and was afterwards drowned in Dundee harbour while going on
+board his ship.  With this exception, the generations of the Smiths
+present no conceivable interest even to a descendant; and Thomas, of
+Edinburgh, was the first to issue from respectable obscurity.  His
+father, a skipper out of Broughty Ferry, was drowned at sea while Thomas
+was still young.  He seems to have owned a ship or two—whalers, I
+suppose, or coasters—and to have been a member of the Dundee Trinity
+House, whatever that implies.  On his death the widow remained in
+Broughty, and the son came to push his future in Edinburgh.  There is a
+story told of him in the family which I repeat here because I shall have
+to tell later on a similar, but more perfectly authenticated, experience
+of his stepson, Robert Stevenson.  Word reached Thomas that his mother
+was unwell, and he prepared to leave for Broughty on the morrow.  It was
+between two and three in the morning, and the early northern daylight was
+already clear, when he awoke and beheld the curtains at the bed-foot
+drawn aside and his mother appear in the interval, smile upon him for a
+moment, and then vanish.  The sequel is stereo-type; he took the time by
+his watch, and arrived at Broughty to learn it was the very moment of her
+death.  The incident is at least curious in having happened to such a
+person—as the tale is being told of him.  In all else, he appears as a
+man ardent, passionate, practical, designed for affairs and prospering in
+them far beyond the average.  He founded a solid business in lamps and
+oils, and was the sole proprietor of a concern called the Greenside
+Company’s Works—‘a multifarious concern it was,’ writes my cousin,
+Professor Swan, ‘of tinsmiths, coppersmiths, brass-founders, blacksmiths,
+and japanners.’  He was also, it seems, a shipowner and underwriter.  He
+built himself ‘a land’—Nos. 1 and 2 Baxter’s Place, then no such
+unfashionable neighbourhood—and died, leaving his only son in easy
+circumstances, and giving to his three surviving daughters portions of
+five thousand pounds and upwards.  There is no standard of success in
+life; but in one of its meanings, this is to succeed.
+
+In what we know of his opinions, he makes a figure highly characteristic
+of the time.  A high Tory and patriot, a captain—so I find it in my
+notes—of Edinburgh Spearmen, and on duty in the Castle during the Muir
+and Palmer troubles, he bequeathed to his descendants a bloodless sword
+and a somewhat violent tradition, both long preserved.  The judge who sat
+on Muir and Palmer, the famous Braxfield, let fall from the bench the
+_obiter dictum_—‘I never liked the French all my days, but now I hate
+them.’  If Thomas Smith, the Edinburgh Spearman, were in court, he must
+have been tempted to applaud.  The people of that land were his
+abhorrence; he loathed Buonaparte like Antichrist.  Towards the end he
+fell into a kind of dotage; his family must entertain him with games of
+tin soldiers, which he took a childish pleasure to array and overset; but
+those who played with him must be upon their guard, for if his side,
+which was always that of the English against the French, should chance to
+be defeated, there would be trouble in Baxter’s Place.  For these
+opinions he may almost be said to have suffered.  Baptised and brought up
+in the Church of Scotland, he had, upon some conscientious scruple,
+joined the communion of the Baptists.  Like other Nonconformists, these
+were inclined to the Liberal side in politics, and, at least in the
+beginning, regarded Buonaparte as a deliverer.  From the time of his
+joining the Spearmen, Thomas Smith became in consequence a bugbear to his
+brethren in the faith.   ‘They that take the sword shall perish with the
+sword,’ they told him; they gave him ‘no rest’; ‘his position became
+intolerable’; it was plain he must choose between his political and his
+religious tenets; and in the last years of his life, about 1812, he
+returned to the Church of his fathers.
+
+August 1786 was the date of his chief advancement, when, having designed
+a system of oil lights to take the place of the primitive coal fires
+before in use, he was dubbed engineer to the newly-formed Board of
+Northern Lighthouses.  Not only were his fortunes bettered by the
+appointment, but he was introduced to a new and wider field for the
+exercise of his abilities, and a new way of life highly agreeable to his
+active constitution.  He seems to have rejoiced in the long journeys, and
+to have combined them with the practice of field sports.  ‘A tall, stout
+man coming ashore with his gun over his arm’—so he was described to my
+father—the only description that has come down to me by a light-keeper
+old in the service.  Nor did this change come alone.  On the 9th July of
+the same year, Thomas Smith had been left for the second time a widower.
+As he was still but thirty-three years old, prospering in his affairs,
+newly advanced in the world, and encumbered at the time with a family of
+children, five in number, it was natural that he should entertain the
+notion of another wife.  Expeditious in business, he was no less so in
+his choice; and it was not later than June 1787—for my grandfather is
+described as still in his fifteenth year—that he married the widow of
+Alan Stevenson.
+
+The perilous experiment of bringing together two families for once
+succeeded.  Mr. Smith’s two eldest daughters, Jean and Janet, fervent in
+piety, unwearied in kind deeds, were well qualified both to appreciate
+and to attract the stepmother; and her son, on the other hand, seems to
+have found immediate favour in the eyes of Mr. Smith.  It is, perhaps,
+easy to exaggerate the ready-made resemblances; the tired woman must have
+done much to fashion girls who were under ten; the man, lusty and
+opinionated, must have stamped a strong impression on the boy of fifteen.
+But the cleavage of the family was too marked, the identity of character
+and interest produced between the two men on the one hand, and the three
+women on the other, was too complete to have been the result of influence
+alone.  Particular bonds of union must have pre-existed on each side.
+And there is no doubt that the man and the boy met with common ambitions,
+and a common bent, to the practice of that which had not so long before
+acquired the name of civil engineering.
+
+For the profession which is now so thronged, famous, and influential, was
+then a thing of yesterday.  My grandfather had an anecdote of Smeaton,
+probably learned from John Clerk of Eldin, their common friend.  Smeaton
+was asked by the Duke of Argyll to visit the West Highland coast for a
+professional purpose.  He refused, appalled, it seems, by the rough
+travelling.  ‘You can recommend some other fit person?’ asked the Duke.
+‘No,’ said Smeaton, ‘I’m sorry I can’t.’  ‘What!’ cried the Duke, ‘a
+profession with only one man in it!  Pray, who taught you?’  ‘Why,’ said
+Smeaton, ‘I believe I may say I was self-taught, an’t please your grace.’
+Smeaton, at the date of Thomas Smith’s third marriage, was yet living;
+and as the one had grown to the new profession from his place at the
+instrument-maker’s, the other was beginning to enter it by the way of his
+trade.  The engineer of to-day is confronted with a library of acquired
+results; tables and formulae to the value of folios full have been
+calculated and recorded; and the student finds everywhere in front of him
+the footprints of the pioneers.  In the eighteenth century the field was
+largely unexplored; the engineer must read with his own eyes the face of
+nature; he arose a volunteer, from the workshop or the mill, to undertake
+works which were at once inventions and adventures.  It was not a science
+then—it was a living art; and it visibly grew under the eyes and between
+the hands of its practitioners.
+
+The charm of such an occupation was strongly felt by stepfather and
+stepson.  It chanced that Thomas Smith was a reformer; the superiority of
+his proposed lamp and reflectors over open fires of coal secured his
+appointment; and no sooner had he set his hand to the task than the
+interest of that employment mastered him.  The vacant stage on which he
+was to act, and where all had yet to be created—the greatness of the
+difficulties, the smallness of the means intrusted him—would rouse a man
+of his disposition like a call to battle.  The lad introduced by marriage
+under his roof was of a character to sympathise; the public usefulness of
+the service would appeal to his judgment, the perpetual need for fresh
+expedients stimulate his ingenuity.  And there was another attraction
+which, in the younger man at least, appealed to, and perhaps first
+aroused, a profound and enduring sentiment of romance: I mean the
+attraction of the life.  The seas into which his labours carried the new
+engineer were still scarce charted, the coasts still dark; his way on
+shore was often far beyond the convenience of any road; the isles in
+which he must sojourn were still partly savage.  He must toss much in
+boats; he must often adventure on horseback by the dubious bridle-track
+through unfrequented wildernesses; he must sometimes plant his lighthouse
+in the very camp of wreckers; and he was continually enforced to the
+vicissitudes of outdoor life.  The joy of my grandfather in this career
+was strong as the love of woman.  It lasted him through youth and
+manhood, it burned strong in age, and at the approach of death his last
+yearning was to renew these loved experiences.  What he felt himself he
+continued to attribute to all around him.  And to this supposed sentiment
+in others I find him continually, almost pathetically, appealing; often
+in vain.
+
+Snared by these interests, the boy seems to have become almost at once
+the eager confidant and adviser of his new connection; the Church, if he
+had ever entertained the prospect very warmly, faded from his view; and
+at the age of nineteen I find him already in a post of some authority,
+superintending the construction of the lighthouse on the isle of Little
+Cumbrae, in the Firth of Clyde.  The change of aim seems to have caused
+or been accompanied by a change of character.  It sounds absurd to couple
+the name of my grandfather with the word indolence; but the lad who had
+been destined from the cradle to the Church, and who had attained the age
+of fifteen without acquiring more than a moderate knowledge of Latin, was
+at least no unusual student.  And from the day of his charge at Little
+Cumbrae he steps before us what he remained until the end, a man of the
+most zealous industry, greedy of occupation, greedy of knowledge, a stern
+husband of time, a reader, a writer, unflagging in his task of
+self-improvement.  Thenceforward his summers were spent directing works
+and ruling workmen, now in uninhabited, now in half-savage islands; his
+winters were set apart, first at the Andersonian Institution, then at the
+University of Edinburgh to improve himself in mathematics, chemistry,
+natural history, agriculture, moral philosophy, and logic; a bearded
+student—although no doubt scrupulously shaved.  I find one reference to
+his years in class which will have a meaning for all who have studied in
+Scottish Universities.  He mentions a recommendation made by the
+professor of logic.  ‘The high-school men,’ he writes, ‘and _bearded men
+like myself_, were all attention.’  If my grandfather were throughout
+life a thought too studious of the art of getting on, much must be
+forgiven to the bearded and belated student who looked across, with a
+sense of difference, at ‘the high-school men.’  Here was a gulf to be
+crossed; but already he could feel that he had made a beginning, and that
+must have been a proud hour when he devoted his earliest earnings to the
+repayment of the charitable foundation in which he had received the
+rudiments of knowledge.
+
+In yet another way he followed the example of his father-in-law, and from
+1794 to 1807, when the affairs of the Bell Rock made it necessary for him
+to resign, he served in different corps of volunteers.  In the last of
+these he rose to a position of distinction, no less than captain of the
+Grenadier Company, and his colonel, in accepting his resignation,
+entreated he would do them ‘the favour of continuing as an honorary
+member of a corps which has been so much indebted for your zeal and
+exertions.’
+
+To very pious women the men of the house are apt to appear worldly.  The
+wife, as she puts on her new bonnet before church, is apt to sigh over
+that assiduity which enabled her husband to pay the milliner’s bill.  And
+in the household of the Smiths and Stevensons the women were not only
+extremely pious, but the men were in reality a trifle worldly.  Religious
+they both were; conscious, like all Scots, of the fragility and unreality
+of that scene in which we play our uncomprehended parts; like all Scots,
+realising daily and hourly the sense of another will than ours and a
+perpetual direction in the affairs of life.  But the current of their
+endeavours flowed in a more obvious channel.  They had got on so far; to
+get on further was their next ambition—to gather wealth, to rise in
+society, to leave their descendants higher than themselves, to be (in
+some sense) among the founders of families.  Scott was in the same town
+nourishing similar dreams.  But in the eyes of the women these dreams
+would be foolish and idolatrous.
+
+I have before me some volumes of old letters addressed to Mrs. Smith and
+the two girls, her favourites, which depict in a strong light their
+characters and the society in which they moved.
+
+    ‘My very dear and much esteemed Friend,’ writes one correspondent,
+    ‘this day being the anniversary of our acquaintance, I feel inclined
+    to address you; but where shall I find words to express the fealings
+    of a graitful _Heart_, first to the Lord who graiciously inclined you
+    on this day last year to notice an afflicted Strainger providentially
+    cast in your way far from any Earthly friend? . . .  Methinks I shall
+    hear him say unto you, “Inasmuch as ye shewed kindness to my
+    afflicted handmaiden, ye did it unto me.”’
+
+This is to Jean; but the same afflicted lady wrote indifferently to Jean,
+to Janet, and to Ms. Smith, whom she calls ‘my Edinburgh mother.’  It is
+plain the three were as one person, moving to acts of kindness, like the
+Graces, inarmed.  Too much stress must not be laid on the style of this
+correspondence; Clarinda survived, not far away, and may have met the
+ladies on the Calton Hill; and many of the writers appear, underneath the
+conventions of the period, to be genuinely moved.  But what unpleasantly
+strikes a reader is, that these devout unfortunates found a revenue in
+their devotion.  It is everywhere the same tale; on the side of the
+soft-hearted ladies, substantial acts of help; on the side of the
+correspondents, affection, italics, texts, ecstasies, and imperfect
+spelling.  When a midwife is recommended, not at all for proficiency in
+her important art, but because she has ‘a sister whom I [the
+correspondent] esteem and respect, and [who] is a spiritual daughter of
+my Hond Father in the Gosple,’ the mask seems to be torn off, and the
+wages of godliness appear too openly.  Capacity is a secondary matter in
+a midwife, temper in a servant, affection in a daughter, and the
+repetition of a shibboleth fulfils the law.  Common decency is at times
+forgot in the same page with the most sanctified advice and aspiration.
+Thus I am introduced to a correspondent who appears to have been at the
+time the housekeeper at Invermay, and who writes to condole with my
+grandmother in a season of distress.  For nearly half a sheet she keeps
+to the point with an excellent discretion in language then suddenly
+breaks out:
+
+    ‘It was fully my intention to have left this at Martinmass, but the
+    Lord fixes the bounds of our habitation.  I have had more need of
+    patience in my situation here than in any other, partly from the very
+    violent, unsteady, deceitful temper of the Mistress of the Family,
+    and also from the state of the house.  It was in a train of repair
+    when I came here two years ago, and is still in Confusion.  There is
+    above six Thousand Pounds’ worth of Furniture come from London to be
+    put up when the rooms are completely finished; and then, woe be to
+    the Person who is Housekeeper at Invermay!’
+
+And by the tail of the document, which is torn, I see she goes on to ask
+the bereaved family to seek her a new place.  It is extraordinary that
+people should have been so deceived in so careless an impostor; that a
+few sprinkled ‘God willings’ should have blinded them to the essence of
+this venomous letter; and that they should have been at the pains to bind
+it in with others (many of them highly touching) in their memorial of
+harrowing days.  But the good ladies were without guile and without
+suspicion; they were victims marked for the axe, and the religious
+impostors snuffed up the wind as they drew near.
+
+I have referred above to my grandmother; it was no slip of the pen: for
+by an extraordinary arrangement, in which it is hard not to suspect the
+managing hand of a mother, Jean Smith became the wife of Robert
+Stevenson.  Mrs. Smith had failed in her design to make her son a
+minister, and she saw him daily more immersed in business and worldly
+ambition.  One thing remained that she might do: she might secure for him
+a godly wife, that great means of sanctification; and she had two under
+her hand, trained by herself, her dear friends and daughters both in law
+and love—Jean and Janet.  Jean’s complexion was extremely pale, Janet’s
+was florid; my grandmother’s nose was straight, my great-aunt’s aquiline;
+but by the sound of the voice, not even a son was able to distinguish one
+from other.  The marriage of a man of twenty-seven and a girl of twenty
+who have lived for twelve years as brother and sister, is difficult to
+conceive.  It took place, however, and thus in 1799 the family was still
+further cemented by the union of a representative of the male or worldly
+element with one of the female and devout.
+
+This essential difference remained unbridged, yet never diminished the
+strength of their relation.  My grandfather pursued his design of
+advancing in the world with some measure of success; rose to distinction
+in his calling, grew to be the familiar of members of Parliament, judges
+of the Court of Session, and ‘landed gentlemen’; learned a ready address,
+had a flow of interesting conversation, and when he was referred to as ‘a
+highly respectable _bourgeois_,’ resented the description.  My
+grandmother remained to the end devout and unambitious, occupied with her
+Bible, her children, and her house; easily shocked, and associating
+largely with a clique of godly parasites.  I do not know if she called in
+the midwife already referred to; but the principle on which that lady was
+recommended, she accepted fully.  The cook was a godly woman, the butcher
+a Christian man, and the table suffered.  The scene has been often
+described to me of my grandfather sawing with darkened countenance at
+some indissoluble joint—‘Preserve me, my dear, what kind of a reedy,
+stringy beast is this?’—of the joint removed, the pudding substituted and
+uncovered; and of my grandmother’s anxious glance and hasty, deprecatory
+comment, ‘Just mismanaged!’  Yet with the invincible obstinacy of soft
+natures, she would adhere to the godly woman and the Christian man, or
+find others of the same kidney to replace them.  One of her confidants
+had once a narrow escape; an unwieldy old woman, she had fallen from an
+outside stair in a close of the Old Town; and my grandmother rejoiced to
+communicate the providential circumstance that a baker had been passing
+underneath with his bread upon his head.  ‘I would like to know what kind
+of providence the baker thought it!’ cried my grandfather.
+
+But the sally must have been unique.  In all else that I have heard or
+read of him, so far from criticising, he was doing his utmost to honour
+and even to emulate his wife’s pronounced opinions.  In the only letter
+which has come to my hand of Thomas Smith’s, I find him informing his
+wife that he was ‘in time for afternoon church’; similar assurances or
+cognate excuses abound in the correspondence of Robert Stevenson; and it
+is comical and pretty to see the two generations paying the same court to
+a female piety more highly strung: Thomas Smith to the mother of Robert
+Stevenson—Robert Stevenson to the daughter of Thomas Smith.  And if for
+once my grandfather suffered himself to be hurried, by his sense of
+humour and justice, into that remark about the case of Providence and the
+Baker, I should be sorry for any of his children who should have stumbled
+into the same attitude of criticism.  In the apocalyptic style of the
+housekeeper of Invermay, woe be to that person!  But there was no fear;
+husband and sons all entertained for the pious, tender soul the same
+chivalrous and moved affection.  I have spoken with one who remembered
+her, and who had been the intimate and equal of her sons, and I found
+this witness had been struck, as I had been, with a sense of
+disproportion between the warmth of the adoration felt and the nature of
+the woman, whether as described or observed.  She diligently read and
+marked her Bible; she was a tender nurse; she had a sense of humour under
+strong control; she talked and found some amusement at her (or rather at
+her husband’s) dinner-parties.  It is conceivable that even my
+grandmother was amenable to the seductions of dress; at least, I find her
+husband inquiring anxiously about ‘the gowns from Glasgow,’ and very
+careful to describe the toilet of the Princess Charlotte, whom he had
+seen in church ‘in a Pelisse and Bonnet of the same colour of cloth as
+the Boys’ Dress jackets, trimmed with blue satin ribbons; the hat or
+Bonnet, Mr. Spittal said, was a Parisian slouch, and had a plume of three
+white feathers.’  But all this leaves a blank impression, and it is
+rather by reading backward in these old musty letters, which have moved
+me now to laughter and now to impatience, that I glean occasional
+glimpses of how she seemed to her contemporaries, and trace (at work in
+her queer world of godly and grateful parasites) a mobile and responsive
+nature.  Fashion moulds us, and particularly women, deeper than we
+sometimes think; but a little while ago, and, in some circles, women
+stood or fell by the degree of their appreciation of old pictures; in the
+early years of the century (and surely with more reason) a character like
+that of my grandmother warmed, charmed, and subdued, like a strain of
+music, the hearts of the men of her own household.  And there is little
+doubt that Mrs. Smith, as she looked on at the domestic life of her son
+and her stepdaughter, and numbered the heads in their increasing nursery,
+must have breathed fervent thanks to her Creator.
+
+Yet this was to be a family unusually tried; it was not for nothing that
+one of the godly women saluted Miss Janet Smith as ‘a veteran in
+affliction’; and they were all before middle life experienced in that
+form of service.  By the 1st of January 1808, besides a pair of
+still-born twins, children had been born and still survived to the young
+couple.  By the 11th two were gone; by the 28th a third had followed, and
+the two others were still in danger.  In the letters of a former
+nurserymaid—I give her name, Jean Mitchell, _honoris causa_—we are
+enabled to feel, even at this distance of time, some of the bitterness of
+that month of bereavement.
+
+    ‘I have this day received,’ she writes to Miss Janet, ‘the melancholy
+    news of my dear babys’ deaths.  My heart is like to break for my dear
+    Mrs. Stevenson.  O may she be supported on this trying occasion!  I
+    hope her other three babys will be spared to her.  O, Miss Smith, did
+    I think when I parted from my sweet babys that I never was to see
+    them more?’  ‘I received,’ she begins her next, ‘the mournful news of
+    my dear Jessie’s death.  I also received the hair of my three sweet
+    babys, which I will preserve as dear to their memorys and as a token
+    of Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson’s friendship and esteem.  At my leisure
+    hours, when the children are in bed, they occupy all my thoughts, I
+    dream of them.  About two weeks ago I dreamed that my sweet little
+    Jessie came running to me in her usual way, and I took her in my
+    arms.  O my dear babys, were mortal eyes permitted to see them in
+    heaven, we would not repine nor grieve for their loss.’
+
+By the 29th of February, the Reverend John Campbell, a man of obvious
+sense and human value, but hateful to the present biographer, because he
+wrote so many letters and conveyed so little information, summed up this
+first period of affliction in a letter to Miss Smith: ‘Your dear sister
+but a little while ago had a full nursery, and the dear blooming
+creatures sitting around her table filled her breast with hope that one
+day they should fill active stations in society and become an ornament in
+the Church below.  But ah!’
+
+Near a hundred years ago these little creatures ceased to be, and for not
+much less a period the tears have been dried.  And to this day, looking
+in these stitched sheaves of letters, we hear the sound of many
+soft-hearted women sobbing for the lost.  Never was such a massacre of
+the innocents; teething and chincough and scarlet fever and smallpox ran
+the round; and little Lillies, and Smiths, and Stevensons fell like moths
+about a candle; and nearly all the sympathetic correspondents deplore and
+recall the little losses of their own.  ‘It is impossible to describe the
+Heavnly looks of the Dear Babe the three last days of his life,’ writes
+Mrs. Laurie to Mrs. Smith.  ‘Never—never, my dear aunt, could I wish to
+eface the rememberance of this Dear Child.  Never, never, my dear aunt!’
+And so soon the memory of the dead and the dust of the survivors are
+buried in one grave.
+
+There was another death in 1812; it passes almost unremarked; a single
+funeral seemed but a small event to these ‘veterans in affliction’; and
+by 1816 the nursery was full again.  Seven little hopefuls enlivened the
+house; some were growing up; to the elder girl my grandfather already
+wrote notes in current hand at the tail of his letters to his wife: and
+to the elder boys he had begun to print, with laborious care, sheets of
+childish gossip and pedantic applications.  Here, for instance, under
+date of 26th May 1816, is part of a mythological account of London, with
+a moral for the three gentlemen, ‘Messieurs Alan, Robert, and James
+Stevenson,’ to whom the document is addressed:
+
+    ‘There are many prisons here like Bridewell, for, like other large
+    towns, there are many bad men here as well as many good men.  The
+    natives of London are in general not so tall and strong as the people
+    of Edinburgh, because they have not so much pure air, and instead of
+    taking porridge they eat cakes made with sugar and plums.  Here you
+    have thousands of carts to draw timber, thousands of coaches to take
+    you to all parts of the town, and thousands of boats to sail on the
+    river Thames.  But you must have money to pay, otherwise you can get
+    nothing.  Now the way to get money is, become clever men and men of
+    education, by being good scholars.’
+
+From the same absence, he writes to his wife on a Sunday:
+
+    ‘It is now about eight o’clock with me, and I imagine you to be busy
+    with the young folks, hearing the questions [_Anglicé_, catechism],
+    and indulging the boys with a chapter from the large Bible, with
+    their interrogations and your answers in the soundest doctrine.  I
+    hope James is getting his verse as usual, and that Mary is not
+    forgetting her little _hymn_.  While Jeannie will be reading
+    Wotherspoon, or some other suitable and instructive book, I presume
+    our friend, Aunt Mary, will have just arrived with the news of _a
+    throng kirk_ [a crowded church] and a great sermon.  You may mention,
+    with my compliments to my mother, that I was at St. Paul’s to-day,
+    and attended a very excellent service with Mr. James Lawrie.  The
+    text was “Examine and see that ye be in the faith.”’
+
+A twinkle of humour lights up this evocation of the distant scene—the
+humour of happy men and happy homes.  Yet it is penned upon the threshold
+of fresh sorrow.  James and Mary—he of the verse and she of the hymn—did
+not much more than survive to welcome their returning father.  On the
+25th, one of the godly women writes to Janet:
+
+    ‘My dearest beloved madam, when I last parted from you, you was so
+    affected with your affliction [you? or I?] could think of nothing
+    else.  But on Saturday, when I went to inquire after your health, how
+    was I startled to hear that dear James was gone!  Ah, what is this?
+    My dear benefactors, doing so much good to many, to the Lord,
+    suddenly to be deprived of their most valued comforts!  I was thrown
+    into great perplexity, could do nothing but murmur, why these things
+    were done to such a family.  I could not rest, but at midnight,
+    whether spoken [or not] it was presented to my mind—“Those whom ye
+    deplore are walking with me in white.”  I conclude from this the Lord
+    saying to sweet Mrs. Stevenson: “I gave them to be brought up for me:
+    well done, good and faithful! they are fully prepared, and now I must
+    present them to my father and your father, to my God and your God.”’
+
+It would be hard to lay on flattery with a more sure and daring hand.  I
+quote it as a model of a letter of condolence; be sure it would console.
+Very different, perhaps quite as welcome, is this from a lighthouse
+inspector to my grandfather:
+
+    ‘In reading your letter the trickling tear ran down ray cheeks in
+    silent sorrow for your departed dear ones, my sweet little friends.
+    Well do I remember, and you will call to mind, their little innocent
+    and interesting stories.  Often have they come round me and taken me
+    by the hand, but alas!  I am no more destined to behold them.’
+
+The child who is taken becomes canonised, and the looks of the homeliest
+babe seem in the retrospect ‘heavenly the three last days of his life.’
+But it appears that James and Mary had indeed been children more than
+usually engaging; a record was preserved a long while in the family of
+their remarks and ‘little innocent and interesting stories,’ and the blow
+and the blank were the more sensible.
+
+Early the next month Robert Stevenson must proceed upon his voyage of
+inspection, part by land, part by sea.  He left his wife plunged in low
+spirits; the thought of his loss, and still more of her concern, was
+continually present in his mind, and he draws in his letters home an
+interesting picture of his family relations:
+
+                      ‘_Windygates Inn_, _Monday_ (_Postmark July_ 16_th_)
+
+    ‘MY DEAREST JEANNIE,—While the people of the inn are getting me a
+    little bit of something to eat, I sit down to tell you that I had a
+    most excellent passage across the water, and got to Wemyss at
+    mid-day.  I hope the children will be very good, and that Robert will
+    take a course with you to learn his Latin lessons daily; he may,
+    however, read English in company.  Let them have strawberries on
+    Saturdays.’
+
+                                              ‘_Westhaven_, 17_th_ _July_.
+
+    ‘I have been occupied to-day at the harbour of Newport, opposite
+    Dundee, and am this far on my way to Arbroath.  You may tell the boys
+    that I slept last night in Mr. Steadman’s tent.  I found my bed
+    rather hard, but the lodgings were otherwise extremely comfortable.
+    The encampment is on the Fife side of the Tay, immediately opposite
+    to Dundee.  From the door of the tent you command the most beautiful
+    view of the Firth, both up and down, to a great extent.  At night all
+    was serene and still, the sky presented the most beautiful appearance
+    of bright stars, and the morning was ushered in with the song of many
+    little birds.’
+
+                                               ‘_Aberdeen_, _July_ 19_th_.
+
+    ‘I hope, my dear, that you are going out of doors regularly and
+    taking much exercise.  I would have you to _make the markets
+    daily_—and by all means to take a seat in the coach once or twice in
+    the week and see what is going on in town.  [The family were at the
+    sea-side.]  It will be good not to be too great a stranger to the
+    house.  It will be rather painful at first, but as it is to be done,
+    I would have you not to be too strange to the house in town.
+
+    ‘Tell the boys that I fell in with a soldier—his name is
+    Henderson—who was twelve years with Lord Wellington and other
+    commanders.  He returned very lately with only eightpence-halfpenny
+    in his pocket, and found his father and mother both in life, though
+    they had never heard from him, nor he from them.  He carried my
+    great-coat and umbrella a few miles.’
+
+                                            ‘_Fraserburgh_, _July_ 20_th_.
+
+    ‘Fraserburgh is the same dull place which [Auntie] Mary and Jeannie
+    found it.  As I am travelling along the coast which they are
+    acquainted with, you had better cause Robert bring down the map from
+    Edinburgh; and it will be a good exercise in geography for the young
+    folks to trace my course.  I hope they have entered upon the writing.
+    The library will afford abundance of excellent books, which I wish
+    you would employ a little.  I hope you are doing me the favour to go
+    much out with the boys, which will do you much good and prevent them
+    from getting so very much overheated.’
+
+                         [_To the Boys—Printed_.]
+
+    ‘When I had last the pleasure of writing to you, your dear little
+    brother James and your sweet little sister Mary were still with us.
+    But it has pleased God to remove them to another and a better world,
+    and we must submit to the will of Providence.  I must, however,
+    request of you to think sometimes upon them, and to be very careful
+    not to do anything that will displease or vex your mother.  It is
+    therefore proper that you do not roamp [Scottish indeed] too much
+    about, and that you learn your lessons.’
+
+    ‘I went to Fraserburgh and visited Kinnaird Head Lighthouse, which I
+    found in good order.  All this time I travelled upon good roads, and
+    paid many a toll-man by the way; but from Fraserburgh to Banff there
+    is no toll-bars, and the road is so bad that I had to walk up and
+    down many a hill, and for want of bridges the horses had to drag the
+    chaise up to the middle of the wheels in water.  At Banff I saw a
+    large ship of 300 tons lying on the sands upon her beam-ends, and a
+    wreck for want of a good harbour.  Captain Wilson—to whom I beg my
+    compliments—will show you a ship of 300 tons.  At the towns of
+    Macduff, Banff, and Portsoy, many of the houses are built of marble,
+    and the rocks on this part of the coast or sea-side are marble.  But,
+    my dear Boys, unless marble be polished and dressed, it is a very
+    coarse-looking stone, and has no more beauty than common rock.  As a
+    proof of this, ask the favour of your mother to take you to Thomson’s
+    Marble Works in South Leith, and you will see marble in all its
+    stages, and perhaps you may there find Portsoy marble!  The use I
+    wish to make of this is to tell you that, without education, a man is
+    just like a block of rough, unpolished marble.  Notice, in proof of
+    this, how much Mr. Neill and Mr. M’Gregor [the tutor] know, and
+    observe how little a man knows who is not a good scholar.  On my way
+    to Fochabers I passed through many thousand acres of Fir timber, and
+    saw many deer running in these woods.’
+
+                            [_To Mrs. Stevenson_.]
+
+                                              ‘_Inverness_, _July_ 21_st_.
+
+    ‘I propose going to church in the afternoon, and as I have
+    breakfasted late, I shall afterwards take a walk, and dine about six
+    o’clock.  I do not know who is the clergyman here, but I shall think
+    of you all.  I travelled in the mail-coach [from Banff] almost alone.
+    While it was daylight I kept the top, and the passing along a country
+    I had never before seen was a considerable amusement.  But, my dear,
+    you are all much in my thoughts, and many are the objects which
+    recall the recollection of our tender and engaging children we have
+    so recently lost.  We must not, however, repine.  I could not for a
+    moment wish any change of circumstances in their case; and in every
+    comparative view of their state, I see the Lord’s goodness in
+    removing them from an evil world to an abode of bliss; and I must
+    earnestly hope that you may be enabled to take such a view of this
+    affliction as to live in the happy prospect of our all meeting again
+    to part no more—and that under such considerations you are getting up
+    your spirits.  I wish you would walk about, and by all means go to
+    town, and do not sit much at home.’
+
+                                              ‘_Inverness_, _July_ 23_rd_.
+
+    ‘I am duly favoured with your much-valued letter, and I am happy to
+    find that you are so much with my mother, because that sort of
+    variety has a tendency to occupy the mind, and to keep it from
+    brooding too much upon one subject.  Sensibility and tenderness are
+    certainly two of the most interesting and pleasing qualities of the
+    mind.  These qualities are also none of the least of the many
+    endearingments of the female character.  But if that kind of sympathy
+    and pleasing melancholy, which is familiar to us under distress, be
+    much indulged, it becomes habitual, and takes such a hold of the mind
+    as to absorb all the other affections, and unfit us for the duties
+    and proper enjoyments of life.  Resignation sinks into a kind of
+    peevish discontent.  I am far, however, from thinking there is the
+    least danger of this in your case, my dear; for you have been on all
+    occasions enabled to look upon the fortunes of this life as under the
+    direction of a higher power, and have always preserved that propriety
+    and consistency of conduct in all circumstances which endears your
+    example to your family in particular, and to your friends.  I am
+    therefore, my dear, for you to go out much, and to go to the house
+    up-stairs [he means to go up-stairs in the house, to visit the place
+    of the dead children], and to put yourself in the way of the visits
+    of your friends.  I wish you would call on the Miss Grays, and it
+    would be a good thing upon a Saturday to dine with my mother, and
+    take Meggy and all the family with you, and let them have their
+    strawberries in town.  The tickets of one of the _old-fashioned
+    coaches_ would take you all up, and if the evening were good, they
+    could all walk down, excepting Meggy and little David.’
+
+                                    ‘_Inverness_, _July_ 25_th_, 11 _p.m._
+
+    ‘Captain Wemyss, of Wemyss, has come to Inverness to go the voyage
+    with me, and as we are sleeping in a double-bedded room, I must no
+    longer transgress.  You must remember me the best way you can to the
+    children.’
+
+                       ‘_On board of the Lighthouse Yacht_, _July_ 29_th_.
+
+    ‘I got to Cromarty yesterday about mid-day, and went to church.  It
+    happened to be the sacrament there, and I heard a Mr. Smith at that
+    place conclude the service with a very suitable exhortation.  There
+    seemed a great concourse of people, but they had rather an
+    unfortunate day for them at the tent, as it rained a good deal.
+    After drinking tea at the inn, Captain Wemyss accompanied me on
+    board, and we sailed about eight last night.  The wind at present
+    being rather a beating one, I think I shall have an opportunity of
+    standing into the bay of Wick, and leaving this letter to let you
+    know my progress and that I am well.’
+
+                         ‘_Lighthouse Yacht_, _Stornoway_, _August_ 4_th_.
+
+    ‘To-day we had prayers on deck as usual when at sea.  I read the 14th
+    chapter, I think, of Job.  Captain Wemyss has been in the habit of
+    doing this on board his own ship, agreeably to the Articles of War.
+    Our passage round the Cape [Cape Wrath] was rather a cross one, and
+    as the wind was northerly, we had a pretty heavy sea, but upon the
+    whole have made a good passage, leaving many vessels behind us in
+    Orkney.  I am quite well, my dear; and Captain Wemyss, who has much
+    spirit, and who is much given to observation, and a perfect
+    enthusiast in his profession, enlivens the voyage greatly.  Let me
+    entreat you to move about much, and take a walk with the boys to
+    Leith.  I think they have still many places to see there, and I wish
+    you would indulge them in this respect.  Mr. Scales is the best
+    person I know for showing them the sailcloth-weaving, etc., and he
+    would have great pleasure in undertaking this.  My dear, I trust soon
+    to be with you, and that through the goodness of God we shall meet
+    all well.’
+
+    ‘There are two vessels lying here with emigrants for America, each
+    with eighty people on board, at all ages, from a few days to upwards
+    of sixty!  Their prospects must be very forlorn to go with a slender
+    purse for distant and unknown countries.’
+
+                       ‘_Lighthouse Yacht_, _off Greenock_, _Aug._ 18_th_.
+
+    ‘It was after _church-time_ before we got here, but we had prayers
+    upon deck on the way up the Clyde.  This has, upon the whole, been a
+    very good voyage, and Captain Wemyss, who enjoys it much, has been an
+    excellent companion; we met with pleasure, and shall part with
+    regret.’
+
+Strange that, after his long experience, my grandfather should have
+learned so little of the attitude and even the dialect of the
+spiritually-minded; that after forty-four years in a most religious
+circle, he could drop without sense of incongruity from a period of
+accepted phrases to ‘trust his wife was _getting up her spirits_,’ or
+think to reassure her as to the character of Captain Wemyss by mentioning
+that he had read prayers on the deck of his frigate ‘_agreeably to the
+Articles of War_’!  Yet there is no doubt—and it is one of the most
+agreeable features of the kindly series—that he was doing his best to
+please, and there is little doubt that he succeeded.  Almost all my
+grandfather’s private letters have been destroyed.  This correspondence
+has not only been preserved entire, but stitched up in the same covers
+with the works of the godly women, the Reverend John Campbell, and the
+painful Mrs. Ogle.  I did not think to mention the good dame, but she
+comes in usefully as an example.  Amongst the treasures of the ladies of
+my family, her letters have been honoured with a volume to themselves.  I
+read about a half of them myself; then handed over the task to one of
+stauncher resolution, with orders to communicate any fact that should be
+found to illuminate these pages.  Not one was found; it was her only art
+to communicate by post second-rate sermons at second-hand; and such, I
+take it, was the correspondence in which my grandmother delighted.  If I
+am right, that of Robert Stevenson, with his quaint smack of the
+contemporary ‘Sandford and Merton,’ his interest in the whole page of
+experience, his perpetual quest, and fine scent of all that seems
+romantic to a boy, his needless pomp of language, his excellent good
+sense, his unfeigned, unstained, unwearied human kindliness, would seem
+to her, in a comparison, dry and trivial and worldly.  And if these
+letters were by an exception cherished and preserved, it would be for one
+or both of two reasons—because they dealt with and were bitter-sweet
+reminders of a time of sorrow; or because she was pleased, perhaps
+touched, by the writer’s guileless efforts to seem spiritually-minded.
+
+After this date there were two more births and two more deaths, so that
+the number of the family remained unchanged; in all five children
+survived to reach maturity and to outlive their parents.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II: THE SERVICE OF THE NORTHERN LIGHTS
+
+
+I
+
+
+It were hard to imagine a contrast more sharply defined than that between
+the lives of the men and women of this family: the one so chambered, so
+centred in the affections and the sensibilities; the other so active,
+healthy, and expeditious.  From May to November, Thomas Smith and Robert
+Stevenson were on the mail, in the saddle, or at sea; and my grandfather,
+in particular, seems to have been possessed with a demon of activity in
+travel.  In 1802, by direction of the Northern Lighthouse Board, he had
+visited the coast of England from St. Bees, in Cumberland, and round by
+the Scilly Islands to some place undecipherable by me; in all a distance
+of 2500 miles.  In 1806 I find him starting ‘on a tour round the south
+coast of England, from the Humber to the Severn.’  Peace was not long
+declared ere he found means to visit Holland, where he was in time to
+see, in the navy-yard at Helvoetsluys, ‘about twenty of Bonaparte’s
+_English flotilla_ lying in a state of decay, the object of curiosity to
+Englishmen.’  By 1834 he seems to have been acquainted with the coast of
+France from Dieppe to Bordeaux; and a main part of his duty as Engineer
+to the Board of Northern Lights was one round of dangerous and laborious
+travel.
+
+In 1786, when Thomas Smith first received the appointment, the extended
+and formidable coast of Scotland was lighted at a single point—the Isle
+of May, in the jaws of the Firth of Forth, where, on a tower already a
+hundred and fifty years old, an open coal-fire blazed in an iron
+chauffer.  The whole archipelago, thus nightly plunged in darkness, was
+shunned by sea-going vessels, and the favourite courses were north about
+Shetland and west about St. Kilda.  When the Board met, four new lights
+formed the extent of their intentions—Kinnaird Head, in Aberdeenshire, at
+the eastern elbow of the coast; North Ronaldsay, in Orkney, to keep the
+north and guide ships passing to the south’ard of Shetland; Island Glass,
+on Harris, to mark the inner shore of the Hebrides and illuminate the
+navigation of the Minch; and the Mull of Kintyre.  These works were to be
+attempted against obstacles, material and financial, that might have
+staggered the most bold.  Smith had no ship at his command till 1791; the
+roads in those outlandish quarters where his business lay were scarce
+passable when they existed, and the tower on the Mull of Kintyre stood
+eleven months unlighted while the apparatus toiled and foundered by the
+way among rocks and mosses.  Not only had towers to be built and
+apparatus transplanted; the supply of oil must be maintained, and the men
+fed, in the same inaccessible and distant scenes; a whole service, with
+its routine and hierarchy, had to be called out of nothing; and a new
+trade (that of lightkeeper) to be taught, recruited, and organised.  The
+funds of the Board were at the first laughably inadequate.  They embarked
+on their career on a loan of twelve hundred pounds, and their income in
+1789, after relief by a fresh Act of Parliament, amounted to less than
+three hundred.  It must be supposed that the thoughts of Thomas Smith, in
+these early years, were sometimes coloured with despair; and since he
+built and lighted one tower after another, and created and bequeathed to
+his successors the elements of an excellent administration, it may be
+conceded that he was not after all an unfortunate choice for a first
+engineer.
+
+War added fresh complications.  In 1794 Smith came ‘very near to be
+taken’ by a French squadron.  In 1813 Robert Stevenson was cruising about
+the neighbourhood of Cape Wrath in the immediate fear of Commodore
+Rogers.  The men, and especially the sailors, of the lighthouse service
+must be protected by a medal and ticket from the brutal activity of the
+press-gang.  And the zeal of volunteer patriots was at times
+embarrassing.
+
+    ‘I set off on foot,’ writes my grandfather, ‘for Marazion, a town at
+    the head of Mount’s Bay, where I was in hopes of getting a boat to
+    freight.  I had just got that length, and was making the necessary
+    inquiry, when a young man, accompanied by several idle-looking
+    fellows, came up to me, and in a hasty tone said, “Sir, in the king’s
+    name I seize your person and papers.”  To which I replied that I
+    should be glad to see his authority, and know the reason of an
+    address so abrupt.  He told me the want of time prevented his taking
+    regular steps, but that it would be necessary for me to return to
+    Penzance, as I was suspected of being a French spy.  I proposed to
+    submit my papers to the nearest Justice of Peace, who was immediately
+    applied to, and came to the inn where I was.  He seemed to be greatly
+    agitated, and quite at a loss how to proceed.  The complaint
+    preferred against me was “that I had examined the Longships
+    Lighthouse with the most minute attention, and was no less particular
+    in my inquiries at the keepers of the lighthouse regarding the sunk
+    rocks lying off the Land’s End, with the sets of the currents and
+    tides along the coast: that I seemed particularly to regret the
+    situation of the rocks called the Seven Stones, and the loss of a
+    beacon which the Trinity Board had caused to be fixed on the Wolf
+    Rock; that I had taken notes of the bearings of several sunk rocks,
+    and a drawing of the lighthouse, and of Cape Cornwall.  Further, that
+    I had refused the honour of Lord Edgecombe’s invitation to dinner,
+    offering as an apology that I had some particular business on hand.”’
+
+My grandfather produced in answer his credentials and letter of credit;
+but the justice, after perusing them, ‘very gravely observed that they
+were “musty bits of paper,”’ and proposed to maintain the arrest.  Some
+more enlightened magistrates at Penzance relieved him of suspicion and
+left him at liberty to pursue his journey,—‘which I did with so much
+eagerness,’ he adds, ‘that I gave the two coal lights on the Lizard only
+a very transient look.’
+
+Lighthouse operations in Scotland differed essentially in character from
+those in England.  The English coast is in comparison a habitable, homely
+place, well supplied with towns; the Scottish presents hundreds of miles
+of savage islands and desolate moors.  The Parliamentary committee of
+1834, profoundly ignorant of this distinction, insisted with my
+grandfather that the work at the various stations should be let out on
+contract ‘in the neighbourhood,’ where sheep and deer, and gulls and
+cormorants, and a few ragged gillies, perhaps crouching in a bee-hive
+house, made up the only neighbours.  In such situations repairs and
+improvements could only be overtaken by collecting (as my grandfather
+expressed it) a few ‘lads,’ placing them under charge of a foreman, and
+despatching them about the coast as occasion served.  The particular
+danger of these seas increased the difficulty.  The course of the
+lighthouse tender lies amid iron-bound coasts, among tide-races, the
+whirlpools of the Pentland Firth, flocks of islands, flocks of reefs,
+many of them uncharted.  The aid of steam was not yet.  At first in
+random coasting sloop, and afterwards in the cutter belonging to the
+service, the engineer must ply and run amongst these multiplied dangers,
+and sometimes late into the stormy autumn.  For pages together my
+grandfather’s diary preserves a record of these rude experiences; of hard
+winds and rough seas; and of ‘the try-sail and storm-jib, those old
+friends which I never like to see.’  They do not tempt to quotation, but
+it was the man’s element, in which he lived, and delighted to live, and
+some specimen must be presented.  On Friday, September 10th, 1830, the
+_Regent_ lying in Lerwick Bay, we have this entry: ‘The gale increases,
+with continued rain.’  On the morrow, Saturday, 11th, the weather
+appeared to moderate, and they put to sea, only to be driven by evening
+into Levenswick.  There they lay, ‘rolling much,’ with both anchors ahead
+and the square yard on deck, till the morning of Saturday, 18th.
+Saturday and Sunday they were plying to the southward with a ‘strong
+breeze and a heavy sea,’ and on Sunday evening anchored in Otterswick.
+‘Monday, 20th, it blows so fresh that we have no communication with the
+shore.  We see Mr. Rome on the beach, but we cannot communicate with him.
+It blows “mere fire,” as the sailors express it.’  And for three days
+more the diary goes on with tales of davits unshipped, high seas, strong
+gales from the southward, and the ship driven to refuge in Kirkwall or
+Deer Sound.  I have many a passage before me to transcribe, in which my
+grandfather draws himself as a man of minute and anxious exactitude about
+details.  It must not be forgotten that these voyages in the tender were
+the particular pleasure and reward of his existence; that he had in him a
+reserve of romance which carried him delightedly over these hardships and
+perils; that to him it was ‘great gain’ to be eight nights and seven days
+in the savage bay of Levenswick—to read a book in the much agitated
+cabin—to go on deck and hear the gale scream in his ears, and see the
+landscape dark with rain and the ship plunge at her two anchors—and to
+turn in at night and wake again at morning, in his narrow berth, to the
+glamorous and continued voices of the gale.
+
+His perils and escapes were beyond counting.  I shall only refer to two:
+the first, because of the impression made upon himself; the second, from
+the incidental picture it presents of the north islanders.  On the 9th
+October 1794 he took passage from Orkney in the sloop _Elizabeth_ of
+Stromness.  She made a fair passage till within view of Kinnaird Head,
+where, as she was becalmed some three miles in the offing, and wind
+seemed to threaten from the south-east, the captain landed him, to
+continue his journey more expeditiously ashore.  A gale immediately
+followed, and the _Elizabeth_ was driven back to Orkney and lost with all
+hands.  The second escape I have been in the habit of hearing related by
+an eye-witness, my own father, from the earliest days of childhood.  On a
+September night, the _Regent_ lay in the Pentland Firth in a fog and a
+violent and windless swell.  It was still dark, when they were alarmed by
+the sound of breakers, and an anchor was immediately let go.  The peep of
+dawn discovered them swinging in desperate proximity to the Isle of Swona
+{54a} and the surf bursting close under their stern.  There was in this
+place a hamlet of the inhabitants, fisher-folk and wreckers; their huts
+stood close about the head of the beach.  All slept; the doors were
+closed, and there was no smoke, and the anxious watchers on board ship
+seemed to contemplate a village of the dead.  It was thought possible to
+launch a boat and tow the _Regent_ from her place of danger; and with
+this view a signal of distress was made and a gun fired with a red-hot
+poker from the galley.  Its detonation awoke the sleepers.  Door after
+door was opened, and in the grey light of the morning fisher after fisher
+was seen to come forth, yawning and stretching himself, nightcap on head.
+Fisher after fisher, I wrote, and my pen tripped; for it should rather
+stand wrecker after wrecker.  There was no emotion, no animation, it
+scarce seemed any interest; not a hand was raised; but all callously
+awaited the harvest of the sea, and their children stood by their side
+and waited also.  To the end of his life, my father remembered that
+amphitheatre of placid spectators on the beach; and with a special and
+natural animosity, the boys of his own age.  But presently a light air
+sprang up, and filled the sails, and fainted, and filled them again; and
+little by little the _Regent_ fetched way against the swell, and clawed
+off shore into the turbulent firth.
+
+The purpose of these voyages was to effect a landing on open beaches or
+among shelving rocks, not for persons only, but for coals and food, and
+the fragile furniture of light-rooms.  It was often impossible.  In 1831
+I find my grandfather ‘hovering for a week’ about the Pentland Skerries
+for a chance to land; and it was almost always difficult.  Much knack and
+enterprise were early developed among the seamen of the service; their
+management of boats is to this day a matter of admiration; and I find my
+grandfather in his diary depicting the nature of their excellence in one
+happily descriptive phrase, when he remarks that Captain Soutar had
+landed ‘the small stores and nine casks of oil _with all the activity of
+a smuggler_.’  And it was one thing to land, another to get on board
+again.  I have here a passage from the diary, where it seems to have been
+touch-and-go.  ‘I landed at Tarbetness, on the eastern side of the point,
+in a _mere gale or blast of wind_ from west-south-west, at 2 p.m.  It
+blew so fresh that the captain, in a kind of despair, went off to the
+ship, leaving myself and the steward ashore.  While I was in the
+light-room, I felt it shaking and waving, not with the tremor of the Bell
+Rock, but with the _waving of a tree_!  This the light-keepers seemed to
+be quite familiar to, the principal keeper remarking that “it was very
+pleasant,” perhaps meaning interesting or curious.  The captain worked
+the vessel into smooth water with admirable dexterity, and I got on board
+again about 6 p.m. from the other side of the point.’  But not even the
+dexterity of Soutar could prevail always; and my grandfather must at
+times have been left in strange berths and with but rude provision.  I
+may instance the case of my father, who was storm-bound three days upon
+an islet, sleeping in the uncemented and unchimneyed houses of the
+islanders, and subsisting on a diet of nettle-soup and lobsters.
+
+The name of Soutar has twice escaped my pen, and I feel I owe him a
+vignette.  Soutar first attracted notice as mate of a praam at the Bell
+Rock, and rose gradually to be captain of the _Regent_.  He was active,
+admirably skilled in his trade, and a man incapable of fear.  Once, in
+London, he fell among a gang of confidence-men, naturally deceived by his
+rusticity and his prodigious accent.  They plied him with drink—a
+hopeless enterprise, for Soutar could not be made drunk; they proposed
+cards, and Soutar would not play.  At last, one of them, regarding him
+with a formidable countenance, inquired if he were not frightened?  ‘I’m
+no’ very easy fleyed,’ replied the captain.  And the rooks withdrew after
+some easier pigeon.  So many perils shared, and the partial familiarity
+of so many voyages, had given this man a stronghold in my grandfather’s
+estimation; and there is no doubt but he had the art to court and please
+him with much hypocritical skill.  He usually dined on Sundays in the
+cabin.  He used to come down daily after dinner for a glass of port or
+whisky, often in his full rig of sou’-wester, oilskins, and long boots;
+and I have often heard it described how insinuatingly he carried himself
+on these appearances, artfully combining the extreme of deference with a
+blunt and seamanlike demeanour.  My father and uncles, with the devilish
+penetration of the boy, were far from being deceived; and my father,
+indeed, was favoured with an object-lesson not to be mistaken.  He had
+crept one rainy night into an apple-barrel on deck, and from this place
+of ambush overheard Soutar and a comrade conversing in their oilskins.
+The smooth sycophant of the cabin had wholly disappeared, and the boy
+listened with wonder to a vulgar and truculent ruffian.  Of Soutar, I may
+say _tantum vidi_, having met him in the Leith docks now more than thirty
+years ago, when he abounded in the praises of my grandfather, encouraged
+me (in the most admirable manner) to pursue his footprints, and left
+impressed for ever on my memory the image of his own Bardolphian nose.
+He died not long after.
+
+The engineer was not only exposed to the hazards of the sea; he must
+often ford his way by land to remote and scarce accessible places, beyond
+reach of the mail or the post-chaise, beyond even the tracery of the
+bridle-path, and guided by natives across bog and heather.  Up to 1807 my
+grand-father seems to have travelled much on horseback; but he then gave
+up the idea—‘such,’ he writes with characteristic emphasis and capital
+letters, ‘is the Plague of Baiting.’  He was a good pedestrian; at the
+age of fifty-eight I find him covering seventeen miles over the moors of
+the Mackay country in less than seven hours, and that is not bad
+travelling for a scramble.  The piece of country traversed was already a
+familiar track, being that between Loch Eriboll and Cape Wrath; and I
+think I can scarce do better than reproduce from the diary some traits of
+his first visit.  The tender lay in Loch Eriboll; by five in the morning
+they sat down to breakfast on board; by six they were ashore—my
+grandfather, Mr. Slight an assistant, and Soutar of the jolly nose, and
+had been taken in charge by two young gentlemen of the neighbourhood and
+a pair of gillies.  About noon they reached the Kyle of Durness and
+passed the ferry.  By half-past three they were at Cape Wrath—not yet
+known by the emphatic abbreviation of ‘The Cape’—and beheld upon all
+sides of them unfrequented shores, an expanse of desert moor, and the
+high-piled Western Ocean.  The site of the tower was chosen.  Perhaps it
+is by inheritance of blood, but I know few things more inspiriting than
+this location of a lighthouse in a designated space of heather and air,
+through which the sea-birds are still flying.  By 9 p.m. the return
+journey had brought them again to the shores of the Kyle.  The night was
+dirty, and as the sea was high and the ferry-boat small, Soutar and Mr.
+Stevenson were left on the far side, while the rest of the party embarked
+and were received into the darkness.  They made, in fact, a safe though
+an alarming passage; but the ferryman refused to repeat the adventure;
+and my grand-father and the captain long paced the beach, impatient for
+their turn to pass, and tormented with rising anxiety as to the fate of
+their companions.  At length they sought the shelter of a shepherd’s
+house.  ‘We had miserable up-putting,’ the diary continues, ‘and on both
+sides of the ferry much anxiety of mind.  Our beds were clean straw, and
+but for the circumstance of the boat, I should have slept as soundly as
+ever I did after a walk through moss and mire of sixteen hours.’
+
+To go round the lights, even to-day, is to visit past centuries.  The
+tide of tourists that flows yearly in Scotland, vulgarising all where it
+approaches, is still defined by certain barriers.  It will be long ere
+there is a hotel at Sumburgh or a hydropathic at Cape Wrath; it will be
+long ere any _char-à-banc_, laden with tourists, shall drive up to Barra
+Head or Monach, the Island of the Monks.  They are farther from London
+than St. Petersburg, and except for the towers, sounding and shining all
+night with fog-bells and the radiance of the light-room, glittering by
+day with the trivial brightness of white paint, these island and moorland
+stations seem inaccessible to the civilisation of to-day, and even to the
+end of my grandfather’s career the isolation was far greater.  There ran
+no post at all in the Long Island; from the light-house on Barra Head a
+boat must be sent for letters as far as Tobermory, between sixty and
+seventy miles of open sea; and the posts of Shetland, which had surprised
+Sir Walter Scott in 1814, were still unimproved in 1833, when my
+grandfather reported on the subject.  The group contained at the time a
+population of 30,000 souls, and enjoyed a trade which had increased in
+twenty years seven-fold, to between three and four thousand tons.  Yet
+the mails were despatched and received by chance coasting vessels at the
+rate of a penny a letter; six and eight weeks often elapsed between
+opportunities, and when a mail was to be made up, sometimes at a moment’s
+notice, the bellman was sent hastily through the streets of Lerwick.
+Between Shetland and Orkney, only seventy miles apart, there was ‘no
+trade communication whatever.’
+
+Such was the state of affairs, only sixty years ago, with the three
+largest clusters of the Scottish Archipelago; and forty-seven years
+earlier, when Thomas Smith began his rounds, or forty-two, when Robert
+Stevenson became conjoined with him in these excursions, the barbarism
+was deep, the people sunk in superstition, the circumstances of their
+life perhaps unique in history.  Lerwick and Kirkwall, like Guam or the
+Bay of Islands, were but barbarous ports where whalers called to take up
+and to return experienced seamen.  On the outlying islands the clergy
+lived isolated, thinking other thoughts, dwelling in a different country
+from their parishioners, like missionaries in the South Seas.  My
+grandfather’s unrivalled treasury of anecdote was never written down; it
+embellished his talk while he yet was, and died with him when he died;
+and such as have been preserved relate principally to the islands of
+Ronaldsay and Sanday, two of the Orkney group.  These bordered on one of
+the water-highways of civilisation; a great fleet passed annually in
+their view, and of the shipwrecks of the world they were the scene and
+cause of a proportion wholly incommensurable to their size.  In one year,
+1798, my grandfather found the remains of no fewer than five vessels on
+the isle of Sanday, which is scarcely twelve miles long.
+
+    ‘Hardly a year passed,’ he writes, ‘without instances of this kind;
+    for, owing to the projecting points of this strangely formed island,
+    the lowness and whiteness of its eastern shores, and the wonderful
+    manner in which the scanty patches of land are intersected with lakes
+    and pools of water, it becomes, even in daylight, a deception, and
+    has often been fatally mistaken for an open sea.  It had even become
+    proverbial with some of the inhabitants to observe that “if wrecks
+    were to happen, they might as well be sent to the poor isle of Sanday
+    as anywhere else.”  On this and the neighbouring islands the
+    inhabitants had certainly had their share of wrecked goods, for the
+    eye is presented with these melancholy remains in almost every form.
+    For example, although quarries are to be met with generally in these
+    islands, and the stones are very suitable for building dykes
+    (_Anglicé_, walls), yet instances occur of the land being enclosed,
+    even to a considerable extent, with ship-timbers.  The author has
+    actually seen a park (_Anglicé_, meadow) paled round chiefly with
+    cedar-wood and mahogany from the wreck of a Honduras-built ship; and
+    in one island, after the wreck of a ship laden with wine, the
+    inhabitants have been known to take claret to their barley-meal
+    porridge.  On complaining to one of the pilots of the badness of his
+    boat’s sails, he replied to the author with some degree of
+    pleasantry, “Had it been His will that you came na’ here wi’ your
+    lights, we might ‘a’ had better sails to our boats, and more o’ other
+    things.”  It may further be mentioned that when some of Lord Dundas’s
+    farms are to be let in these islands a competition takes place for
+    the lease, and it is _bona fide_ understood that a much higher rent
+    is paid than the lands would otherwise give were it not for the
+    chance of making considerably by the agency and advantages attending
+    shipwrecks on the shores of the respective farms.’
+
+The people of North Ronaldsay still spoke Norse, or, rather, mixed it
+with their English.  The walls of their huts were built to a great
+thickness of rounded stones from the sea-beach; the roof flagged, loaded
+with earth, and perforated by a single hole for the escape of smoke.  The
+grass grew beautifully green on the flat house-top, where the family
+would assemble with their dogs and cats, as on a pastoral lawn; there
+were no windows, and in my grandfather’s expression, ‘there was really no
+demonstration of a house unless it were the diminutive door.’  He once
+landed on Ronaldsay with two friends.  The inhabitants crowded and
+pressed so much upon the strangers that the bailiff, or resident factor
+of the island, blew with his ox-horn, calling out to the natives to stand
+off and let the gentlemen come forward to the laird; upon which one of
+the islanders, as spokesman, called out, “God ha’e us, man! thou needsna
+mak’ sic a noise.  It’s no’ every day we ha’e _three hatted men_ on our
+isle.”’  When the Surveyor of Taxes came (for the first time, perhaps) to
+Sanday, and began in the King’s name to complain of the unconscionable
+swarms of dogs, and to menace the inhabitants with taxation, it chanced
+that my grandfather and his friend, Dr. Patrick Neill, were received by
+an old lady in a Ronaldsay hut.  Her hut, which was similar to the model
+described, stood on a Ness, or point of land jutting into the sea.  They
+were made welcome in the firelit cellar, placed ‘in _casey_ or
+straw-worked chairs, after the Norwegian fashion, with arms, and a canopy
+overhead,’ and given milk in a wooden dish.  These hospitalities attended
+to, the old lady turned at once to Dr. Neill, whom she took for the
+Surveyor of Taxes.  ‘Sir,’ said she, ‘gin ye’ll tell the King that I
+canna keep the Ness free o’ the Bangers (sheep) without twa hun’s, and
+twa guid hun’s too, he’ll pass me threa the tax on dugs.’
+
+This familiar confidence, these traits of engaging simplicity, are
+characters of a secluded people.  Mankind—and, above all, islanders—come
+very swiftly to a bearing, and find very readily, upon one convention or
+another, a tolerable corporate life.  The danger is to those from
+without, who have not grown up from childhood in the islands, but appear
+suddenly in that narrow horizon, life-sized apparitions.  For these no
+bond of humanity exists, no feeling of kinship is awakened by their
+peril; they will assist at a shipwreck, like the fisher-folk of Lunga, as
+spectators, and when the fatal scene is over, and the beach strewn with
+dead bodies, they will fence their fields with mahogany, and, after a
+decent grace, sup claret to their porridge.  It is not wickedness: it is
+scarce evil; it is only, in its highest power, the sense of isolation and
+the wise disinterestedness of feeble and poor races.  Think how many
+viking ships had sailed by these islands in the past, how many vikings
+had landed, and raised turmoil, and broken up the barrows of the dead,
+and carried off the wines of the living; and blame them, if you are able,
+for that belief (which may be called one of the parables of the devil’s
+gospel) that a man rescued from the sea will prove the bane of his
+deliverer.  It might be thought that my grandfather, coming there
+unknown, and upon an employment so hateful to the inhabitants, must have
+run the hazard of his life.  But this were to misunderstand.  He came
+franked by the laird and the clergyman; he was the King’s officer; the
+work was ‘opened with prayer by the Rev. Walter Trail, minister of the
+parish’; God and the King had decided it, and the people of these pious
+islands bowed their heads.  There landed, indeed, in North Ronaldsay,
+during the last decade of the eighteenth century, a traveller whose life
+seems really to have been imperilled.  A very little man of a swarthy
+complexion, he came ashore, exhausted and unshaved, from a long boat
+passage, and lay down to sleep in the home of the parish schoolmaster.
+But he had been seen landing.  The inhabitants had identified him for a
+Pict, as, by some singular confusion of name, they called the dark and
+dwarfish aboriginal people of the land.  Immediately the obscure ferment
+of a race-hatred, grown into a superstition, began to work in their
+bosoms, and they crowded about the house and the room-door with fearful
+whisperings.  For some time the schoolmaster held them at bay, and at
+last despatched a messenger to call my grand-father.  He came: he found
+the islanders beside themselves at this unwelcome resurrection of the
+dead and the detested; he was shown, as adminicular of testimony, the
+traveller’s uncouth and thick-soled boots; he argued, and finding
+argument unavailing, consented to enter the room and examine with his own
+eyes the sleeping Pict.  One glance was sufficient: the man was now a
+missionary, but he had been before that an Edinburgh shopkeeper with whom
+my grandfather had dealt.  He came forth again with this report, and the
+folk of the island, wholly relieved, dispersed to their own houses.  They
+were timid as sheep and ignorant as limpets; that was all.  But the Lord
+deliver us from the tender mercies of a frightened flock!
+
+I will give two more instances of their superstition.  When Sir Walter
+Scott visited the Stones of Stennis, my grandfather put in his pocket a
+hundred-foot line, which he unfortunately lost.
+
+    ‘Some years afterwards,’ he writes, ‘one of my assistants on a visit
+    to the Stones of Stennis took shelter from a storm in a cottage close
+    by the lake; and seeing a box-measuring-line in the bole or sole of
+    the cottage window, he asked the woman where she got this well-known
+    professional appendage.  She said: “O sir, ane of the bairns fand it
+    lang syne at the Stanes; and when drawing it out we took fright, and
+    thinking it had belanged to the fairies, we threw it into the bole,
+    and it has layen there ever since.”’
+
+This is for the one; the last shall be a sketch by the master hand of
+Scott himself:
+
+    ‘At the village of Stromness, on the Orkney main island, called
+    Pomona, lived, in 1814, an aged dame called Bessie Millie, who helped
+    out her subsistence by selling favourable winds to mariners.  He was
+    a venturous master of a vessel who left the roadstead of Stromness
+    without paying his offering to propitiate Bessie Millie!  Her fee was
+    extremely moderate, being exactly sixpence, for which she boiled her
+    kettle and gave the bark the advantage of her prayers, for she
+    disclaimed all unlawful acts.  The wind thus petitioned for was sure,
+    she said, to arrive, though occasionally the mariners had to wait
+    some time for it.  The woman’s dwelling and appearance were not
+    unbecoming her pretensions.  Her house, which was on the brow of the
+    steep hill on which Stromness is founded, was only accessible by a
+    series of dirty and precipitous lanes, and for exposure might have
+    been the abode of Eolus himself, in whose commodities the inhabitant
+    dealt.  She herself was, as she told us, nearly one hundred years
+    old, withered and dried up like a mummy.  A clay-coloured kerchief,
+    folded round her neck, corresponded in colour to her corpse-like
+    complexion.  Two light blue eyes that gleamed with a lustre like that
+    of insanity, an utterance of astonishing rapidity, a nose and chin
+    that almost met together, and a ghastly expression of cunning, gave
+    her the effect of Hecate.  Such was Bessie Millie, to whom the
+    mariners paid a sort of tribute with a feeling between jest and
+    earnest.’
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+From about the beginning of the century up to 1807 Robert Stevenson was
+in partnership with Thomas Smith.  In the last-named year the partnership
+was dissolved; Thomas Smith returning to his business, and my grandfather
+becoming sole engineer to the Board of Northern Lights.
+
+I must try, by excerpts from his diary and correspondence, to convey to
+the reader some idea of the ardency and thoroughness with which he threw
+himself into the largest and least of his multifarious engagements in
+this service.  But first I must say a word or two upon the life of
+lightkeepers, and the temptations to which they are more particularly
+exposed.  The lightkeeper occupies a position apart among men.  In
+sea-towers the complement has always been three since the deplorable
+business in the Eddystone, when one keeper died, and the survivor,
+signalling in vain for relief, was compelled to live for days with the
+dead body.  These usually pass their time by the pleasant human expedient
+of quarrelling; and sometimes, I am assured, not one of the three is on
+speaking terms with any other.  On shore stations, which on the Scottish
+coast are sometimes hardly less isolated, the usual number is two, a
+principal and an assistant.  The principal is dissatisfied with the
+assistant, or perhaps the assistant keeps pigeons, and the principal
+wants the water from the roof.  Their wives and families are with them,
+living cheek by jowl.  The children quarrel; Jockie hits Jimsie in the
+eye, and the mothers make haste to mingle in the dissension.  Perhaps
+there is trouble about a broken dish; perhaps Mrs. Assistant is more
+highly born than Mrs. Principal and gives herself airs; and the men are
+drawn in and the servants presently follow.  ‘Church privileges have been
+denied the keeper’s and the assistant’s servants,’ I read in one case,
+and the eminently Scots periphrasis means neither more nor less than
+excommunication, ‘on account of the discordant and quarrelsome state of
+the families.  The cause, when inquired into, proves to be
+_tittle_-_tattle_ on both sides.’  The tender comes round; the foremen
+and artificers go from station to station; the gossip flies through the
+whole system of the service, and the stories, disfigured and exaggerated,
+return to their own birthplace with the returning tender.  The English
+Board was apparently shocked by the picture of these dissensions.  ‘When
+the Trinity House can,’ I find my grandfather writing at Beachy Head, in
+1834, ‘they do not appoint two keepers, they disagree so ill.  A man who
+has a family is assisted by his family; and in this way, to my experience
+and present observation, the business is very much neglected.  One keeper
+is, in my view, a bad system.  This day’s visit to an English lighthouse
+convinces me of this, as the lightkeeper was walking on a staff with the
+gout, and the business performed by one of his daughters, a girl of
+thirteen or fourteen years of age.’  This man received a hundred a year!
+It shows a different reading of human nature, perhaps typical of Scotland
+and England, that I find in my grandfather’s diary the following pregnant
+entry: ‘_The lightkeepers_, _agreeing ill_, _keep one another to their
+duty_.’  But the Scottish system was not alone founded on this cynical
+opinion.  The dignity and the comfort of the northern lightkeeper were
+both attended to.  He had a uniform to ‘raise him in his own estimation,
+and in that of his neighbour, which is of consequence to a person of
+trust.  The keepers,’ my grandfather goes on, in another place, ‘are
+attended to in all the detail of accommodation in the best style as
+shipmasters; and this is believed to have a sensible effect upon their
+conduct, and to regulate their general habits as members of society.’  He
+notes, with the same dip of ink, that ‘the brasses were not clean, and
+the persons of the keepers not _trig’_; and thus we find him writing to a
+culprit: ‘I have to complain that you are not cleanly in your person, and
+that your manner of speech is ungentle, and rather inclines to rudeness.
+You must therefore take a different view of your duties as a
+lightkeeper.’  A high ideal for the service appears in these expressions,
+and will be more amply illustrated further on.  But even the Scottish
+lightkeeper was frail.  During the unbroken solitude of the winter
+months, when inspection is scarce possible, it must seem a vain toil to
+polish the brass hand-rail of the stair, or to keep an unrewarded vigil
+in the light-room; and the keepers are habitually tempted to the
+beginnings of sloth, and must unremittingly resist.  He who temporises
+with his conscience is already lost.  I must tell here an anecdote that
+illustrates the difficulties of inspection.  In the days of my uncle
+David and my father there was a station which they regarded with
+jealousy.  The two engineers compared notes and were agreed.  The tower
+was always clean, but seemed always to bear traces of a hasty cleansing,
+as though the keepers had been suddenly forewarned.  On inquiry, it
+proved that such was the case, and that a wandering fiddler was the
+unfailing harbinger of the engineer.  At last my father was storm-stayed
+one Sunday in a port at the other side of the island.  The visit was
+quite overdue, and as he walked across upon the Monday morning he
+promised himself that he should at last take the keepers unprepared.
+They were both waiting for him in uniform at the gate; the fiddler had
+been there on Saturday!
+
+My grandfather, as will appear from the following extracts, was much a
+martinet, and had a habit of expressing himself on paper with an almost
+startling emphasis.  Personally, with his powerful voice, sanguine
+countenance, and eccentric and original locutions, he was well qualified
+to inspire a salutary terror in the service.
+
+    ‘I find that the keepers have, by some means or another, got into the
+    way of cleaning too much with rotten-stone and oil.  I take the
+    principal keeper to _task_ on this subject, and make him bring a
+    clean towel and clean one of the brazen frames, which leaves the
+    towel in an odious state.  This towel I put up in a sheet of paper,
+    seal, and take with me to confront Mr. Murdoch, who has just left the
+    station.’  ‘This letter’—a stern enumeration of complaints—‘to lie a
+    week on the light-room book-place, and to be put in the Inspector’s
+    hands when he comes round.’  ‘It is the most painful thing that can
+    occur for me to have a correspondence of this kind with any of the
+    keepers; and when I come to the Lighthouse, instead of having the
+    satisfaction to meet them with approbation, it is distressing when
+    one is obliged to put on a most angry countenance and demeanour; but
+    from such culpable negligence as you have shown there is no avoiding
+    it.  I hold it as a fixed maxim that, when a man or a family put on a
+    slovenly appearance in their houses, stairs, and lanterns, I always
+    find their reflectors, burners, windows, and light in general, ill
+    attended to; and, therefore, I must insist on cleanliness
+    throughout.’  ‘I find you very deficient in the duty of the high
+    tower.  You thus place your appointment as Principal Keeper in
+    jeopardy; and I think it necessary, as an old servant of the Board,
+    to put you upon your guard once for all at this time.  I call upon
+    you to recollect what was formerly and is now said to you.  The state
+    of the backs of the reflectors at the high tower was disgraceful, as
+    I pointed out to you on the spot.  They were as if spitten upon, and
+    greasy finger-marks upon the back straps.  I demand an explanation of
+    this state of things.’  ‘The cause of the Commissioners dismissing
+    you is expressed in the minute; and it must be a matter of regret to
+    you that you have been so much engaged in smuggling, and also that
+    the Reports relative to the cleanliness of the Lighthouse, upon being
+    referred to, rather added to their unfavourable opinion.’  ‘I do not
+    go into the dwelling-house, but severely chide the lightkeepers for
+    the disagreement that seems to subsist among them.’  ‘The families of
+    the two lightkeepers here agree very ill.  I have effected a
+    reconciliation for the present.’  ‘Things are in a very _humdrum_
+    state here.  There is no painting, and in and out of doors no taste
+    or tidiness displayed.  Robert’s wife _greets_ and M’Gregor’s scolds;
+    and Robert is so down-hearted that he says he is unfit for duty.  I
+    told him that if he was to mind wives’ quarrels, and to take them up,
+    the only way was for him and M’Gregor to go down to the point like
+    Sir G. Grant and Lord Somerset.’  ‘I cannot say that I have
+    experienced a more unpleasant meeting than that of the lighthouse
+    folks this morning, or ever saw a stronger example of unfeeling
+    barbarity than the conduct which the ---s exhibited.  These two
+    cold-hearted persons, not contented with having driven the daughter
+    of the poor nervous woman from her father’s house, _both_ kept
+    _pouncing_ at her, lest she should forget her great misfortune.
+    Write me of their conduct.  Do not make any communication of the
+    state of these families at Kinnaird Head, as this would be like
+    _Tale-bearing_.’
+
+There is the great word out.  Tales and Tale-bearing, always with the
+emphatic capitals, run continually in his correspondence.  I will give
+but two instances:—
+
+    ‘Write to David [one of the lightkeepers] and caution him to be more
+    prudent how he expresses himself.  Let him attend his duty to the
+    Lighthouse and his family concerns, and give less heed to
+    Tale-bearers.’  ‘I have not your last letter at hand to quote its
+    date; but, if I recollect, it contains some kind of tales, which
+    nonsense I wish you would lay aside, and notice only the concerns of
+    your family and the important charge committed to you.’
+
+Apparently, however, my grandfather was not himself inaccessible to the
+Tale-bearer, as the following indicates:
+
+    ‘In walking along with Mr. --- , I explain to him that I should be
+    under the necessity of looking more closely into the business here
+    from his conduct at Buddonness, which had given an instance of
+    weakness in the Moral principle which had staggered my opinion of
+    him.  His answer was, “That will be with regard to the lass?”  I told
+    him I was to enter no farther with him upon the subject.’  ‘Mr.
+    Miller appears to be master and man.  I am sorry about this foolish
+    fellow.  Had I known his train, I should not, as I did, have rather
+    forced him into the service.  Upon finding the windows in the state
+    they were, I turned upon Mr. Watt, and especially upon Mr. Stewart.
+    The latter did not appear for a length of time to have visited the
+    light-room.  On asking the cause—did Mr. Watt and him (_sic_)
+    disagree; he said no; but he had got very bad usage from the
+    assistant, “who was a very obstreperous man.”  I could not bring Mr.
+    Watt to put in language his objections to Miller; all I could get was
+    that, he being your friend, and saying he was unwell, he did not like
+    to complain or to push the man; that the man seemed to have no liking
+    to anything like work; that he was unruly; that, being an educated
+    man, he despised them.  I was, however, determined to have out of
+    these _unwilling_ witnesses the language alluded to.  I fixed upon
+    Mr. Stewart as chief; he hedged.  My curiosity increased, and I
+    urged.  Then he said, “What would I think, just exactly, of Mr. Watt
+    being called an Old B-?”  You may judge of my surprise.  There was
+    not another word uttered.  This was quite enough, as coming from a
+    person I should have calculated upon quite different behaviour from.
+    It spoke a volume of the man’s mind and want of principle.’  ‘Object
+    to the keeper keeping a Bull-Terrier dog of ferocious appearance.  It
+    is dangerous, as we land at all times of the night.’  ‘Have only to
+    complain of the storehouse floor being spotted with oil.  Give orders
+    for this being instantly rectified, so that on my return to-morrow I
+    may see things in good order.’  ‘The furniture of both houses wants
+    much rubbing.  Mrs. ---’s carpets are absurd beyond anything I have
+    seen.  I want her to turn the fenders up with the bottom to the
+    fireplace: the carpets, when not likely to be in use, folded up and
+    laid as a hearthrug partly under the fender.’
+
+My grandfather was king in the service to his finger-tips.  All should go
+in his way, from the principal lightkeeper’s coat to the assistant’s
+fender, from the gravel in the garden-walks to the bad smell in the
+kitchen, or the oil-spots on the store-room floor.  It might be thought
+there was nothing more calculated to awake men’s resentment, and yet his
+rule was not more thorough than it was beneficent.  His thought for the
+keepers was continual, and it did not end with their lives.  He tried to
+manage their successions; he thought no pains too great to arrange
+between a widow and a son who had succeeded his father; he was often
+harassed and perplexed by tales of hardship; and I find him writing,
+almost in despair, of their improvident habits and the destitution that
+awaited their families upon a death.  ‘The house being completely
+furnished, they come into possession without necessaries, and they go out
+NAKED.  The insurance seems to have failed, and what next is to be
+tried?’  While they lived he wrote behind their backs to arrange for the
+education of their children, or to get them other situations if they
+seemed unsuitable for the Northern Lights.  When he was at a lighthouse
+on a Sunday he held prayers and heard the children read.  When a keeper
+was sick, he lent him his horse and sent him mutton and brandy from the
+ship.  ‘The assistant’s wife having been this morning confined, there was
+sent ashore a bottle of sherry and a few rusks—a practice which I have
+always observed in this service,’ he writes.  They dwelt, many of them,
+in uninhabited isles or desert forelands, totally cut off from shops.
+Many of them were, besides, fallen into a rustic dishabitude of life, so
+that even when they visited a city they could scarce be trusted with
+their own affairs, as (for example) he who carried home to his children,
+thinking they were oranges, a bag of lemons.  And my grandfather seems to
+have acted, at least in his early years, as a kind of gratuitous agent
+for the service.  Thus I find him writing to a keeper in 1806, when his
+mind was already preoccupied with arrangements for the Bell Rock: ‘I am
+much afraid I stand very unfavourably with you as a man of promise, as I
+was to send several things of which I believe I have more than once got
+the memorandum.  All I can say is that in this respect you are not
+singular.  This makes me no better; but really I have been driven about
+beyond all example in my past experience, and have been essentially
+obliged to neglect my own urgent affairs.’  No servant of the Northern
+Lights came to Edinburgh but he was entertained at Baxter’s Place to
+breakfast.  There, at his own table, my grandfather sat down delightedly
+with his broad-spoken, homespun officers.  His whole relation to the
+service was, in fact, patriarchal; and I believe I may say that
+throughout its ranks he was adored.  I have spoken with many who knew
+him; I was his grandson, and their words may have very well been words of
+flattery; but there was one thing that could not be affected, and that
+was the look and light that came into their faces at the name of Robert
+Stevenson.
+
+In the early part of the century the foreman builder was a young man of
+the name of George Peebles, a native of Anstruther.  My grandfather had
+placed in him a very high degree of confidence, and he was already
+designated to be foreman at the Bell Rock, when, on Christmas-day 1806,
+on his way home from Orkney, he was lost in the schooner _Traveller_.
+The tale of the loss of the _Traveller_ is almost a replica of that of
+the _Elizabeth_ of Stromness; like the _Elizabeth_ she came as far as
+Kinnaird Head, was then surprised by a storm, driven back to Orkney, and
+bilged and sank on the island of Flotta.  It seems it was about the dusk
+of the day when the ship struck, and many of the crew and passengers were
+drowned.  About the same hour, my grandfather was in his office at the
+writing-table; and the room beginning to darken, he laid down his pen and
+fell asleep.  In a dream he saw the door open and George Peebles come in,
+‘reeling to and fro, and staggering like a drunken man,’ with water
+streaming from his head and body to the floor.  There it gathered into a
+wave which, sweeping forward, submerged my grandfather.  Well, no matter
+how deep; versions vary; and at last he awoke, and behold it was a dream!
+But it may be conceived how profoundly the impression was written even on
+the mind of a man averse from such ideas, when the news came of the wreck
+on Flotta and the death of George.
+
+George’s vouchers and accounts had perished with himself; and it appeared
+he was in debt to the Commissioners.  But my grandfather wrote to Orkney
+twice, collected evidence of his disbursements, and proved him to be
+seventy pounds ahead.  With this sum, he applied to George’s brothers,
+and had it apportioned between their mother and themselves.  He
+approached the Board and got an annuity of £5 bestowed on the widow
+Peebles; and we find him writing her a long letter of explanation and
+advice, and pressing on her the duty of making a will.  That he should
+thus act executor was no singular instance.  But besides this we are able
+to assist at some of the stages of a rather touching experiment; no less
+than an attempt to secure Charles Peebles heir to George’s favour.  He is
+despatched, under the character of ‘a fine young man’; recommended to
+gentlemen for ‘advice, as he’s a stranger in your place, and indeed to
+this kind of charge, this being his first outset as Foreman’; and for a
+long while after, the letter-book, in the midst of that thrilling first
+year of the Bell Rock, is encumbered with pages of instruction and
+encouragement.  The nature of a bill, and the precautions that are to be
+observed about discounting it, are expounded at length and with
+clearness.  ‘You are not, I hope, neglecting, Charles, to work the
+harbour at spring-tides; and see that you pay the greatest attention to
+get the well so as to supply the keeper with water, for he is a very
+helpless fellow, and so unfond of hard work that I fear he could do ill
+to keep himself in water by going to the other side for it.’—‘With regard
+to spirits, Charles, I see very little occasion for it.’  These abrupt
+apostrophes sound to me like the voice of an awakened conscience; but
+they would seem to have reverberated in vain in the ears of Charles.
+There was trouble in Pladda, his scene of operations; his men ran away
+from him, there was at least a talk of calling in the Sheriff.  ‘I fear,’
+writes my grandfather, ‘you have been too indulgent, and I am sorry to
+add that men do not answer to be too well treated, a circumstance which I
+have experienced, and which you will learn as you go on in business.’  I
+wonder, was not Charles Peebles himself a case in point?  Either death,
+at least, or disappointment and discharge, must have ended his service in
+the Northern Lights; and in later correspondence I look in vain for any
+mention of his name—Charles, I mean, not Peebles: for as late as 1839 my
+grandfather is patiently writing to another of the family: ‘I am sorry
+you took the trouble of applying to me about your son, as it lies quite
+out of my way to forward his views in the line of his profession as a
+Draper.’
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+A professional life of Robert Stevenson has been already given to the
+world by his son David, and to that I would refer those interested in
+such matters.  But my own design, which is to represent the man, would be
+very ill carried out if I suffered myself or my reader to forget that he
+was, first of all and last of all, an engineer.  His chief claim to the
+style of a mechanical inventor is on account of the Jib or Balance Crane
+of the Bell Rock, which are beautiful contrivances.  But the great merit
+of this engineer was not in the field of engines.  He was above all
+things a projector of works in the face of nature, and a modifier of
+nature itself.  A road to be made, a tower to be built, a harbour to be
+constructed, a river to be trained and guided in its channel—these were
+the problems with which his mind was continually occupied; and for these
+and similar ends he travelled the world for more than half a century,
+like an artist, note-book in hand.
+
+He once stood and looked on at the emptying of a certain oil-tube; he did
+so watch in hand, and accurately timed the operation; and in so doing
+offered the perfect type of his profession.  The fact acquired might
+never be of use: it was acquired: another link in the world’s huge chain
+of processes was brought down to figures and placed at the service of the
+engineer.  ‘The very term mensuration sounds _engineer-like_,’ I find him
+writing; and in truth what the engineer most properly deals with is that
+which can be measured, weighed, and numbered.  The time of any operation
+in hours and minutes, its cost in pounds, shillings, and pence, the
+strain upon a given point in foot-pounds—these are his conquests, with
+which he must continually furnish his mind, and which, after he has
+acquired them, he must continually apply and exercise.  They must be not
+only entries in note-books, to be hurriedly consulted; in the actor’s
+phrase, he must be _stale_ in them; in a word of my grandfather’s, they
+must be ‘fixed in the mind like the ten fingers and ten toes.’
+
+These are the certainties of the engineer; so far he finds a solid
+footing and clear views.  But the province of formulas and constants is
+restricted.  Even the mechanical engineer comes at last to an end of his
+figures, and must stand up, a practical man, face to face with the
+discrepancies of nature and the hiatuses of theory.  After the machine is
+finished, and the steam turned on, the next is to drive it; and
+experience and an exquisite sympathy must teach him where a weight should
+be applied or a nut loosened.  With the civil engineer, more properly so
+called (if anything can be proper with this awkward coinage), the
+obligation starts with the beginning.  He is always the practical man.
+The rains, the winds and the waves, the complexity and the fitfulness of
+nature, are always before him.  He has to deal with the unpredictable,
+with those forces (in Smeaton’s phrase) that ‘are subject to no
+calculation’; and still he must predict, still calculate them, at his
+peril.  His work is not yet in being, and he must foresee its influence:
+how it shall deflect the tide, exaggerate the waves, dam back the
+rain-water, or attract the thunderbolt.  He visits a piece of sea-board;
+and from the inclination and soil of the beach, from the weeds and
+shell-fish, from the configuration of the coast and the depth of
+soundings outside, he must deduce what magnitude of waves is to be looked
+for.  He visits a river, its summer water babbling on shallows; and he
+must not only read, in a thousand indications, the measure of winter
+freshets, but be able to predict the violence of occasional great floods.
+Nay, and more; he must not only consider that which is, but that which
+may be.  Thus I find my grandfather writing, in a report on the North Esk
+Bridge: ‘A less waterway might have sufficed, but the _valleys may come
+to be meliorated by drainage_.’  One field drained after another through
+all that confluence of vales, and we come to a time when they shall
+precipitate by so much a more copious and transient flood, as the gush of
+the flowing drain-pipe is superior to the leakage of a peat.
+
+It is plain there is here but a restricted use for formulas.  In this
+sort of practice, the engineer has need of some transcendental sense.
+Smeaton, the pioneer, bade him obey his ‘feelings’; my father, that
+‘power of estimating obscure forces which supplies a coefficient of its
+own to every rule.’  The rules must be everywhere indeed; but they must
+everywhere be modified by this transcendental coefficient, everywhere
+bent to the impression of the trained eye and the _feelings_ of the
+engineer.  A sentiment of physical laws and of the scale of nature, which
+shall have been strong in the beginning and progressively fortified by
+observation, must be his guide in the last recourse.  I had the most
+opportunity to observe my father.  He would pass hours on the beach,
+brooding over the waves, counting them, noting their least deflection,
+noting when they broke.  On Tweedside, or by Lyne or Manor, we have spent
+together whole afternoons; to me, at the time, extremely wearisome; to
+him, as I am now sorry to think, bitterly mortifying.  The river was to
+me a pretty and various spectacle; I could not see—I could not be made to
+see—it otherwise.  To my father it was a chequer-board of lively forces,
+which he traced from pool to shallow with minute appreciation and
+enduring interest.  ‘That bank was being under-cut,’ he might say.  ‘Why?
+Suppose you were to put a groin out here, would not the _filum fluminis_
+be cast abruptly off across the channel? and where would it impinge upon
+the other shore? and what would be the result?  Or suppose you were to
+blast that boulder, what would happen?  Follow it—use the eyes God has
+given you—can you not see that a great deal of land would be reclaimed
+upon this side?’  It was to me like school in holidays; but to him, until
+I had worn him out with my invincible triviality, a delight.  Thus he
+pored over the engineer’s voluminous handy-book of nature; thus must,
+too, have pored my grand-father and uncles.
+
+But it is of the essence of this knowledge, or this knack of mind, to be
+largely incommunicable.  ‘It cannot be imparted to another,’ says my
+father.  The verbal casting-net is thrown in vain over these evanescent,
+inferential relations. Hence the insignificance of much engineering
+literature.  So far as the science can be reduced to formulas or
+diagrams, the book is to the point; so far as the art depends on intimate
+study of the ways of nature, the author’s words will too often be found
+vapid.  This fact—that engineering looks one way, and literature
+another—was what my grand-father overlooked.  All his life long, his pen
+was in his hand, piling up a treasury of knowledge, preparing himself
+against all possible contingencies.  Scarce anything fell under his
+notice but he perceived in it some relation to his work, and chronicled
+it in the pages of his journal in his always lucid, but sometimes inexact
+and wordy, style.  The Travelling Diary (so he called it) was kept in
+fascicles of ruled paper, which were at last bound up, rudely indexed,
+and put by for future reference.  Such volumes as have reached me contain
+a surprising medley: the whole details of his employment in the Northern
+Lights and his general practice; the whole biography of an enthusiastic
+engineer.  Much of it is useful and curious; much merely otiose; and much
+can only be described as an attempt to impart that which cannot be
+imparted in words.  Of such are his repeated and heroic descriptions of
+reefs; monuments of misdirected literary energy, which leave upon the
+mind of the reader no effect but that of a multiplicity of words and the
+suggested vignette of a lusty old gentleman scrambling among tangle.  It
+is to be remembered that he came to engineering while yet it was in the
+egg and without a library, and that he saw the bounds of that profession
+widen daily.  He saw iron ships, steamers, and the locomotive engine,
+introduced.  He lived to travel from Glasgow to Edinburgh in the inside
+of a forenoon, and to remember that he himself had ‘often been twelve
+hours upon the journey, and his grand-father (Lillie) two days’!  The
+profession was still but in its second generation, and had already broken
+down the barriers of time and space.  Who should set a limit to its
+future encroachments?  And hence, with a kind of sanguine pedantry, he
+pursued his design of ‘keeping up with the day’ and posting himself and
+his family on every mortal subject.  Of this unpractical idealism we
+shall meet with many instances; there was not a trade, and scarce an
+accomplishment, but he thought it should form part of the outfit of an
+engineer; and not content with keeping an encyclopaedic diary himself, he
+would fain have set all his sons to work continuing and extending it.
+They were more happily inspired.  My father’s engineering pocket-book was
+not a bulky volume; with its store of pregnant notes and vital formulas,
+it served him through life, and was not yet filled when he came to die.
+As for Robert Stevenson and the Travelling Diary, I should be ungrateful
+to complain, for it has supplied me with many lively traits for this and
+subsequent chapters; but I must still remember much of the period of my
+study there as a sojourn in the Valley of the Shadow.
+
+The duty of the engineer is twofold—to design the work, and to see the
+work done.  We have seen already something of the vociferous thoroughness
+of the man, upon the cleaning of lamps and the polishing of reflectors.
+In building, in road-making, in the construction of bridges, in every
+detail and byway of his employments, he pursued the same ideal.
+Perfection (with a capital P and violently under-scored) was his design.
+A crack for a penknife, the waste of ‘six-and-thirty shillings,’ ‘the
+loss of a day or a tide,’ in each of these he saw and was revolted by the
+finger of the sloven; and to spirits intense as his, and immersed in
+vital undertakings, the slovenly is the dishonest, and wasted time is
+instantly translated into lives endangered.  On this consistent idealism
+there is but one thing that now and then trenches with a touch of
+incongruity, and that is his love of the picturesque.  As when he laid
+out a road on Hogarth’s line of beauty; bade a foreman be careful, in
+quarrying, not ‘to disfigure the island’; or regretted in a report that
+‘the great stone, called the _Devil in the Hole_, was blasted or broken
+down to make road-metal, and for other purposes of the work.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III: THE BUILDING OF THE BELL ROCK
+
+
+Off the mouths of the Tay and the Forth, thirteen miles from Fifeness,
+eleven from Arbroath, and fourteen from the Red Head of Angus, lies the
+Inchcape or Bell Rock.  It extends to a length of about fourteen hundred
+feet, but the part of it discovered at low water to not more than four
+hundred and twenty-seven.  At a little more than half-flood in fine
+weather the seamless ocean joins over the reef, and at high-water springs
+it is buried sixteen feet.  As the tide goes down, the higher reaches of
+the rock are seen to be clothed by _Conferva rupestris_ as by a sward of
+grass; upon the more exposed edges, where the currents are most swift and
+the breach of the sea heaviest, Baderlock or Henware flourishes; and the
+great Tangle grows at the depth of several fathoms with luxuriance.
+Before man arrived, and introduced into the silence of the sea the smoke
+and clangour of a blacksmith’s shop, it was a favourite resting-place of
+seals.  The crab and lobster haunt in the crevices; and limpets, mussels,
+and the white buckie abound.
+
+According to a tradition, a bell had been once hung upon this rock by an
+abbot of Arbroath, {91a} ‘and being taken down by a sea-pirate, a year
+thereafter he perished upon the same rock, with ship and goods, in the
+righteous judgment of God.’  From the days of the abbot and the
+sea-pirate no man had set foot upon the Inchcape, save fishers from the
+neighbouring coast, or perhaps—for a moment, before the surges swallowed
+them—the unfortunate victims of shipwreck.  The fishers approached the
+rock with an extreme timidity; but their harvest appears to have been
+great, and the adventure no more perilous than lucrative.  In 1800, on
+the occasion of my grandfather’s first landing, and during the two or
+three hours which the ebb-tide and the smooth water allowed them to pass
+upon its shelves, his crew collected upwards of two hundredweight of old
+metal: pieces of a kedge anchor and a cabin stove, crowbars, a hinge and
+lock of a door, a ship’s marking-iron, a piece of a ship’s caboose, a
+soldier’s bayonet, a cannon ball, several pieces of money, a shoe-buckle,
+and the like.  Such were the spoils of the Bell Rock.
+
+From 1794 onward, the mind of my grandfather had been exercised with the
+idea of a light upon this formidable danger.  To build a tower on a sea
+rock, eleven miles from shore, and barely uncovered at low water of
+neaps, appeared a fascinating enterprise.  It was something yet
+unattempted, unessayed; and even now, after it has been lighted for more
+than eighty years, it is still an exploit that has never been repeated.
+{92a}  My grandfather was, besides, but a young man, of an experience
+comparatively restricted, and a reputation confined to Scotland; and when
+he prepared his first models, and exhibited them in Merchants’ Hall, he
+can hardly be acquitted of audacity.  John Clerk of Eldin stood his
+friend from the beginning, kept the key of the model room, to which he
+carried ‘eminent strangers,’ and found words of counsel and encouragement
+beyond price.  ‘Mr. Clerk had been personally known to Smeaton, and used
+occasionally to speak of him to me,’ says my grandfather; and again: ‘I
+felt regret that I had not the opportunity of a greater range of practice
+to fit me for such an undertaking; but I was fortified by an expression
+of my friend Mr. Clerk in one of our conversations. “This work,” said he,
+“is unique, and can be little forwarded by experience of ordinary masonic
+operations.  In this case Smeaton’s ‘Narrative’ must be the text-book,
+and energy and perseverance the pratique.”’
+
+A Bill for the work was introduced into Parliament and lost in the Lords
+in 1802–3.  John Rennie was afterwards, at my grandfather’s suggestion,
+called in council, with the style of chief engineer.  The precise meaning
+attached to these words by any of the parties appears irrecoverable.
+Chief engineer should have full authority, full responsibility, and a
+proper share of the emoluments; and there were none of these for Rennie.
+I find in an appendix a paper which resumes the controversy on this
+subject; and it will be enough to say here that Rennie did not design the
+Bell Rock, that he did not execute it, and that he was not paid for it.
+{94a}  From so much of the correspondence as has come down to me, the
+acquaintance of this man, eleven years his senior, and already famous,
+appears to have been both useful and agreeable to Robert Stevenson.  It
+is amusing to find my grandfather seeking high and low for a brace of
+pistols which his colleague had lost by the way between Aberdeen and
+Edinburgh; and writing to Messrs. Dollond, ‘I have not thought it
+necessary to trouble Mr. Rennie with this order, but _I beg you will see
+to get two minutes of him as he passes your door_’—a proposal calculated
+rather from the latitude of Edinburgh than from London, even in 1807.  It
+is pretty, too, to observe with what affectionate regard Smeaton was held
+in mind by his immediate successors.  ‘Poor old fellow,’ writes Rennie to
+Stevenson, ‘I hope he will now and then take a peep at us, and inspire
+you with fortitude and courage to brave all difficulties and dangers to
+accomplish a work which will, if successful, immortalise you in the
+annals of fame.’  The style might be bettered, but the sentiment is
+charming.
+
+Smeaton was, indeed, the patron saint of the Bell Rock.  Undeterred by
+the sinister fate of Winstanley, he had tackled and solved the problem of
+the Eddystone; but his solution had not been in all respects perfect.  It
+remained for my grand-father to outdo him in daring, by applying to a
+tidal rock those principles which had been already justified by the
+success of the Eddystone, and to perfect the model by more than one
+exemplary departure.  Smeaton had adopted in his floors the principle of
+the arch; each therefore exercised an outward thrust upon the walls,
+which must be met and combated by embedded chains.  My grandfather’s
+flooring-stones, on the other hand, were flat, made part of the outer
+wall, and were keyed and dovetailed into a central stone, so as to bind
+the work together and be positive elements of strength.  In 1703
+Winstanley still thought it possible to erect his strange pagoda, with
+its open gallery, its florid scrolls and candlesticks: like a rich man’s
+folly for an ornamental water in a park.  Smeaton followed; then
+Stevenson in his turn corrected such flaws as were left in Smeaton’s
+design; and with his improvements, it is not too much to say the model
+was made perfect.  Smeaton and Stevenson had between them evolved and
+finished the sea-tower.  No subsequent builder has departed in anything
+essential from the principles of their design.  It remains, and it seems
+to us as though it must remain for ever, an ideal attained.  Every stone
+in the building, it may interest the reader to know, my grandfather had
+himself cut out in the model; and the manner in which the courses were
+fitted, joggled, trenailed, wedged, and the bond broken, is intricate as
+a puzzle and beautiful by ingenuity.
+
+In 1806 a second Bill passed both Houses, and the preliminary works were
+at once begun.  The same year the Navy had taken a great harvest of
+prizes in the North Sea, one of which, a Prussian fishing dogger,
+flat-bottomed and rounded at the stem and stern, was purchased to be a
+floating lightship, and re-named the _Pharos_.  By July 1807 she was
+overhauled, rigged for her new purpose, and turned into the lee of the
+Isle of May.  ‘It was proposed that the whole party should meet in her
+and pass the night; but she rolled from side to side in so extraordinary
+a manner, that even the most seahardy fled.  It was humorously observed
+of this vessel that she was in danger of making a round turn and
+appearing with her keel uppermost; and that she would even turn a
+half-penny if laid upon deck.’  By two o’clock on the morning of the 15th
+July this purgatorial vessel was moored by the Bell Rock.
+
+A sloop of forty tons had been in the meantime built at Leith, and named
+the _Smeaton_; by the 7th of August my grandfather set sail in her—
+
+    ‘carrying with him Mr. Peter Logan, foreman builder, and five
+    artificers selected from their having been somewhat accustomed to the
+    sea, the writer being aware of the distressing trial which the
+    floating light would necessarily inflict upon landsmen from her
+    rolling motion.  Here he remained till the 10th, and, as the weather
+    was favourable, a landing was effected daily, when the workmen were
+    employed in cutting the large seaweed from the sites of the
+    lighthouse and beacon, which were respectively traced with pickaxes
+    upon the rock.  In the meantime the crew of the _Smeaton_ was
+    employed in laying down the several sets of moorings within about
+    half a mile of the rock for the convenience of vessels.  The
+    artificers, having, fortunately, experienced moderate weather,
+    returned to the workyard of Arbroath with a good report of their
+    treatment afloat; when their comrades ashore began to feel some
+    anxiety to see a place of which they had heard so much, and to change
+    the constant operations with the iron and mallet in the process of
+    hewing for an occasional tide’s work on the rock, which they figured
+    to themselves as a state of comparative ease and comfort.’
+
+I am now for many pages to let my grandfather speak for himself, and tell
+in his own words the story of his capital achievement.  The tall quarto
+of 533 pages from which the following narrative has been dug out is
+practically unknown to the general reader, yet good judges have perceived
+its merit, and it has been named (with flattering wit) ‘The Romance of
+Stone and Lime’ and ‘The Robinson Crusoe of Civil Engineering.’  The
+tower was but four years in the building; it took Robert Stevenson, in
+the midst of his many avocations, no less than fourteen to prepare the
+_Account_.  The title-page is a solid piece of literature of upwards of a
+hundred words; the table of contents runs to thirteen pages; and the
+dedication (to that revered monarch, George IV) must have cost him no
+little study and correspondence.  Walter Scott was called in council, and
+offered one miscorrection which still blots the page.  In spite of all
+this pondering and filing, there remain pages not easy to construe, and
+inconsistencies not easy to explain away.  I have sought to make these
+disappear, and to lighten a little the baggage with which my grandfather
+marches; here and there I have rejointed and rearranged a sentence,
+always with his own words, and all with a reverent and faithful hand; and
+I offer here to the reader the true Monument of Robert Stevenson with a
+little of the moss removed from the inscription, and the Portrait of the
+artist with some superfluous canvas cut away.
+
+
+
+I—OPERATIONS OF 1807
+
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 16th Aug.]
+
+Everything being arranged for sailing to the rock on Saturday the 15th,
+the vessel might have proceeded on the Sunday; but understanding that
+this would not be so agreeable to the artificers it was deferred until
+Monday.  Here we cannot help observing that the men allotted for the
+operations at the rock seemed to enter upon the undertaking with a degree
+of consideration which fully marked their opinion as to the hazardous
+nature of the undertaking on which they were about to enter.  They went
+in a body to church on Sunday, and whether it was in the ordinary course,
+or designed for the occasion, the writer is not certain, but the service
+was, in many respects, suitable to their circumstances.
+
+                                                       [Monday, 17th Aug.]
+
+The tide happening to fall late in the evening of Monday the 17th, the
+party, counting twenty-four in number, embarked on board of the _Smeaton_
+about ten o’clock p.m., and sailed from Arbroath with a gentle breeze at
+west.  Our ship’s colours having been flying all day in compliment to the
+commencement of the work, the other vessels in the harbour also saluted,
+which made a very gay appearance.  A number of the friends and
+acquaintances of those on board having been thus collected, the piers,
+though at a late hour, were perfectly crowded, and just as the _Smeaton_
+cleared the harbour, all on board united in giving three hearty cheers,
+which were returned by those on shore in such good earnest, that, in the
+still of the evening, the sound must have been heard in all parts of the
+town, re-echoing from the walls and lofty turrets of the venerable Abbey
+of Aberbrothwick.  The writer felt much satisfaction at the manner of
+this parting scene, though he must own that the present rejoicing was, on
+his part, mingled with occasional reflections upon the responsibility of
+his situation, which extended to the safety of all who should be engaged
+in this perilous work.  With such sensations he retired to his cabin; but
+as the artificers were rather inclined to move about the deck than to
+remain in their confined berths below, his repose was transient, and the
+vessel being small every motion was necessarily heard.  Some who were
+musically inclined occasionally sung; but he listened with peculiar
+pleasure to the sailor at the helm, who hummed over Dibdin’s
+characteristic air:—
+
+    ‘They say there’s a Providence sits up aloft,
+    To keep watch for the life of poor Jack.’
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 18th Aug.]
+
+The weather had been very gentle all night, and, about four in the
+morning of the 18th, the _Smeaton_ anchored.  Agreeably to an arranged
+plan of operations, all hands were called at five o’clock a.m., just as
+the highest part of the Bell Rock began to show its sable head among the
+light breakers, which occasionally whitened with the foaming sea.  The
+two boats belonging to the floating light attended the _Smeaton_, to
+carry the artificers to the rock, as her boat could only accommodate
+about six or eight sitters.  Every one was more eager than his neighbour
+to leap into the boats and it required a good deal of management on the
+part of the coxswains to get men unaccustomed to a boat to take their
+places for rowing and at the same time trimming her properly.  The
+landing-master and foreman went into one boat, while the writer took
+charge of another, and steered it to and from the rock.  This became the
+more necessary in the early stages of the work, as places could not be
+spared for more than two, or at most three seamen to each boat, who were
+always stationed, one at the bow, to use the boat-hook in fending or
+pushing off, and the other at the aftermost oar, to give the proper time
+in rowing, while the middle oars were double-banked, and rowed by the
+artificers.
+
+As the weather was extremely fine, with light airs of wind from the east,
+we landed without difficulty upon the central part of the rock at
+half-past five, but the water had not yet sufficiently left it for
+commencing the work.  This interval, however, did not pass unoccupied.
+The first and last of all the principal operations at the Bell Rock were
+accompanied by three hearty cheers from all hands, and, on occasions like
+the present, the steward of the ship attended, when each man was regaled
+with a glass of rum.  As the water left the rock about six, some began to
+bore the holes for the great bats or holdfasts, for fixing the beams of
+the Beacon-house, while the smith was fully attended in laying out the
+site of his forge, upon a somewhat sheltered spot of the rock, which also
+recommended itself from the vicinity of a pool of water for tempering his
+irons.  These preliminary steps occupied about an hour, and as nothing
+further could be done during this tide towards fixing the forge, the
+workmen gratified their curiosity by roaming about the rock, which they
+investigated with great eagerness till the tide overflowed it.  Those who
+had been sick picked dulse (_Fucus palmatus_), which they ate with much
+seeming appetite; others were more intent upon collecting limpets for
+bait, to enjoy the amusement of fishing when they returned on board of
+the vessel.  Indeed, none came away empty-handed, as everything found
+upon the Bell Rock was considered valuable, being connected with some
+interesting association.  Several coins, and numerous bits of shipwrecked
+iron, were picked up, of almost every description; and, in particular, a
+marking-iron lettered JAMES—a circumstance of which it was thought proper
+to give notice to the public, as it might lead to the knowledge of some
+unfortunate shipwreck, perhaps unheard of till this simple occurrence led
+to the discovery.  When the rock began to be overflowed, the
+landing-master arranged the crews of the respective boats, appointing
+twelve persons to each.  According to a rule which the writer had laid
+down to himself, he was always the last person who left the rock.
+
+In a short time the Bell Rock was laid completely under water, and the
+weather being extremely fine, the sea was so smooth that its place could
+not be pointed out from the appearance of the surface—a circumstance
+which sufficiently demonstrates the dangerous nature of this rock, even
+during the day, and in the smoothest and calmest state of the sea.
+During the interval between the morning and the evening tides, the
+artificers were variously employed in fishing and reading; others were
+busy in drying and adjusting their wet clothes, and one or two amused
+their companions with the violin and German flute.
+
+About seven in the evening the signal bell for landing on the rock was
+again rung, when every man was at his quarters.  In this service it was
+thought more appropriate to use the bell than to _pipe_ to quarters, as
+the use of this instrument is less known to the mechanic than the sound
+of the bell.  The landing, as in the morning, was at the eastern harbour.
+During this tide the seaweed was pretty well cleared from the site of the
+operations, and also from the tracks leading to the different
+landing-places; for walking upon the rugged surface of the Bell Rock,
+when covered with seaweed, was found to be extremely difficult and even
+dangerous.  Every hand that could possibly be occupied now employed in
+assisting the smith to fit up the apparatus for his forge.  At 9 p.m. the
+boats returned to the tender, after other two hours’ work, in the same
+order as formerly—perhaps as much gratified with the success that
+attended the work of this day as with any other in the whole course of
+the operations.  Although it could not he said that the fatigues of this
+day had been great, yet all on board retired early to rest.  The sea
+being calm, and no movement on deck, it was pretty generally remarked in
+the morning that the bell awakened the greater number on board from their
+first sleep; and though this observation was not altogether applicable to
+the writer himself, yet he was not a little pleased to find that thirty
+people could all at once become so reconciled to a night’s quarters
+within a few hundred paces of the Bell Rock.
+
+                                                    [Wednesday, 19th Aug.]
+
+Being extremely anxious at this time to get forward with fixing the
+smith’s forge, on which the progress of the work at present depended, the
+writer requested that he might be called at daybreak to learn the
+landing-master’s opinion of the weather from the appearance of the rising
+sun, a criterion by which experienced seamen can generally judge pretty
+accurately of the state of the weather for the following day.  About five
+o’clock, on coming upon deck, the sun’s upper limb or disc had just begun
+to appear as if rising from the ocean, and in less than a minute he was
+seen in the fullest splendour; but after a short interval he was
+enveloped in a soft cloudy sky, which was considered emblematical of fine
+weather.  His rays had not yet sufficiently dispelled the clouds which
+hid the land from view, and the Bell Rock being still overflowed, the
+whole was one expanse of water.  This scene in itself was highly
+gratifying; and, when the morning bell was tolled, we were gratified with
+the happy forebodings of good weather and the expectation of having both
+a morning and an evening tide’s work on the rock.
+
+The boat which the writer steered happened to be the last which
+approached the rock at this tide; and, in standing up in the stern, while
+at some distance, to see how the leading boat entered the creek, he was
+astonished to observe something in the form of a human figure, in a
+reclining posture, upon one of the ledges of the rock.  He immediately
+steered the boat through a narrow entrance to the eastern harbour, with a
+thousand unpleasant sensations in his mind.  He thought a vessel or boat
+must have been wrecked upon the rock during the night; and it seemed
+probable that the rock might be strewed with dead bodies, a spectacle
+which could not fail to deter the artificers from returning so freely to
+their work.  In the midst of these reveries the boat took the ground at
+an improper landing-place; but, without waiting to push her off, he leapt
+upon the rock, and making his way hastily to the spot which had privately
+given him alarm, he had the satisfaction to ascertain that he had only
+been deceived by the peculiar situation and aspect of the smith’s anvil
+and block, which very completely represented the appearance of a lifeless
+body upon the rock.  The writer carefully suppressed his feelings, the
+simple mention of which might have had a bad effect upon the artificers,
+and his haste passed for an anxiety to examine the apparatus of the
+smith’s forge, left in an unfinished state at evening tide.
+
+In the course of this morning’s work two or three apparently distant
+peals of thunder were heard, and the atmosphere suddenly became thick and
+foggy.  But as the _Smeaton_, our present tender, was moored at no great
+distance from the rock, the crew on board continued blowing with a horn,
+and occasionally fired a musket, so that the boats got to the ship
+without difficulty.
+
+                                                     [Thursday, 20th Aug.]
+
+The wind this morning inclined from the north-east, and the sky had a
+heavy and cloudy appearance, but the sea was smooth, though there was an
+undulating motion on, the surface, which indicated easterly winds, and
+occasioned a slight surf upon the rock.  But the boats found no
+difficulty in landing at the western creek at half-past seven, and, after
+a good tide’s work, left it again about a quarter from eleven.  In the
+evening the artificers landed at half-past seven, and continued till
+half-past eight, having completed the fixing of the smith’s forge, his
+vice, and a wooden board or bench, which were also batted to a ledge of
+the rock, to the great joy of all, under a salute of three hearty cheers.
+From an oversight on the part of the smith, who had neglected to bring
+his tinder-box and matches from the vessel, the work was prevented from
+being continued for at least an hour longer.
+
+The smith’s shop was, of course, in _open space_: the large bellows were
+carried to and from the rock every tide, for the serviceable condition of
+which, together with the tinder-box, fuel, and embers of the former fire,
+the smith was held responsible.  Those who have been placed in situations
+to feel the inconveniency and want of this useful artisan, will be able
+to appreciate his value in a case like the present.  It often happened,
+to our annoyance and disappointment, in the early state of the work, when
+the smith was in the middle of a _favourite heat_ in making some useful
+article, or in sharpening the tools, after the flood-tide had obliged the
+pickmen to strike work, a sea would come rolling over the rocks, dash out
+the fire, and endanger his indispensable implement, the bellows.  If the
+sea was smooth, while the smith often stood at work knee-deep in water,
+the tide rose by imperceptible degrees, first cooling the exterior of the
+fireplace, or hearth, and then quietly blackening and extinguishing the
+fire from below.  The writer has frequently been amused at the perplexing
+anxiety of the blacksmith when coaxing his fire and endeavouring to avert
+the effects of the rising tide.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 21st Aug.]
+
+Everything connected with the forge being now completed, the artificers
+found no want of sharp tools, and the work went forward with great
+alacrity and spirit.  It was also alleged that the rock had a more
+habitable appearance from the volumes of smoke which ascended from the
+smith’s shop and the busy noise of his anvil, the operations of the
+masons, the movements of the boats, and shipping at a distance—all
+contributed to give life and activity to the scene.  This noise and
+traffic had, however, the effect of almost completely banishing the herd
+of seals which had hitherto frequented the rock as a resting-place during
+the period of low water.  The rock seemed to be peculiarly adapted to
+their habits, for, excepting two or three days at neap-tides, a part of
+it always dries at low water—at least, during the summer season—and as
+there was good fishing-ground in the neighbourhood, without a human being
+to disturb or molest them, it had become a very favourite residence of
+these amphibious animals, the writer having occasionally counted from
+fifty to sixty playing about the rock at a time.  But when they came to
+be disturbed every tide, and their seclusion was broken in upon by the
+kindling of great fires, together with the beating of hammers and picks
+during low water, after hovering about for a time, they changed their
+place, and seldom more than one or two were to be seen about the rock
+upon the more detached outlayers which dry partially, whence they seemed
+to look with that sort of curiosity which is observable in these animals
+when following a boat.
+
+                                                     [Saturday, 22nd Aug.]
+
+Hitherto the artificers had remained on board the _Smeaton_, which was
+made fast to one of the mooring buoys at a distance only of about a
+quarter of a mile from the rock, and, of course, a very great conveniency
+to the work.  Being so near, the seamen could never be mistaken as to the
+progress of the tide, or state of the sea upon the rock, nor could the
+boats be much at a loss to pull on board of the vessel during fog, or
+even in very rough weather; as she could be cast loose from her moorings
+at pleasure, and brought to the lee side of the rock.  But the _Smeaton_
+being only about forty register tons, her accommodations were extremely
+limited.  It may, therefore, be easily imagined that an addition of
+twenty-four persons to her own crew must have rendered the situation of
+those on board rather uncomfortable.  The only place for the men’s
+hammocks on board being in the hold, they were unavoidably much crowded:
+and if the weather had required the hatches to be fastened down, so great
+a number of men could not possibly have been accommodated.  To add to
+this evil, the _co-boose_ or cooking-place being upon deck, it would not
+have been possible to have cooked for so large a company in the event of
+bad weather.
+
+The stock of water was now getting short, and some necessaries being also
+wanted for the floating light, the _Smeaton_ was despatched for Arbroath;
+and the writer, with the artificers at the same time shifted their
+quarters from her to the floating light.
+
+Although the rock barely made its appearance at this period of the tides
+till eight o’clock, yet, having now a full mile to row from the floating
+light to the rock, instead of about a quarter of a mile from the moorings
+of the _Smeaton_, it was necessary to be earlier astir, and to form
+different arrangements; breakfast was accordingly served up at seven
+o’clock this morning.  From the excessive motion of the floating light,
+the writer had looked forward rather with anxiety to the removal of the
+workmen to this ship.  Some among them, who had been congratulating
+themselves upon having become sea-hardy while on board the _Smeaton_, had
+a complete relapse upon returning to the floating light.  This was the
+case with the writer.  From the spacious and convenient berthage of the
+floating light, the exchange to the artificers was, in this respect, much
+for the better.  The boats were also commodious, measuring sixteen feet
+in length on the keel, so that, in fine weather, their complement of
+sitters was sixteen persons for each, with which, however, they were
+rather crowded, but she could not stow two boats of larger dimensions.
+When there was what is called a breeze of wind, and a swell in the sea,
+the proper number for each boat could not, with propriety, be rated at
+more than twelve persons.
+
+When the tide-bell rung the boats were hoisted out, and two active seamen
+were employed to keep them from receiving damage alongside.  The floating
+light being very buoyant, was so quick in her motions that when those who
+were about to step from her gunwale into a boat, placed themselves upon a
+cleat or step on the ship’s side, with the man or rail ropes in their
+hands, they had often to wait for some time till a favourable opportunity
+occurred for stepping into the boat.  While in this situation, with the
+vessel rolling from side to side, watching the proper time for letting go
+the man-ropes, it required the greatest dexterity and presence of mind to
+leap into the boats.  One who was rather awkward would often wait a
+considerable period in this position: at one time his side of the ship
+would be so depressed that he would touch the boat to which he belonged,
+while the next sea would elevate him so much that he would see his
+comrades in the boat on the opposite side of the ship, his friends in the
+one boat calling to him to ‘Jump,’ while those in the boat on the other
+side, as he came again and again into their view, would jocosely say,
+‘Are you there yet?  You seem to enjoy a swing.’  In this situation it
+was common to see a person upon each side of the ship for a length of
+time, waiting to quit his hold.
+
+On leaving the rock to-day a trial of seamanship was proposed amongst the
+rowers, for by this time the artificers had become tolerably expert in
+this exercise.  By inadvertency some of the oars provided had been made
+of fir instead of ash, and although a considerable stock had been laid
+in, the workmen, being at first awkward in the art, were constantly
+breaking their oars; indeed it was no uncommon thing to see the broken
+blades of a pair of oars floating astern, in the course of a passage from
+the rock to the vessel.  The men, upon the whole, had but little work to
+perform in the course of a day; for though they exerted themselves
+extremely hard while on the rock, yet, in the early state of the
+operations, this could not be continued for more than three or four hours
+at a time, and as their rations were large—consisting of one pound and a
+half of beef, one pound of ship biscuit, eight ounces oatmeal, two ounces
+barley, two ounces butter, three quarts of small beer, with vegetables
+and salt—they got into excellent spirits when free of sea-sickness.  The
+rowing of the boats against each other became a favourite amusement,
+which was rather a fortunate circumstance, as it must have been attended
+with much inconvenience had it been found necessary to employ a
+sufficient number of sailors for this purpose.  The writer, therefore,
+encouraged the spirit of emulation, and the speed of their respective
+boats became a favourite topic.  Premiums for boat-races were instituted,
+which were contended for with great eagerness, and the respective crews
+kept their stations in the boats with as much precision as they kept
+their beds on board of the ship.  With these and other pastimes, when the
+weather was favourable, the time passed away among the inmates of the
+forecastle and waist of the ship.  The writer looks back with interest
+upon the hours of solitude which he spent in this lonely ship with his
+small library.
+
+This being the first Saturday that the artificers were afloat, all hands
+were served with a glass of rum and water at night, to drink the sailors’
+favourite toast of ‘Wives and Sweethearts.’  It was customary, upon these
+occasions, for the seamen and artificers to collect in the galley, when
+the musical instruments were put in requisition: for, according to
+invariable practice, every man must play a tune, sing a song, or tell a
+story.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 23rd Aug.]
+
+Having, on the previous evening, arranged matters with the landing-master
+as to the business of the day, the signal was rung for all hands at
+half-past seven this morning.  In the early state of the spring-tides the
+artificers went to the rock before breakfast, but as the tides fell later
+in the day, it became necessary to take this meal before leaving the
+ship.  At eight o’clock all hands were assembled on the quarter-deck for
+prayers, a solemnity which was gone through in as orderly a manner as
+circumstances would admit.  When the weather permitted, the flags of the
+ship were hung up as an awning or screen, forming the quarter-deck into a
+distinct compartment; the pendant was also hoisted at the mainmast, and a
+large ensign flag was displayed over the stern; and lastly, the ship’s
+companion, or top of the staircase, was covered with the _flag proper_ of
+the Lighthouse Service, on which the Bible was laid.  A particular toll
+of the bell called all hands to the quarter-deck, when the writer read a
+chapter of the Bible, and, the whole ship’s company being uncovered, he
+also read the impressive prayer composed by the Reverend Dr. Brunton, one
+of the ministers of Edinburgh.
+
+Upon concluding this service, which was attended with becoming reverence
+and attention, all on board retired to their respective berths to
+breakfast, and, at half-past nine, the bell again rung for the artificers
+to take their stations in their respective boats.  Some demur having been
+evinced on board about the propriety of working on Sunday, which had
+hitherto been touched upon as delicately as possible, all hands being
+called aft, the writer, from the quarter-deck, stated generally the
+nature of the service, expressing his hopes that every man would feel
+himself called upon to consider the erection of a lighthouse on the Bell
+Rock, in every point of view, as a work of necessity and mercy.  He knew
+that scruples had existed with some, and these had, indeed, been fairly
+and candidly urged before leaving the shore; but it was expected that,
+after having seen the critical nature of the rock, and the necessity of
+the measure, every man would now be satisfied of the propriety of
+embracing all opportunities of landing on the rock when the state of the
+weather would permit.  The writer further took them to witness that it
+did not proceed from want of respect for the appointments and established
+forms of religion that he had himself adopted the resolution of attending
+the Bell Rock works on the Sunday; but, as he hoped, from a conviction
+that it was his bounden duty, on the strictest principles of morality.
+At the same time it was intimated that, if any were of a different
+opinion, they should be perfectly at liberty to hold their sentiments
+without the imputation of contumacy or disobedience; the only difference
+would be in regard to the pay.
+
+Upon stating this much, he stepped into his boat, requesting all who were
+so disposed to follow him.  The sailors, from their habits, found no
+scruple on this subject, and all of the artificers, though a little
+tardy, also embarked, excepting four of the masons, who, from the
+beginning, mentioned that they would decline working on Sundays.  It may
+here be noticed that throughout the whole of the operations it was
+observable that the men wrought, if possible, with more keenness upon the
+Sundays than at other times from an impression that they were engaged in
+a work of imperious necessity, which required every possible exertion.
+On returning to the floating light, after finishing the tide’s work, the
+boats were received by the part of the ship’s crew left on board with the
+usual attention of handing ropes to the boats and helping the artificers
+on board; but the four masons who had absented themselves from the work
+did not appear upon deck.
+
+                                                       [Monday, 24th Aug.]
+
+The boats left the floating light at a quarter-past nine o’clock this
+morning, and the work began at three-quarters past nine; but as the
+neap-tides were approaching the working time at the rock became gradually
+shorter, and it was now with difficulty that two and a half hours’ work
+could be got.  But so keenly had the workmen entered into the spirit of
+the beacon-house operations, that they continued to bore the holes in the
+rock till some of them were knee-deep in water.
+
+The operations at this time were entirely directed to the erection of the
+beacon, in which every man felt an equal interest, as at this critical
+period the slightest casualty to any of the boats at the rock might have
+been fatal to himself individually, while it was perhaps peculiar to the
+writer more immediately to feel for the safety of the whole.  Each log or
+upright beam of the beacon was to be fixed to the rock by two strong and
+massive bats or stanchions of iron.  These bats, for the fixture of the
+principal and diagonal beams and bracing chains, required fifty-four
+holes, each measuring two inches in diameter and eighteen inches in
+depth.  There had already been so considerable a progress made in boring
+and excavating the holes that the writer’s hopes of getting the beacon
+erected this year began to be more and more confirmed, although it was
+now advancing towards what was considered the latter end of the proper
+working season at the Bell Rock.  The foreman joiner, Mr. Francis Watt,
+was accordingly appointed to attend at the rock to-day, when the
+necessary levels were taken for the step or seat of each particular beam
+of the beacon, that they might be cut to their respective lengths, to
+suit the inequalities of the rock; several of the stanchions were also
+tried into their places, and other necessary observations made, to
+prevent mistakes on the application of the apparatus, and to facilitate
+the operations when the beams came to be set up, which would require to
+be done in the course of a single tide.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 25th Aug.]
+
+We had now experienced an almost unvaried tract of light airs of easterly
+wind, with clear weather in the fore-part of the day and fog in the
+evenings.  To-day, however, it sensibly changed; when the wind came to
+the south-west, and blew a fresh breeze.  At nine a.m. the bell rung, and
+the boats were hoisted out, and though the artificers were now pretty
+well accustomed to tripping up and down the sides of the floating light,
+yet it required more seamanship this morning than usual.  It therefore
+afforded some merriment to those who had got fairly seated in their
+respective boats to see the difficulties which attended their companions,
+and the hesitating manner in which they quitted hold of the man-ropes in
+leaving the ship.  The passage to the rock was tedious, and the boats did
+not reach it till half-past ten.
+
+It being now the period of neap-tides, the water only partially left the
+rock, and some of the men who were boring on the lower ledges of the site
+of the beacon stood knee-deep in water.  The situation of the smith
+to-day was particularly disagreeable, but his services were at all times
+indispensable.  As the tide did not leave the site of the forge, he stood
+in the water, and as there was some roughness on the surface it was with
+considerable difficulty that, with the assistance of the sailors, he was
+enabled to preserve alive his fire; and, while his feet were immersed in
+water, his face was not only scorched but continually exposed to volumes
+of smoke, accompanied with sparks from the fire, which were occasionally
+set up owing to the strength and direction of the wind.
+
+                                                    [Wednesday, 26th Aug.]
+
+The wind had shifted this morning to N.N.W., with rain, and was blowing
+what sailors call a fresh breeze.  To speak, perhaps, somewhat more
+intelligibly to the general reader, the wind was such that a fishing-boat
+could just carry full sail.  But as it was of importance, specially in
+the outset of the business, to keep up the spirit of enterprise for
+landing on all practicable occasions, the writer, after consulting with
+the landing-master, ordered the bell to be rung for embarking, and at
+half-past eleven the boats reached the rock, and left it again at a
+quarter-past twelve, without, however, being able to do much work, as the
+smith could not be set to work from the smallness of the ebb and the
+strong breach of sea, which lashed with great force among the bars of the
+forge.
+
+Just as we were about to leave the rock the wind shifted to the S.W.,
+and, from a fresh gale, it became what seamen term a hard gale, or such
+as would have required the fisherman to take in two or three reefs in his
+sail.  It is a curious fact that the respective tides of ebb and flood
+are apparent upon the shore about an hour and a half sooner than at the
+distance of three or four miles in the offing.  But what seems chiefly
+interesting here is that the tides around this small sunken rock should
+follow exactly the same laws as on the extensive shores of the mainland.
+When the boats left the Bell Rock to-day it was overflowed by the
+flood-tide, but the floating light did not swing round to the flood-tide
+for more than an hour afterwards.  Under this disadvantage the boats had
+to struggle with the ebb-tide and a hard gale of wind, so that it was
+with the greatest difficulty that they reached the floating light.  Had
+this gale happened in spring-tides when the current was strong we must
+have been driven to sea in a very helpless condition.
+
+The boat which the writer steered was considerably behind the other, one
+of the masons having unluckily broken his oar.  Our prospect of getting
+on board, of course, became doubtful, and our situation was rather
+perilous, as the boat shipped so much sea that it occupied two of the
+artificers to bale and clear her of water.  When the oar gave way we were
+about half a mile from the ship, but, being fortunately to windward, we
+got into the wake of the floating light, at about 250 fathoms astern,
+just as the landing-master’s boat reached the vessel.  He immediately
+streamed or floated a life-buoy astern, with a line which was always in
+readiness, and by means of this useful implement the boat was towed
+alongside of the floating light, where, from her rolling motion, it
+required no small management to get safely on board, as the men were much
+worn out with their exertions in pulling from the rock.  On the present
+occasion the crews of both boats were completely drenched with spray, and
+those who sat upon the bottom of the boats to bale them were sometimes
+pretty deep in the water before it could be cleared out.  After getting
+on board, all hands were allowed an extra dram, and, having shifted and
+got a warm and comfortable dinner, the affair, it is believed, was little
+more thought of.
+
+                                                     [Thursday, 27th Aug.]
+
+The tides were now in that state which sailors term the dead of the neap,
+and it was not expected that any part of the rock would be seen above
+water to-day; at any rate, it was obvious, from the experience of
+yesterday, that no work could be done upon it, and therefore the
+artificers were not required to land.  The wind was at west, with light
+breezes, and fine clear weather; and as it was an object with the writer
+to know the actual state of the Bell Rock at neap-tides, he got one of
+the boats manned, and, being accompanied by the landing-master, went to
+it at a quarter-past twelve.  The parts of the rock that appeared above
+water being very trifling, were covered by every wave, so that no landing
+was made.  Upon trying the depth of water with a boathook, particularly
+on the sites of the lighthouse and beacon, on the former, at low water,
+the depth was found to be three feet, and on the central parts of the
+latter it was ascertained to be two feet eight inches.  Having made these
+remarks, the boat returned to the ship at two p.m., and the weather being
+good, the artificers were found amusing themselves with fishing.  The
+_Smeaton_ came from Arbroath this afternoon, and made fast to her
+moorings, having brought letters and newspapers, with parcels of clean
+linen, etc., for the workmen, who were also made happy by the arrival of
+three of their comrades from the workyard ashore.  From these men they
+not only received all the news of the workyard, but seemed themselves to
+enjoy great pleasure in communicating whatever they considered to be
+interesting with regard to the rock.  Some also got letters from their
+friends at a distance, the postage of which for the men afloat was always
+free, so that they corresponded the more readily.
+
+The site of the building having already been carefully traced out with
+the pick-axe, the artificers this day commenced the excavation of the
+rock for the foundation or first course of the lighthouse.  Four men only
+were employed at this work, while twelve continued at the site of the
+beacon-house, at which every possible opportunity was embraced, till this
+essential art of the operations should be completed.
+
+                                                    [Wednesday, 2nd Sept.]
+
+The floating light’s bell rung this morning at half-past four o’clock, as
+a signal for the boats to be got ready, and the landing took place at
+half-past five.  In passing the _Smeaton_ at her moorings near the rock,
+her boat followed with eight additional artificers who had come from
+Arbroath with her at last trip, but there being no room for them in the
+floating light’s boats, they had continued on board.  The weather did not
+look very promising in the morning, the wind blowing pretty fresh from
+W.S.W.: and had it not been that the writer calculated upon having a
+vessel so much at command, in all probability he would not have ventured
+to land.  The _Smeaton_ rode at what sailors call a _salvagee_, with a
+cross-head made fast to the floating buoy.  This kind of attachment was
+found to be more convenient than the mode of passing the hawser through
+the ring of the buoy when the vessel was to be made fast.  She had then
+only to be steered very close to the buoy, when the salvagee was laid
+hold of with a boat-hook, and the _bite_ of the hawser thrown over the
+cross-head.  But the salvagee, by this method, was always left at the
+buoy, and was, of course, more liable to chafe and wear than a hawser
+passed through the ring, which could be wattled with canvas, and shifted
+at pleasure.  The salvagee and cross method is, however, much practised;
+but the experience of this morning showed it to be very unsuitable for
+vessels riding in an exposed situation for any length of time.
+
+Soon after the artificers landed they commenced work; but the wind coming
+to blow hard, the _Smeaton’s_ boat and crew, who had brought their
+complement of eight men to the rock, went off to examine her riding
+ropes, and see that they were in proper order.  The boat had no sooner
+reached the vessel than she went adrift, carrying the boat along with
+her.  By the time that she was got round to make a tack towards the rock,
+she had drifted at least three miles to leeward, with the praam-boat
+astern; and, having both the wind and a tide against her, the writer
+perceived, with no little anxiety, that she could not possibly return to
+the rock till long after its being overflowed; for, owing to the anomaly
+of the tides formerly noticed, the Bell Rock is completely under water
+when the ebb abates to the offing.
+
+In this perilous predicament, indeed, he found himself placed between
+hope and despair—but certainly the latter was by much the most
+predominant feeling of his mind—situate upon a sunken rock in the middle
+of the ocean, which, in the progress of the flood-tide, was to be laid
+under water to the depth of at least twelve feet in a stormy sea.  There
+were this morning thirty-two persons in all upon the rock, with only two
+boats, whose complement, even in good weather, did not exceed twenty-four
+sitters; but to row to the floating light with so much wind, and in so
+heavy a sea, a complement of eight men for each boat was as much as
+could, with propriety, be attempted, so that, in this way, about one-half
+of our number was unprovided for.  Under these circumstances, had the
+writer ventured to despatch one of the boats in expectation of either
+working the _Smeaton_ sooner up towards the rock, or in hopes of getting
+her boat brought to our assistance, this must have given an immediate
+alarm to the artificers, each of whom would have insisted upon taking to
+his own boat, and leaving the eight artificers belonging to the _Smeaton_
+to their chance.  Of course a scuffle might have ensued, and it is hard
+to say, in the ardour of men contending for life, where it might have
+ended.  It has even been hinted to the writer that a party of the
+_pickmen_ were determined to keep exclusively to their own boat against
+all hazards.
+
+The unfortunate circumstance of the _Smeaton_ and her boat having drifted
+was, for a considerable time, only known to the writer and to the
+landing-master, who removed to the farther point of the rock, where he
+kept his eye steadily upon the progress of the vessel.  While the
+artificers were at work, chiefly in sitting or kneeling postures,
+excavating the rock, or boring with the jumpers, and while their numerous
+hammers, with the sound of the smith’s anvil, continued, the situation of
+things did not appear so awful.  In this state of suspense, with almost
+certain destruction at hand, the water began to rise upon those who were
+at work on the lower parts of the sites of the beacon and lighthouse.
+From the run of sea upon the rock, the forge fire was also sooner
+extinguished this morning than usual, and the volumes of smoke having
+ceased, objects in every direction became visible from all parts of the
+rock.  After having had about three ‘hours’ work, the men began, pretty
+generally, to make towards their respective boats for their jackets and
+stockings, when, to their astonishment, instead of three, they found only
+two boats, the third being adrift with the _Smeaton_.  Not a word was
+uttered by any one, but all appeared to be silently calculating their
+numbers, and looking to each other with evident marks of perplexity
+depicted in their countenances.  The landing-master, conceiving that
+blame might be attached to him for allowing the boat to leave the rock,
+still kept at a distance.  At this critical moment the author was
+standing upon an elevated part of Smith’s Ledge, where he endeavoured to
+mark the progress of the _Smeaton_, not a little surprised that her crew
+did not cut the praam adrift, which greatly retarded her way, and amazed
+that some effort was not making to bring at least the boat, and attempt
+our relief.  The workmen looked steadfastly upon the writer, and turned
+occasionally towards the vessel, still far to leeward. {122a}  All this
+passed in the most perfect silence, and the melancholy solemnity of the
+group made an impression never to be effaced from his mind.
+
+The writer had all along been considering of various schemes—providing
+the men could be kept under command—which might be put in practice for
+the general safety, in hopes that the _Smeaton_ might be able to pick up
+the boats to leeward, when they were obliged to leave the rock.  He was,
+accordingly, about to address the artificers on the perilous nature of
+their circumstances, and to propose that all hands should unstrip their
+upper clothing when the higher parts of the rock were laid under water;
+that the seamen should remove every unnecessary weight and encumbrance
+from the boats; that a specified number of men should go into each boat,
+and that the remainder should hang by the gunwales, while the boats were
+to be rowed gently towards the _Smeaton_, as the course to the _Pharos_,
+or floating light, lay rather to windward of the rock.  But when he
+attempted to speak his mouth was so parched that his tongue refused
+utterance, and he now learned by experience that the saliva is as
+necessary as the tongue itself for speech.  He turned to one of the pools
+on the rock and lapped a little water, which produced immediate relief.
+But what was his happiness, when on rising from this unpleasant beverage,
+some one called out, ‘A boat! a boat!’ and, on looking around, at no
+great distance, a large boat was seen through the haze making towards the
+rock.  This at once enlivened and rejoiced every heart.  The timeous
+visitor proved to be James Spink, the Bell Rock pilot, who had come
+express from Arbroath with letters.  Spink had for some time seen the
+_Smeaton_, and had even supposed, from the state of the weather, that all
+hands were on board of her till he approached more nearly and observed
+people upon the rock; but not supposing that the assistance of his boat
+was necessary to carry the artificers off the rock, he anchored on the
+lee-side and began to fish, waiting, as usual, till the letters were sent
+for, as the pilot-boat was too large and unwieldy for approaching the
+rock when there was any roughness or run of the sea at the entrance of
+the landing creeks.
+
+Upon this fortunate change of circumstances, sixteen of the artificers
+were sent, at two trips, in one of the boats, with instructions for Spink
+to proceed with them to the floating light.  This being accomplished, the
+remaining sixteen followed in the two boats belonging to the service of
+the rock.  Every one felt the most perfect happiness at leaving the Bell
+Rock this morning, though a very hard and even dangerous passage to the
+floating light still awaited us, as the wind by this time had increased
+to a pretty hard gale, accompanied with a considerable swell of sea.
+Every one was as completely drenched in water as if he had been dragged
+astern of the boats.  The writer, in particular, being at the helm,
+found, on getting on board, that his face and ears were completely coated
+with a thin film of salt from the sea spray, which broke constantly over
+the bows of the boat.  After much baling of water and severe work at the
+oars, the three boats reached the floating light, where some new
+difficulties occurred in getting on board in safety, owing partly to the
+exhausted state of the men, and partly to the violent rolling of the
+vessel.
+
+As the tide flowed, it was expected that the _Smeaton_ would have got to
+windward; but, seeing that all was safe, after tacking for several hours
+and making little progress, she bore away for Arbroath, with the
+praam-boat.  As there was now too much wind for the pilot-boat to return
+to Arbroath, she was made fast astern of the floating light, and the crew
+remained on board till next day, when the weather moderated.  There can
+be very little doubt that the appearance of James Spink with his boat on
+this critical occasion was the means of preventing the loss of lives at
+the rock this morning.  When these circumstances, some years afterwards,
+came to the knowledge of the Board, a small pension was ordered to our
+faithful pilot, then in his seventieth year; and he still continues to
+wear the uniform clothes and badge of the Lighthouse service.  Spink is a
+remarkably strong man, whose _tout ensemble_ is highly characteristic of
+a North-country fisherman.  He usually dresses in a _pé-jacket_, cut
+after a particular fashion, and wears a large, flat, blue bonnet.  A
+striking likeness of Spink in his pilot-dress, with the badge or insignia
+on his left arm which is characteristic of the boatmen in the service of
+the Northern Lights, has been taken by Howe, and is in the writer’s
+possession.
+
+                                                     [Thursday, 3rd Sept.]
+
+The bell rung this morning at five o’clock, but the writer must
+acknowledge, from the circumstances of yesterday, that its sound was
+extremely unwelcome.  This appears also to have been the feelings of the
+artificers, for when they came to be mustered, out of twenty-six, only
+eight, besides the foreman and seamen, appeared upon deck to accompany
+the writer to the rock.  Such are the baneful effects of anything like
+misfortune or accident connected with a work of this description.  The
+use of argument to persuade the men to embark in cases of this kind would
+have been out of place, as it is not only discomfort, or even the risk of
+the loss of a limb, but life itself that becomes the question.  The
+boats, notwithstanding the thinness of our ranks, left the vessel at
+half-past five.  The rough weather of yesterday having proved but a
+summer’s gale, the wind came to-day in gentle breezes; yet, the
+atmosphere being cloudy, it a not a very favourable appearance.  The
+boats reached the rock at six a.m., and the eight artificers who landed
+were employed in clearing out the bat-holes for the beacon-house, and had
+a very prosperous tide of four hours’ work, being the longest yet
+experienced by half an hour.
+
+The boats left the rock again at ten o’clock, and the weather having
+cleared up as we drew near the vessel, the eighteen artificers who had
+remained on board were observed upon deck, but as the boats approached
+they sought their way below, being quite ashamed of their conduct.  This
+was the only instance of refusal to go to the rock which occurred during
+the whole progress of the work, excepting that of the four men who
+declined working upon Sunday, a case which the writer did not conceive to
+be at all analogous to the present.  It may here be mentioned, much to
+the credit of these four men, that they stood foremost in embarking for
+the rock this morning.
+
+                                                     [Saturday, 5th Sept.]
+
+It was fortunate that a landing was not attempted this evening, for at
+eight o’clock the wind shifted to E.S.E., and at ten it had become a hard
+gale, when fifty fathoms of the floating light’s hempen cable were veered
+out.  The gale still increasing, the ship rolled and laboured
+excessively, and at midnight eighty fathoms of cable were veered out;
+while the sea continued to strike the vessel with a degree of force which
+had not before been experienced.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 6th Sept.]
+
+During the last night there was little rest on board of the _Pharos_, and
+daylight, though anxiously wished for, brought no relief, as the gale
+continued with unabated violence.  The sea struck so hard upon the
+vessel’s bows that it rose in great quantities, or in ‘green seas,’ as
+the sailors termed it, which were carried by the wind as far aft as the
+quarter-deck, and not infrequently over the stern of the ship altogether.
+It fell occasionally so heavily on the skylight of the writer’s cabin,
+though so far aft as to be within five feet of the helm, that the glass
+was broken to pieces before the dead-light could be got into its place,
+so that the water poured down in great quantities.  In shutting out the
+water, the admission of light was prevented, and in the morning all
+continued in the most comfortless state of darkness.  About ten o’clock
+a.m. the wind shifted to N.E., and blew, if possible, harder than before,
+and it was accompanied by a much heavier swell of sea.  In the course of
+the gale, the part of the cable in the hause-hole had been so often
+shifted that nearly the whole length of one of her hempen cables, of 120
+fathoms, had been veered out, besides the chain-moorings.  The cable, for
+its preservation, was also carefully served or wattled with pieces of
+canvas round the windlass, and with leather well greased in the
+hause-hole.  In this state things remained during the whole day, every
+sea which struck the vessel—and the seas followed each other in close
+succession—causing her to shake, and all on board occasionally to
+tremble.  At each of these strokes of the sea the rolling and pitching of
+the vessel ceased for a time, and her motion was felt as if she had
+either broke adrift before the wind or were in the act of sinking; but,
+when another sea came, she ranged up against it with great force, and
+this became the regular intimation of our being still riding at anchor.
+
+About eleven o’clock, the writer with some difficulty got out of bed,
+but, in attempting to dress, he was thrown twice upon the floor at the
+opposite end of the cabin.  In an undressed state he made shift to get
+about half-way up the companion-stairs, with an intention to observe the
+state of the sea and of the ship upon deck; but he no sooner looked over
+the companion than a heavy sea struck the vessel, which fell on the
+quarter-deck, and rushed downstairs in the officers’ cabin in so
+considerable a quantity that it was found necessary to lift one of the
+scuttles in the floor, to let the water into the limbers of the ship, as
+it dashed from side to side in such a manner as to run into the lower
+tier of beds.  Having been foiled in this attempt, and being completely
+wetted, he again got below and went to bed.  In this state of the weather
+the seamen had to move about the necessary or indispensable duties of the
+ship with the most cautious use both of hands and feet, while it required
+all the art of the landsman to keep within the precincts of his bed.  The
+writer even found himself so much tossed about that it became necessary,
+in some measure, to shut himself in bed, in order to avoid being thrown
+upon the floor.  Indeed, such was the motion of the ship that it seemed
+wholly impracticable to remain in any other than a lying posture.  On
+deck the most stormy aspect presented itself, while below all was wet and
+comfortless.
+
+ About two o’clock p.m. a great alarm was given throughout the ship from
+the effects of a very heavy sea which struck her, and almost filled the
+waist, pouring down into the berths below, through every chink and
+crevice of the hatches and skylights.  From the motion of the vessel
+being thus suddenly deadened or checked, and from the flowing in of the
+water above, it is believed there was not an individual on board who did
+not think, at the moment, that the vessel had foundered, and was in the
+act of sinking.  The writer could withstand this no longer, and as soon
+as she again began to range to the sea he determined to make another
+effort to get upon deck.  In the first instance, however, he groped his
+way in darkness from his own cabin through the berths of the officers,
+where all was quietness.  He next entered the galley and other
+compartments occupied by the artificers.  Here also all was shut up in
+darkness, the fire having been drowned out in the early part of the gale.
+Several of the artificers were employed in prayer, repeating psalms and
+other devotional exercises in a full tone of voice; others protesting
+that, if they should fortunately get once more on shore, no one should
+ever see them afloat again.  With the assistance of the landing-master,
+the writer made his way, holding on step by step, among the numerous
+impediments which lay in the way.  Such was the creaking noise of the
+bulk-heads or partitions, the dashing of the water, and the whistling
+noise of the winds, that it was hardly possible to break in upon such a
+confusion of sounds.  In one or two instances, anxious and repeated
+inquiries were made by the artificers as to the state of things upon
+deck, to which the captain made the usual answer, that it could not blow
+long in this way, and that we must soon have better weather.  The next
+berth in succession, moving forward in the ship, was that allotted for
+the seamen.  Here the scene was considerably different.  Having reached
+the middle of this darksome berth without its inmates being aware of any
+intrusion, the writer had the consolation of remarking that, although
+they talked of bad weather and the cross accidents of the sea, yet the
+conversation was carried on in that sort of tone and manner which bespoke
+an ease and composure of mind highly creditable to them and pleasing to
+him.  The writer immediately accosted the seamen about the state of the
+ship.  To these inquiries they replied that the vessel being light, and
+having but little hold of the water, no top-rigging, with excellent
+ground-tackle, and everything being fresh and new, they felt perfect
+confidence in their situation.
+
+It being impossible to open any of the hatches in the fore part of the
+ship in communicating with the deck, the watch was changed by passing
+through the several berths to the companion-stair leading to the
+quarter-deck.  The writer, therefore, made the best of his way aft, and,
+on a second attempt to look out, he succeeded, and saw indeed an
+astonishing sight.  The sea or waves appeared to be ten or fifteen feet
+in height of unbroken water, and every approaching billow seemed as if it
+would overwhelm our vessel, but she continued to rise upon the waves and
+to fall between the seas in a very wonderful manner.  It seemed to be
+only those seas which caught her in the act of rising which struck her
+with so much violence and threw such quantities of water aft.  On deck
+there was only one solitary individual looking out, to give the alarm in
+the event of the ship breaking from her moorings.  The seaman on watch
+continued only two hours; he who kept watch at this time was a tall,
+slender man of a black complexion; he had no greatcoat nor over-all of
+any kind, but was simply dressed in his ordinary jacket and trousers; his
+hat was tied under his chin with a napkin, and he stood aft the foremast,
+to which he had lashed himself with a gasket or small rope round his
+waist, to prevent his falling upon deck or being washed overboard.  When
+the writer looked up, he appeared to smile, which afforded a further
+symptom of the confidence of the crew in their ship.  This person on
+watch was as completely wetted as if he had been drawn through the sea,
+which was given as a reason for his not putting on a greatcoat, that he
+might wet as few of his clothes as possible, and have a dry shift when he
+went below.  Upon deck everything that was movable was out of sight,
+having either been stowed below, previous to the gale, or been washed
+overboard.  Some trifling parts of the quarter boards were damaged by the
+breach of the sea; and one of the boats upon deck was about one-third
+full of water, the oyle-hole or drain having been accidently stopped up,
+and part of her gunwale had received considerable injury.  These
+observations were hastily made, and not without occasionally shutting the
+companion, to avoid being wetted by the successive seas which broke over
+the bows and fell upon different parts of the deck according to the
+impetus with which the waves struck the vessel.  By this time it was
+about three o’clock in the afternoon, and the gale, which had now
+continued with unabated force for twenty-seven hours, had not the least
+appearance of going off.
+
+In the dismal prospect of undergoing another night like the last, and
+being in imminent hazard of parting from our cable, the writer thought it
+necessary to advise with the master and officers of the ship as to the
+probable event of the vessel’s drifting from her moorings.  They
+severally gave it as their opinion that we had now every chance of riding
+out the gale, which, in all probability, could not continue with the same
+fury many hours longer; and that even if she should part from her anchor,
+the storm-sails had been laid to hand, and could be bent in a very short
+time.  They further stated that from the direction of the wind being
+N.E., she would sail up the Firth of Forth to Leith Roads.  But if this
+should appear doubtful, after passing the Island and Light of May, it
+might be advisable at once to steer for Tyningham Sands, on the western
+side of Dunbar, and there run the vessel ashore.  If this should happen
+at the time of high-water, or during the ebbing of the tide, they were of
+opinion, from the flatness and strength of the floating light, that no
+danger would attend her taking the ground, even with a very heavy sea.
+The writer, seeing the confidence which these gentlemen possessed with
+regard to the situation of things, found himself as much relieved with
+this conversation as he had previously been with the seeming indifference
+of the forecastle men, and the smile of the watch upon deck, though
+literally lashed to the foremast.  From this time he felt himself almost
+perfectly at ease; at any rate, he was entirely resigned to the ultimate
+result.
+
+About six o’clock in the evening the ship’s company was heard moving upon
+deck, which on the present occasion was rather the cause of alarm.  The
+writer accordingly rang his bell to know what was the matter, when he was
+informed by the steward that the weather looked considerably better, and
+that the men upon deck were endeavouring to ship the smoke-funnel of the
+galley that the people might get some meat.  This was a more favourable
+account than had been anticipated.  During the last twenty-one hours he
+himself had not only had nothing to eat, but he had almost never passed a
+thought on the subject.  Upon the mention of a change of weather, he sent
+the steward to learn how the artificers felt, and on his return he stated
+that they now seemed to be all very happy, since the cook had begun to
+light the galley-fire and make preparations for the suet-pudding of
+Sunday, which was the only dish to be attempted for the mess, from the
+ease with which it could both be cooked and served up.
+
+The principal change felt upon the ship as the wind abated was her
+increased rolling motion, but the pitching was much diminished, and now
+hardly any sea came farther aft than the foremast: but she rolled so
+extremely hard as frequently to dip and take in water over the gunwales
+and rails in the waist.  By nine o’clock all hands had been refreshed by
+the exertions of the cook and steward, and were happy in the prospect of
+the worst of the gale being over.  The usual complement of men was also
+now set on watch, and more quietness was experienced throughout the ship.
+Although the previous night had been a very restless one, it had not the
+effect of inducing repose in the writer’s berth on the succeeding night;
+for having been so much tossed about in bed during the last thirty hours,
+he found no easy spot to turn to, and his body was all sore to the touch,
+which ill accorded with the unyielding materials with which his bed-place
+was surrounded.
+
+                                                       [Monday, 7th Sept.]
+
+This morning, about eight o’clock, the writer was agreeably surprised to
+see the scuttle of his cabin sky-light removed, and the bright rays of
+the sun admitted.  Although the ship continued to roll excessively, and
+the sea was still running very high, yet the ordinary business on board
+seemed to be going forward on deck.  It was impossible to steady a
+telescope, so as to look minutely at the progress of the waves and trace
+their breach upon the Bell Rock; but the height to which the
+cross-running waves rose in sprays when they met each other was truly
+grand, and the continued roar and noise of the sea was very perceptible
+to the ear.  To estimate the height of the sprays at forty or fifty feet
+would surely be within the mark.  Those of the workmen who were not much
+afflicted with sea-sickness, came upon deck, and the wetness below being
+dried up, the cabins were again brought into a habitable state.  Every
+one seemed to meet as if after a long absence, congratulating his
+neighbour upon the return of good weather.  Little could be said as to
+the comfort of the vessel, but after riding out such a gale, no one felt
+the least doubt or hesitation as to the safety and good condition of her
+moorings.  The master and mate were extremely anxious, however, to heave
+in the hempen cable, and see the state of the clinch or iron ring of the
+chain-cable.  But the vessel rolled at such a rate that the seamen could
+not possibly keep their feet at the windlass nor work the hand-spikes,
+though it had been several times attempted since the gale took off.
+
+About twelve noon, however, the vessel’s motion was observed to be
+considerably less, and the sailors were enabled to walk upon deck with
+some degree of freedom.  But, to the astonishment of every one, it was
+soon discovered that the floating light was adrift!  The windlass was
+instantly manned, and the men soon gave out that there was no strain upon
+the cable.  The mizzen sail, which was bent for the occasional purpose of
+making the vessel ride more easily to the tide, was immediately set, and
+the other sails were also hoisted in a short time, when, in no small
+consternation, we bore away about one mile to the south-westward of the
+former station, and there let go the best bower anchor and cable in
+twenty fathoms water, to ride until the swell of the sea should fall,
+when it might be practicable to grapple for the moorings, and find a
+better anchorage for the ship.
+
+                                                     [Tuesday, 15th Sept.]
+
+This morning, at five a.m., the bell rung as a signal for landing upon
+the rock, a sound which, after a lapse of ten days, it is believed was
+welcomed by every one on board.  There being a heavy breach of sea at the
+eastern creek, we landed, though not without difficulty, on the western
+side, every one seeming more eager than another to get upon the rock; and
+never did hungry men sit down to a hearty meal with more appetite than
+the artificers began to pick the dulse from the rocks.  This marine plant
+had the effect of reviving the sickly, and seemed to be no less relished
+by those who were more hardy.
+
+While the water was ebbing, and the men were roaming in quest of their
+favourite morsel, the writer was examining the effects of the storm upon
+the forge and loose apparatus left upon the rock.  Six large blocks of
+granite which had been landed, by way of experiment, on the 1st instant,
+were now removed from their places and, by the force of the sea, thrown
+over a rising ledge into a hole at the distance of twelve or fifteen
+paces from the place on which they had been landed.  This was a pretty
+good evidence both of the violence of the storm and the agitation of the
+sea upon the rock.  The safety of the smith’s forge was always an object
+of essential regard.  The ash-pan of the hearth or fireplace, with its
+weighty cast-iron back, had been washed from their places of supposed
+security; the chains of attachment had been broken, and these ponderous
+articles were found at a very considerable distance in a hole on the
+western side of the rock; while the tools and picks of the Aberdeen
+masons were scattered about in every direction.  It is, however,
+remarkable that not a single article was ultimately lost.
+
+This being the night on which the floating light was advertised to be
+lighted, it was accordingly exhibited, to the great joy of every one.
+
+                                                   [Wednesday, 16th Sept.]
+
+The writer was made happy to-day by the return of the Lighthouse yacht
+from a voyage to the Northern Lighthouses.  Having immediately removed on
+board of this fine vessel of eighty-one tons register, the artificers
+gladly followed; for, though they found themselves more pinched for
+accommodation on board of the yacht, and still more so in the _Smeaton_,
+yet they greatly preferred either of these to the _Pharos_, or floating
+light, on account of her rolling motion, though in all respects fitted up
+for their conveniency.
+
+The writer called them to the quarter-deck and informed them that, having
+been one mouth afloat, in terms of their agreement they were now at
+liberty to return to the workyard at Arbroath if they preferred this to
+continuing at the Bell Rock.  But they replied that, in the prospect of
+soon getting the beacon erected upon the rock, and having made a change
+from the floating light, they were now perfectly reconciled to their
+situation, and would remain afloat till the end of the working season.
+
+                                                    [Thursday, 17th Sept.]
+
+The wind was at N.E. this morning, and though they were only light airs,
+yet there was a pretty heavy swell coming ashore upon the rock.  The
+boats landed at half-past seven o’clock a.m., at the creek on the
+southern side of the rock, marked Port Hamilton.  But as one of the boats
+was in the act of entering this creek, the seaman at the bow-oar, who had
+just entered the service, having inadvertently expressed some fear from a
+heavy sea which came rolling towards the boat, and one of the artificers
+having at the same time looked round and missed a stroke with his oar,
+such a preponderance was thus given to the rowers upon the opposite side
+that when the wave struck the boat it threw her upon a ledge of shelving
+rocks, where the water left her, and she having _kanted_ to seaward, the
+next wave completely filled her with water.  After making considerable
+efforts the boat was again got afloat in the proper track of the creek,
+so that we landed without any other accident than a complete ducking.
+There being no possibility of getting a shift of clothes, the artificers
+began with all speed to work, so as to bring themselves into heat, while
+the writer and his assistants kept as much as possible in motion.  Having
+remained more than an hour upon the rock, the boats left it at half-past
+nine; and, after getting on board, the writer recommended to the
+artificers, as the best mode of getting into a state of comfort, to strip
+off their wet clothes and go to bed for an hour or two.  No further
+inconveniency was felt, and no one seemed to complain of the affection
+called ‘catching cold.’
+
+                                                      [Friday, 18th Sept.]
+
+An important occurrence connected with the operations of this season was
+the arrival of the _Smeaton_ at four p.m., having in tow the six
+principal beams of the beacon-house, together with all the stanchions and
+other work on board for fixing it on the rock.  The mooring of the
+floating light was a great point gained, but in the erection of the
+beacon at this late period of the season new difficulties presented
+themselves.  The success of such an undertaking at any season was
+precarious, because a single day of bad weather occurring before the
+necessary fixtures could be made might sweep the whole apparatus from the
+rock.  Notwithstanding these difficulties, the writer had determined to
+make the trial, although he could almost have wished, upon looking at the
+state of the clouds and the direction of the wind, that the apparatus for
+the beacon had been still in the workyard.
+
+                                                    [Saturday, 19th Sept.]
+
+The main beams of the beacon were made up in two separate rafts, fixed
+with bars and bolts of iron.  One of these rafts, not being immediately
+wanted, was left astern of the floating light, and the other was kept in
+tow by the _Smeaton_, at the buoy nearest to the rock.  The Lighthouse
+yacht rode at another buoy with all hands on board that could possibly be
+spared out of the floating light.  The party of artificers and seamen
+which landed on the rock counted altogether forty in number.  At
+half-past eight o’clock a derrick, or mast of thirty feet in height, was
+erected and properly supported with guy-ropes, for suspending the block
+for raising the first principal beam of the beacon; and a winch machine
+was also bolted down to the rock for working the purchase-tackle.
+
+Upon raising the derrick, all hands on the rock spontaneously gave three
+hearty cheers, as a favourable omen of our future exertions in pointing
+out more permanently the position of the rock.  Even to this single spar
+of timber, could it be preserved, a drowning man might lay hold.  When
+the _Smeaton_ drifted on the 2nd of this month such a spar would have
+been sufficient to save us till she could have come to our relief.
+
+                                                      [Sunday, 20th Sept.]
+
+The wind this morning was variable, but the weather continued extremely
+favourable for the operations throughout the whole day.  At six a.m. the
+boats were in motion, and the raft, consisting of four of the six
+principal beams of the beacon-house, each measuring about sixteen inches
+square, and fifty feet in length, was towed to the rock, where it was
+anchored, that it might ground upon it as the water ebbed.  The sailors
+and artificers, including all hands, to-day counted no fewer than
+fifty-two, being perhaps the greatest number of persons ever collected
+upon the Bell Rock.  It was early in the tide when the boats reached the
+rock, and the men worked a considerable time up to their middle in water,
+every one being more eager than his neighbour to be useful.  Even the
+four artificers who had hitherto declined working on Sunday were to-day
+most zealous in their exertions.  They had indeed become so convinced of
+the precarious nature and necessity of the work that they never
+afterwards absented themselves from the rock on Sunday when a landing was
+practicable.
+
+Having made fast a piece of very good new line, at about two-thirds from
+the lower end of one of the beams, the purchase-tackle of the derrick was
+hooked into the turns of the line, and it was speedily raised by the
+number of men on the rock and the power of the winch tackle.  When this
+log was lifted to a sufficient height, its foot, or lower end, was
+_stepped_ into the spot which had been previously prepared for it.  Two
+of the great iron stanchions were then set in their respective holes on
+each side of the beam, when a rope was passed round them and the beam, to
+prevent it from slipping till it could be more permanently fixed.  The
+derrick, or upright spar used for carrying the tackle to raise the first
+beam, was placed in such a position as to become useful for supporting
+the upper end of it, which now became, in its turn, the prop of the
+tackle for raising the second beam.  The whole difficulty of this
+operation was in the raising and propping of the first beam, which became
+a convenient derrick for raising the second, these again a pair of shears
+for lifting the third, and the shears a triangle for raising the fourth.
+Having thus got four of the six principal beams set on end, it required a
+considerable degree of trouble to get their upper ends to fit.  Here they
+formed the apex of a cone, and were all together mortised into a large
+piece of beechwood, and secured, for the present, with ropes, in a
+temporary manner.  During the short period of one tide all that could
+further be done for their security was to put a single screw-bolt through
+the great kneed bats or stanchions on each side of the beams, and screw
+the nut home.
+
+In this manner these four principal beams were erected, and left in a
+pretty secure state.  The men had commenced while there was about two or
+three feet of water upon the side of the beacon, and as the sea was
+smooth they continued the work equally long during flood-tide.  Two of
+the boats being left at the rock to take off the joiners, who were busily
+employed on the upper parts till two o’clock p.m., this tide’s work may
+be said to have continued for about seven hours, which was the longest
+that had hitherto been got upon the rock by at least three hours.
+
+When the first boats left the rock with the artificers employed on the
+lower part of the work during the flood-tide, the beacon had quite a
+novel appearance.  The beams erected formed a common base of about
+thirty-three feet, meeting at the top, which was about forty-five feet
+above the rock, and here half a dozen of the artificers were still at
+work.  After clearing the rock the boats made a stop, when three hearty
+cheers were given, which were returned with equal goodwill by those upon
+the beacon, from the personal interest which every one felt in the
+prosperity of this work, so intimately connected with his safety.
+
+All hands having returned to their respective ships, they got a shift of
+dry clothes and some refreshment.  Being Sunday, they were afterwards
+convened by signal on board of the Lighthouse yacht, when prayers were
+read; for every heart upon this occasion felt gladness, and every mind
+was disposed to be thankful for the happy and successful termination of
+the operations of this day.
+
+                                                      [Monday, 21st Sept.]
+
+The remaining two principal beams were erected in the course of this
+tide, which, with the assistance of those set up yesterday, was found to
+be a very simple operation.
+
+The six principal beams of the beacon were thus secured, at least in a
+temporary manner, in the course of two tides, or in the short space of
+about eleven hours and a half.  Such is the progress that may be made
+when active hands and willing minds set properly to work in operations of
+this kind.
+
+                                                     [Tuesday 22nd, Sept.]
+
+Having now got the weighty part of this work over, and being thereby
+relieved of the difficulty both of landing and victualling such a number
+of men, the _Smeaton_ could now be spared, and she was accordingly
+despatched to Arbroath for a supply of water and provisions, and carried
+with her six of the artificers who could best be spared.
+
+                                                   [Wednesday, 23rd Sept.]
+
+In going out of the eastern harbour, the boat which the writer steered
+shipped a sea, that filled her about one-third with water.  She had also
+been hid for a short time, by the waves breaking upon the rock, from the
+sight of the crew of the preceding boat, who were much alarmed for our
+safety, imagining for a time that she had gone down.
+
+The _Smeaton_ returned from Arbroath this afternoon, but there was so
+much sea that she could not be made fast to her moorings, and the vessel
+was obliged to return to Arbroath without being able either to deliver
+the provisions or take the artificers on board.  The Lighthouse yacht was
+also soon obliged to follow her example, as the sea was breaking heavily
+over her bows.  After getting two reefs in the mainsail, and the third or
+storm-jib set, the wind being S.W., she bent to windward, though blowing
+a hard gale, and got into St. Andrews Bay, where we passed the night
+under the lee of Fifeness.
+
+                                                    [Thursday, 24th Sept.]
+
+At two o’clock this morning we were in St. Andrews Bay, standing off and
+on shore, with strong gales of wind at S.W.; at seven we were off the
+entrance of the Tay; at eight stood towards the rock, and at ten passed
+to leeward of it, but could not attempt a landing.  The beacon, however,
+appeared to remain in good order, and by six p.m. the vessel had again
+beaten up to St. Andrews Bay, and got into somewhat smoother water for
+the night.
+
+                                                      [Friday, 25th Sept.]
+
+At seven o’clock bore away for the Bell Rock, but finding a heavy sea
+running on it were unable to land.  The writer, however, had the
+satisfaction to observe, with his telescope, that everything about the
+beacon appeared entire: and although the sea had a most frightful
+appearance, yet it was the opinion of every one that, since the erection
+of the beacon, the Bell Rock was divested of many of its terrors, and had
+it been possible to have got the boats hoisted out and manned, it might
+have even been found practicable to land.  At six it blew so hard that it
+was found necessary to strike the topmast and take in a third reef of the
+mainsail, and under this low canvas we soon reached St. Andrews Bay, and
+got again under the lee of the land for the night.  The artificers, being
+sea-hardy, were quite reconciled to their quarters on board of the
+Lighthouse yacht; but it is believed that hardly any consideration would
+have induced them again to take up their abode in the floating light.
+
+                                                    [Saturday, 26th Sept.]
+
+At daylight the yacht steered towards the Bell Rock, and at eight a.m.
+made fast to her moorings; at ten, all hands, to the amount of thirty,
+landed, when the writer had the happiness to find that the beacon had
+withstood the violence of the gale and the heavy breach of sea,
+everything being found in the same state in which it had been left on the
+21st.  The artificers were now enabled to work upon the rock throughout
+the whole day, both at low and high water, but it required the strictest
+attention to the state of the weather, in case of their being overtaken
+with a gale, which might prevent the possibility of getting them off the
+rock.
+
+Two somewhat memorable circumstances in the annals of the Bell Rock
+attended the operations of this day: one was the removal of Mr. James
+Dove, the foreman smith, with his apparatus, from the rock to the upper
+part of the beacon, where the forge was now erected on a temporary
+platform, laid on the cross beams or upper framing.  The other was the
+artificers having dined for the first time upon the rock, their dinner
+being cooked on board of the yacht, and sent to them by one of the boats.
+But what afforded the greatest happiness and relief was the removal of
+the large bellows, which had all along been a source of much trouble and
+perplexity, by their hampering and incommoding the boat which carried the
+smiths and their apparatus.
+
+                                                      [Saturday, 3rd Oct.]
+
+The wind being west to-day, the weather was very favourable for
+operations at the rock, and during the morning and evening tides, with
+the aid of torchlight, the masons had seven hours’ work upon the site of
+the building.  The smiths and joiners, who landed at half-past six a.m.,
+did not leave the rock till a quarter-past eleven p.m., having been at
+work, with little intermission, for sixteen hours and three-quarters.
+When the water left the rock, they were employed at the lower parts of
+the beacon, and as the tide rose or fell, they shifted the place of their
+operations.  From these exertions, the fixing and securing of the beacon
+made rapid advancement, as the men were now landed in the morning and
+remained throughout the day.  But, as a sudden change of weather might
+have prevented their being taken off at the proper time of tide, a
+quantity of bread and water was always kept on the beacon.
+
+During this period of working at the beacon all the day, and often a
+great part of the night, the writer was much on board of the tender; but,
+while the masons could work on the rock, and frequently also while it was
+covered by the tide, he remained on the beacon; especially during the
+night, as he made a point of being on the rock to the latest hour, and
+was generally the last person who stepped into the boat.  He had laid
+this down as part of his plan of procedure; and in this way had acquired,
+in the course of the first season, a pretty complete knowledge and
+experience of what could actually be done at the Bell Rock, under all
+circumstances of the weather.  By this means also his assistants, and the
+artificers and mariners, got into a systematic habit of proceeding at the
+commencement of the work, which, it is believed, continued throughout the
+whole of the operations.
+
+                                                        [Sunday, 4th Oct.]
+
+The external part of the beacon was now finished, with its supports and
+bracing-chains, and whatever else was considered necessary for its
+stability in so far as the season would permit; and although much was
+still wanting to complete this fabric, yet it was in such a state that it
+could be left without much fear of the consequences of a storm.  The
+painting of the upper part was nearly finished this afternoon; and the
+_Smeaton_ had brought off a quantity of brushwood and other articles, for
+the purpose of heating or charring the lower part of the principal beams,
+before being laid over with successive coats of boiling pitch, to the
+height of from eight to twelve feet, or as high as the rise of
+spring-tides.  A small flagstaff having also been erected to-day, a flag
+was displayed for the first time from the beacon, by which its
+perspective effect was greatly improved.  On this, as on all like
+occasions at the Bell Rock, three hearty cheers were given; and the
+steward served out a dram of rum to all hands, while the Lighthouse
+yacht, _Smeaton_, and floating light, hoisted their colours in compliment
+to the erection.
+
+                                                        [Monday, 5th Oct.]
+
+In the afternoon, and just as the tide’s work was over, Mr. John Rennie,
+engineer, accompanied by his son Mr. George, on their way to the harbour
+works of Fraserburgh, in Aberdeenshire, paid a visit to the Bell Rock, in
+a boat from Arbroath.  It being then too late in the tide for landing,
+they remained on board of the Lighthouse yacht all night, when the
+writer, who had now been secluded from society for several weeks, enjoyed
+much of Mr. Rennie’s interesting conversation, both on general topics,
+and professionally upon the progress of the Bell Rock works, on which he
+was consulted as chief engineer.
+
+                                                       [Tuesday, 6th Oct.]
+
+The artificers landed this morning at nine, after which one of the boats
+returned to the ship for the writer and Messrs. Rennie, who, upon
+landing, were saluted with a display of the colours from the beacon and
+by three cheers from the workmen.  Everything was now in a prepared state
+for leaving the rock, and giving up the works afloat for this season,
+excepting some small articles, which would still occupy the smiths and
+joiners for a few days longer.  They accordingly shifted on board of the
+_Smeaton_, while the yacht left the rock for Arbroath, with Messrs.
+Rennie, the writer, and the remainder of the artificers.  But, before
+taking leave, the steward served out a farewell glass, when three hearty
+cheers were given, and an earnest wish expressed that everything, in the
+spring of 1808, might be found in the same state of good order as it was
+now about to be left.
+
+
+
+II—OPERATIONS OF 1808
+
+
+                                                       [Monday, 29th Feb.]
+
+The writer sailed from Arbroath at one a.m. in the Lighthouse yacht.  At
+seven the floating light was hailed, and all on board found to be well.
+The crew were observed to have a very healthy-like appearance, and looked
+better than at the close of the works upon the rock.  They seemed only to
+regret one thing, which was the secession of their cook, Thomas
+Elliot—not on account of his professional skill, but for his facetious
+and curious manner.  Elliot had something peculiar in his history, and
+was reported by his comrades to have seen better days.  He was, however,
+happy with his situation on board of the floating light, and, having a
+taste for music, dancing, and acting plays, he contributed much to the
+amusement of the ship’s company in their dreary abode during the winter
+months.  He had also recommended himself to their notice as a good
+shipkeeper, for as it did not answer Elliot to go often ashore, he had
+always given up his turn of leave to his neighbours.  At his own desire
+he was at length paid off, when he had a considerable balance of wages to
+receive, which he said would be sufficient to carry him to the West
+Indies, and he accordingly took leave of the Lighthouse service.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 1st March]
+
+At daybreak the Lighthouse yacht, attended by a boat from the floating
+light, again stood towards the Bell Rock.  The weather felt extremely
+cold this morning, the thermometer being at 34 degrees, with the wind at
+east, accompanied by occasional showers of snow, and the marine barometer
+indicated 29.80.  At half-past seven the sea ran with such force upon the
+rock that it seemed doubtful if a landing could be effected.  At
+half-past eight, when it was fairly above water, the writer took his
+place in the floating light’s boat with the artificers, while the yacht’s
+boat followed, according to the general rule of having two boats afloat
+in landing expeditions of this kind, that, in case of accident to one
+boat, the other might assist.  In several unsuccessful attempts the boats
+were beat back by the breach of the sea upon the rock.  On the eastern
+side it separated into two distinct waves, which came with a sweep round
+to the western side, where they met; and at the instance of their
+confluence the water rose in spray to a considerable height.  Watching
+what the sailors term a _smooth_, we caught a favourable opportunity, and
+in a very dexterous manner the boats were rowed between the two seas, and
+made a favourable landing at the western creek.
+
+At the latter end of last season, as was formerly noticed, the beacon was
+painted white, and from the bleaching of the weather and the sprays of
+the sea the upper parts were kept clean; but within the range of the tide
+the principal beams were observed to be thickly coated with a green
+stuff, the _conferva_ of botanists.  Notwithstanding the intrusion of
+these works, which had formerly banished the numerous seals that played
+about the rock, they were now seen in great numbers, having been in an
+almost undisturbed state for six months.  It had now also, for the first
+time, got some inhabitants of the feathered tribe: in particular the
+scarth or cormorant, and the large herring-gull, had made the beacon a
+resting-place, from its vicinity to their fishing-grounds.  About a dozen
+of these birds had rested upon the cross-beams, which, in some places,
+were coated with their dung; and their flight, as the boats approached,
+was a very unlooked-for indication of life and habitation on the Bell
+Rock, conveying the momentary idea of the conversion of this fatal rock,
+from being a terror to the mariner, into a residence of man and a
+safeguard to shipping.
+
+Upon narrowly examining the great iron stanchions with which the beams
+were fixed to the rock, the writer had the satisfaction of finding that
+there was not the least appearance of working or shifting at any of the
+joints or places of connection; and, excepting the loosening of the
+bracing-chains, everything was found in the same entire state in which it
+had been left in the month of October.  This, in the estimation of the
+writer, was a matter of no small importance to the future success of the
+work.  He from that moment saw the practicability and propriety of
+fitting up the beacon, not only as a place of refuge in case of accident
+to the boats in landing, but as a residence for the artificers during the
+working months.
+
+While upon the top of the beacon the writer was reminded by the
+landing-master that the sea was running high, and that it would be
+necessary to set off while the rock afforded anything like shelter to the
+boats, which by this time had been made fast by a long line to the
+beacon, and rode with much agitation, each requiring two men with
+boat-hooks to keep them from striking each other, or from ranging up
+against the beacon.  But even under these circumstances the greatest
+confidence was felt by every one, from the security afforded by this
+temporary erection.  For, supposing the wind had suddenly increased to a
+gale, and that it had been found unadvisable to go into the boats; or,
+supposing they had drifted or sprung a leak from striking upon the rocks;
+in any of these possible and not at all improbable cases, those who might
+thus have been left upon the rock had now something to lay hold of, and,
+though occupying this dreary habitation of the sea-gull and the
+cormorant, affording only bread and water, yet _life_, would be
+preserved, and the mind would still be supported by the hope of being
+ultimately relieved.
+
+                                                     [Wednesday, 25th May]
+
+On the 25th of May the writer embarked at Arbroath, on board of the _Sir
+Joseph Banks_, for the Bell Rock, accompanied by Mr. Logan senior,
+foreman builder, with twelve masons and two smiths, together with
+thirteen seamen, including the master, mate, and steward.
+
+                                                      [Thursday, 26th May]
+
+Mr. James Wilson, now commander of the _Pharos_, floating light, and
+landing-master, in the room of Mr. Sinclair, who had left the service,
+came into the writer’s cabin this morning at six o’clock, and intimated
+that there was a good appearance of landing on the rock.  Everything
+being arranged, both boats proceeded in company, and at eight a.m. they
+reached the rock.  The lighthouse colours were immediately hoisted upon
+the flagstaff of the beacon, a compliment which was duly returned by the
+tender and floating light, when three hearty cheers were given, and a
+glass of rum was served out to all hands to drink success to the
+operations of 1808.
+
+                                                        [Friday, 27th May]
+
+This morning the wind was at east, blowing a fresh gale, the weather
+being hazy, with a considerable breach of sea setting in upon the rock.
+The morning bell was therefore rung, in some doubt as to the
+practicability of making a landing.  After allowing the rock to get fully
+up, or to be sufficiently left by the tide, that the boats might have
+some shelter from the range of the sea, they proceeded at 8 a.m., and
+upon the whole made a pretty good landing; and after two hours and
+three-quarters’ work returned to the ship in safety.
+
+In the afternoon the wind considerably increased, and, as a pretty heavy
+sea was still running, the tender rode very hard, when Mr. Taylor, the
+commander, found it necessary to take in the bowsprit, and strike the
+fore and main topmasts, that she might ride more easily.  After
+consulting about the state of the weather, it was resolved to leave the
+artificers on board this evening, and carry only the smiths to the rock,
+as the sharpening of the irons was rather behind, from their being so
+much broken and blunted by the hard and tough nature of the rock, which
+became much more compact and hard as the depth of excavation was
+increased.  Besides avoiding the risk of encumbering the boats with a
+number of men who had not yet got the full command of the oar in a breach
+of sea, the writer had another motive for leaving them behind.  He wanted
+to examine the site of the building without interruption, and to take the
+comparative levels of the different inequalities of its area; and as it
+would have been painful to have seen men standing idle upon the Bell
+Rock, where all moved with activity, it was judged better to leave them
+on board.  The boats landed at half-past seven p.m., and the
+landing-master, with the seamen, was employed during this tide in cutting
+the seaweeds from the several paths leading to the landing-places, to
+render walking more safe, for, from the slippery state of the surface of
+the rock, many severe tumbles had taken place.  In the meantime the
+writer took the necessary levels, and having carefully examined the site
+of the building and considered all its parts, it still appeared to be
+necessary to excavate to the average depth of fourteen inches over the
+whole area of the foundation.
+
+                                                      [Saturday, 28th May]
+
+The wind still continued from the eastward with a heavy swell; and to-day
+it was accompanied with foggy weather and occasional showers of rain.
+Notwithstanding this, such was the confidence which the erection of the
+beacon had inspired that the boats landed the artificers on the rock
+under very unpromising circumstances, at half-past eight, and they
+continued at work till half-past eleven, being a period of three hours,
+which was considered a great tide’s work in the present low state of the
+foundation.  Three of the masons on board were so afflicted with
+sea-sickness that they had not been able to take any food for almost
+three days, and they were literally assisted into the boats this morning
+by their companions.  It was, however, not a little surprising to see how
+speedily these men revived upon landing on the rock and eating a little
+dulse.  Two of them afterwards assisted the sailors in collecting the
+chips of stone and carrying them out of the way of the pickmen; but the
+third complained of a pain in his head, and was still unable to do
+anything.  Instead of returning to the tender with the boats, these three
+men remained on the beacon all day, and had their victuals sent to them
+along with the smiths’.  From Mr. Dove, the foreman smith, they had much
+sympathy, for he preferred remaining on the beacon at all hazards, to be
+himself relieved from the malady of sea-sickness.  The wind continuing
+high, with a heavy sea, and the tide falling late, it was not judged
+proper to land the artificers this evening, but in the twilight the boats
+were sent to fetch the people on board who had been left on the rock.
+
+                                                        [Sunday, 29th May]
+
+The wind was from the S.W. to-day, and the signal-bell rung, as usual,
+about an hour before the period for landing on the rock.  The writer was
+rather surprised, however, to hear the landing-master repeatedly call,
+‘All hands for the rock!’ and, coming on deck, he was disappointed to
+find the seamen only in the boats.  Upon inquiry, it appeared that some
+misunderstanding had taken place about the wages of the artificers for
+Sundays.  They had preferred wages for seven days statedly to the former
+mode of allowing a day for each tide’s work on Sunday, as they did not
+like the appearance of working for double or even treble wages on Sunday,
+and would rather have it understood that their work on that day arose
+more from the urgency of the case than with a view to emolument.  This
+having been judged creditable to their religious feelings, and readily
+adjusted to their wish, the boats proceeded to the rock, and the work
+commenced at nine a.m.
+
+                                                        [Monday, 30th May]
+
+Mr. Francis Watt commenced, with five joiners, to fit up a temporary
+platform upon the beacon, about twenty-five feet above the highest part
+of the rock.  This platform was to be used as the site of the smith’s
+forge, after the beacon should be fitted up as a barrack; and here also
+the mortar was to be mixed and prepared for the building, and it was
+accordingly termed the Mortar Gallery.
+
+The landing-master’s crew completed the discharging from the _Smeaton_ of
+her cargo of the cast-iron rails and timber.  It must not here be omitted
+to notice that the _Smeaton_ took in ballast from the Bell Rock,
+consisting of the shivers or chips of stone produced by the workmen in
+preparing the site of the building, which were now accumulating in great
+quantities on the rock.  These the boats loaded, after discharging the
+iron.  The object in carrying off these chips, besides ballasting the
+vessel, was to get them permanently out of the way, as they were apt to
+shift about from place to place with every gale of wind; and it often
+required a considerable time to clear the foundation a second time of
+this rubbish.  The circumstance of ballasting a ship at the Bell Rock
+afforded great entertainment, especially to the sailors; and it was
+perhaps with truth remarked that the _Smeaton_ was the first vessel that
+had ever taken on board ballast at the Bell Rock.  Mr. Pool, the
+commander of this vessel, afterwards acquainted the writer that, when the
+ballast was landed upon the quay at Leith, many persons carried away
+specimens of it, as part of a cargo from the Bell Rock; when he added,
+that such was the interest excited, from the number of specimens carried
+away, that some of his friends suggested that he should have sent the
+whole to the Cross of Edinburgh, where each piece might have sold for a
+penny.
+
+                                                       [Tuesday, 31st May]
+
+In the evening the boats went to the rock, and brought the joiners and
+smiths, and their sickly companions, on board of the tender.  These also
+brought with them two baskets full of fish, which they had caught at
+high-water from the beacon, reporting, at the same time, to their
+comrades, that the fish were swimming in such numbers over the rock at
+high-water that it was completely hid from their sight, and nothing seen
+but the movement of thousands of fish.  They were almost exclusively of
+the species called the podlie, or young coal-fish.  This discovery, made
+for the first time to-day by the workmen, was considered fortunate, as an
+additional circumstance likely to produce an inclination among the
+artificers to take up their residence in the beacon, when it came to be
+fitted up as a barrack.
+
+                                                       [Tuesday, 7th June]
+
+At three o’clock in the morning the ship’s bell was rung as the signal
+for landing at the rock.  When the landing was to be made before
+breakfast, it was customary to give each of the artificers and seamen a
+dram and a biscuit, and coffee was prepared by the steward for the
+cabins.  Exactly at four o’clock the whole party landed from three boats,
+including one of those belonging to the floating light, with a part of
+that ship’s crew, which always attended the works in moderate weather.
+The landing-master’s boat, called the _Seaman_, but more commonly called
+the _Lifeboat_, took the lead.  The next boat, called the _Mason_, was
+generally steered by the writer; while the floating light’s boat,
+_Pharos_, was under the management of the boatswain of that ship.
+
+Having now so considerable a party of workmen and sailors on the rock, it
+may be proper here to notice how their labours were directed.
+Preparations having been made last month for the erection of a second
+forge upon the beacon, the smiths commenced their operations both upon
+the lower and higher platforms.  They were employed in sharpening the
+picks and irons for the masons, and in making bats and other apparatus of
+various descriptions connected with the fitting of the railways.  The
+landing-master’s crew were occupied in assisting the millwrights in
+laying the railways to hand.  Sailors, of all other descriptions of men,
+are the most accommodating in the use of their hands.  They worked freely
+with the boring-irons, and assisted in all the operations of the
+railways, acting by turns as boatmen, seamen, and artificers.  We had no
+such character on the Bell Rock as the common labourer.  All the
+operations of this department were cheerfully undertaken by the seamen,
+who, both on the rock and on shipboard, were the inseparable companions
+of every work connected with the erection of the Bell Rock Lighthouse.
+It will naturally be supposed that about twenty-five masons, occupied
+with their picks in executing and preparing the foundation of the
+lighthouse, in the course of a tide of about three hours, would make a
+considerable impression upon an area even of forty-two feet in diameter.
+But in proportion as the foundation was deepened, the rock was found to
+be much more hard and difficult to work, while the baling and pumping of
+water became much more troublesome.  A joiner was kept almost constantly
+employed in fitting the picks to their handles, which, as well as the
+points to the irons, were very frequently broken.
+
+The Bell Rock this morning presented by far the most busy and active
+appearance it had exhibited since the erection of the principal beams of
+the beacon.  The surface of the rock was crowded with men, the two forges
+flaming, the one above the other, upon the beacon, while the anvils
+thundered with the rebounding noise of their wooden supports, and formed
+a curious contrast with the occasional clamour of the surges.  The wind
+was westerly, and the weather being extremely agreeable, as soon after
+breakfast as the tide had sufficiently overflowed the rock to float the
+boats over it, the smiths, with a number of the artificers, returned to
+the beacon, carrying their fishing-tackle along with them.  In the course
+of the forenoon, the beacon exhibited a still more extraordinary
+appearance than the rock had done in the morning.  The sea being smooth,
+it seemed to be afloat upon the water, with a number of men supporting
+themselves in all the variety of attitude and position: while, from the
+upper part of this wooden house, the volumes of smoke which ascended from
+the forges gave the whole a very curious and fanciful appearance.
+
+In the course of this tide it was observed that a heavy swell was setting
+in from the eastward, and the appearance of the sky indicated a change of
+weather, while the wind was shifting about.  The barometer also had
+fallen from 30 in. to 29.6.  It was, therefore, judged prudent to shift
+the vessel to the S.W. or more distant buoy.  Her bowsprit was also soon
+afterwards taken in, the topmasts struck, and everything made _snug_, as
+seamen term it, for a gale.  During the course of the night the wind
+increased and shifted to the eastward, when the vessel rolled very hard,
+and the sea often broke over her bows with great force.
+
+                                                     [Wednesday, 8th June]
+
+Although the motion of the tender was much less than that of the floating
+light—at least, in regard to the rolling motion—yet she _sended_, or
+pitched, much.  Being also of a very handsome build, and what seamen term
+very _clean aft_, the sea often struck the counter with such force that
+the writer, who possessed the aftermost cabin, being unaccustomed to this
+new vessel, could not divest himself of uneasiness; for when her stern
+fell into the sea, it struck with so much violence as to be more like the
+resistance of a rock than the sea.  The water, at the same time, often
+rushed with great force up the rudder-case, and, forcing up the valve of
+the water-closet, the floor of his cabin was at times laid under water.
+The gale continued to increase, and the vessel rolled and pitched in such
+a manner that the hawser by which the tender was made fast to the buoy
+snapped, and she went adrift.  In the act of swinging round to the wind
+she shipped a very heavy sea, which greatly alarmed the artificers, who
+imagined that we had got upon the rock; but this, from the direction of
+the wind, was impossible.  The writer, however, sprung upon deck, where
+he found the sailors busily employed in rigging out the bowsprit and in
+setting sail.  From the easterly direction of the wind, it was considered
+most advisable to steer for the Firth of Forth, and there wait a change
+of weather.  At two p.m. we accordingly passed the Isle of May, at six
+anchored in Leith Roads, and at eight the writer landed, when he came in
+upon his friends, who were not a little surprised at his unexpected
+appearance, which gave an instantaneous alarm for the safety of things at
+the Bell Rock.
+
+                                                      [Thursday, 9th June]
+
+The wind still continued to blow very hard at E. by N., and the _Sir
+Joseph Banks_ rode heavily, and even drifted with both anchors ahead, in
+Leith Roads.  The artificers did not attempt to leave the ship last
+night; but there being upwards of fifty people on board, and the decks
+greatly lumbered with the two large boats, they were in a very crowded
+and impatient state on board.  But to-day they got ashore, and amused
+themselves by walking about the streets of Edinburgh, some in very humble
+apparel, from having only the worst of their jackets with them, which,
+though quite suitable for their work, were hardly fit for public
+inspection, being not only tattered, but greatly stained with the red
+colour of the rock.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 10th June]
+
+To-day the wind was at S.E., with light breezes and foggy weather.  At
+six a.m. the writer again embarked for the Bell Rock, when the vessel
+immediately sailed.  At eleven p.m., there being no wind, the
+kedge-anchor was _let go_ off Anstruther, one of the numerous towns on
+the coast of Fife, where we waited the return of the tide.
+
+                                                     [Saturday, 11th June]
+
+At six a.m. the _Sir Joseph_ got under weigh, and at eleven was again
+made fast to the southern buoy at the Bell Rock.  Though it was now late
+in the tide, the writer, being anxious to ascertain the state of things
+after the gale, landed with the artificers to the number of forty-four.
+Everything was found in an entire state; but, as the tide was nearly
+gone, only half an hour’s work had been got when the site of the building
+was overflowed.  In the evening the boats again landed at nine, and after
+a good tide’s work of three hours with torchlight, the work was left off
+at midnight.  To the distant shipping the appearance of things under
+night on the Bell Rock, when the work was going forward, must have been
+very remarkable, especially to those who were strangers to the
+operations.  Mr. John Reid, principal lightkeeper, who also acted as
+master of the floating light during the working months at the rock,
+described the appearance of numerous lights situated so low in the water,
+when seen at the distance of two or three miles, as putting him in mind
+of Milton’s description of the fiends in the lower regions, adding, ‘for
+it seems greatly to surpass Will-o’-the-Wisp, or any of those earthly
+spectres of which we have so often heard.’
+
+                                                       [Monday, 13th June]
+
+From the difficulties attending the landing on the rock, owing to the
+breach of sea which had for days past been around it, the artificers
+showed some backwardness at getting into the boats this morning; but
+after a little explanation this was got over.  It was always observable
+that for some time after anything like danger had occurred at the rock,
+the workmen became much more cautious, and on some occasions their
+timidity was rather troublesome.  It fortunately happened, however, that
+along with the writer’s assistants and the sailors there were also some
+of the artificers themselves who felt no such scruples, and in this way
+these difficulties were the more easily surmounted.  In matters where
+life is in danger it becomes necessary to treat even unfounded prejudices
+with tenderness, as an accident, under certain circumstances, would not
+only have been particularly painful to those giving directions, but have
+proved highly detrimental to the work, especially in the early stages of
+its advancement.
+
+At four o’clock fifty-eight persons landed; but the tides being extremely
+languid, the water only left the higher parts of the rock, and no work
+could be done at the site of the building.  A third forge was, however,
+put in operation during a short time, for the greater conveniency of
+sharpening the picks and irons, and for purposes connected with the
+preparations for fixing the railways on the rock.  The weather towards
+the evening became thick and foggy, and there was hardly a breath of wind
+to ruffle the surface of the water.  Had it not, therefore, been for the
+noise from the anvils of the smiths who had been left on the beacon
+throughout the day, which afforded a guide for the boats, a landing could
+not have been attempted this evening, especially with such a company of
+artificers.  This circumstance confirmed the writer’s opinion with regard
+to the propriety of connecting large bells to be rung with machinery in
+the lighthouse, to be tolled day and night during the continuance of
+foggy weather.
+
+                                                     [Thursday, 23rd June]
+
+The boats landed this evening, when the artificers had again two hours’
+work.  The weather still continuing very thick and foggy, more difficulty
+was experienced in getting on board of the vessels to-night than had
+occurred on any previous occasion, owing to a light breeze of wind which
+carried the sound of the bell, and the other signals made on board of the
+vessels, away from the rock.  Having fortunately made out the position of
+the sloop _Smeaton_ at the N.E. buoy—to which we were much assisted by
+the barking of the ship’s dog,—we parted with the _Smeaton’s_ boat, when
+the boats of the tender took a fresh departure for that vessel, which lay
+about half a mile to the south-westward.  Yet such is the very deceiving
+state of the tides, that, although there was a small binnacle and compass
+in the landing-master’s boat, we had, nevertheless, passed the _Sir
+Joseph_ a good way, when, fortunately, one of the sailors catched the
+sound of a blowing-horn.  The only fire-arms on board were a pair of
+swivels of one-inch calibre; but it is quite surprising how much the
+sound is lost in foggy weather, as the report was heard but at a very
+short distance.  The sound from the explosion of gunpowder is so
+instantaneous that the effect of the small guns was not so good as either
+the blowing of a horn or the tolling of a bell, which afforded a more
+constant and steady direction for the pilot.
+
+                                                     [Wednesday, 6th July]
+
+Landed on the rock with the three boats belonging to the tender at five
+p.m., and began immediately to bale the water out of the foundation-pit
+with a number of buckets, while the pumps were also kept in action with
+relays of artificers and seamen.  The work commenced upon the higher
+parts of the foundation as the water left them, but it was now pretty
+generally reduced to a level.  About twenty men could be conveniently
+employed at each pump, and it is quite astonishing in how short a time so
+great a body of water could be drawn off.  The water in the
+foundation-pit at this time measured about two feet in depth, on an area
+of forty-two feet in diameter, and yet it was drawn off in the course of
+about half an hour.  After this the artificers commenced with their picks
+and continued at work for two hours and a half, some of the sailors being
+at the same time busily employed in clearing the foundation of chips and
+in conveying the irons to and from the smiths on the beacon, where they
+were sharped.  At eight o’clock the sea broke in upon us and overflowed
+the foundation-pit, when the boats returned to the tender.
+
+                                                      [Thursday, 7th July]
+
+The landing-master’s bell rung this morning about four o’clock, and at
+half-past five, the foundation being cleared, the work commenced on the
+site of the building.  But from the moment of landing, the squad of
+joiners and millwrights was at work upon the higher parts of the rock in
+laying the railways, while the anvils of the smith resounded on the
+beacon, and such columns of smoke ascended from the forges that they were
+often mistaken by strangers at a distance for a ship on fire.  After
+continuing three hours at work the foundation of the building was again
+overflowed, and the boats returned to the ship at half-past eight
+o’clock. the masons and pickmen had, at this period, a pretty long day on
+board of the tender, but the smiths and joiners were kept constantly at
+work upon the beacon, the stability and great conveniency of which had
+now been so fully shown that no doubt remained as to the propriety of
+fitting it up as a barrack.  The workmen were accordingly employed,
+during the period of high-water, in making preparations for this purpose.
+
+The foundation-pit now assumed the appearance of a great platform, and
+the late tides had been so favourable that it became apparent that the
+first course, consisting of a few irregular and detached stones for
+making up certain inequalities in the interior parts of the site of the
+building, might be laid in the course of the present spring-tides.
+Having been enabled to-day to get the dimensions of the foundation, or
+first stone, accurately taken, a mould was made of its figure, when the
+writer left the rock, after the tide’s work of this morning, in a fast
+rowing-boat for Arbroath; and, upon landing, two men were immediately set
+to work upon one of the blocks from Mylnefield quarry, which was prepared
+in the course of the following day, as the stone-cutters relieved each
+other, and worked both night and day, so that it was sent off in one of
+the stone-lighters without delay.
+
+                                                      [Saturday, 9th July]
+
+The site of the foundation-stone was very difficult to work, from its
+depth in the rock; but being now nearly prepared, it formed a very
+agreeable kind of pastime at high-water for all hands to land the stone
+itself upon the rock.  The landing-master’s crew and artificers
+accordingly entered with great spirit into this operation.  The stone was
+placed upon the deck of the _Hedderwick_ praam-boat, which had just been
+brought from Leith, and was decorated with colours for the occasion.
+Flags were also displayed from the shipping in the offing, and upon the
+beacon.  Here the writer took his station with the greater part of the
+artificers, who supported themselves in every possible position while the
+boats towed the praam from her moorings and brought her immediately over
+the site of the building, where her grappling anchors were let go.  The
+stone was then lifted off the deck by a tackle hooked into a Lewis bat
+inserted into it, when it was gently lowered into the water and grounded
+on the site of the building, amidst the cheering acclamations of about
+sixty persons.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 10th July]
+
+At eleven o’clock the foundation-stone was laid to hand.  It was of a
+square form, containing about twenty cubic feet, and had the figures, or
+date, of 1808 simply cut upon it with a chisel.  A derrick, or spar of
+timber, having been erected at the edge of the hole and guyed with ropes,
+the stone was then hooked to the tackle and lowered into its place, when
+the writer, attended by his assistants—Mr. Peter Logan, Mr. Francis Watt,
+and Mr. James Wilson,—applied the square, the level, and the mallet, and
+pronounced the following benediction: ‘May the great Architect of the
+Universe complete and bless this building,’ on which three hearty cheers
+were given, and success to the future operations was drunk with the
+greatest enthusiasm.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 26th July]
+
+The wind being at S.E. this evening, we had a pretty heavy swell of sea
+upon the rock, and some difficulty attended our getting off in safety, as
+the boats got aground in the creek and were in danger of being upset.
+Upon extinguishing the torchlights, about twelve in number, the darkness
+of the night seemed quite horrible; the water being also much charged
+with the phosphorescent appearance which is familiar to every one on
+shipboard, the waves, as they dashed upon the rock, were in some degree
+like so much liquid flame.  The scene, upon the whole, was truly awful!
+
+                                                    [Wednesday, 27th July]
+
+In leaving the rock this evening everything, after the torches were
+extinguished, had the same dismal appearance as last night, but so
+perfectly acquainted were the landing-master and his crew with the
+position of things at the rock, that comparatively little inconveniency
+was experienced on these occasions when the weather was moderate; such is
+the effect of habit, even in the most unpleasant situations.  If, for
+example, it had been proposed to a person accustomed to a city life, at
+once to take up his quarters off a sunken reef and land upon it in boats
+at all hours of the night, the proposition must have appeared quite
+impracticable and extravagant; but this practice coming progressively
+upon the artificers, it was ultimately undertaken with the greatest
+alacrity.  Notwithstanding this, however, it must be acknowledged that it
+was not till after much labour and peril, and many an anxious hour, that
+the writer is enabled to state that the site of the Bell Rock Lighthouse
+is fully prepared for the first entire course of the building.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 12th Aug.]
+
+The artificers landed this morning at half-past ten, and after an hour
+and a half’s work eight stones were laid, which completed the first
+entire course of the building, consisting of 123 blocks, the last of
+which was laid with three hearty cheers.
+
+                                                    [Saturday, 10th Sept.]
+
+Landed at nine a.m., and by a quarter-past twelve noon twenty-three
+stones had been laid.  The works being now somewhat elevated by the lower
+courses, we got quit of the very serious inconvenience of pumping water
+to clear the foundation-pit.  This gave much facility to the operations,
+and was noticed with expressions of as much happiness by the artificers
+as the seamen had shown when relieved of the continual trouble of
+carrying the smith’s bellows off the rock prior to the erection of the
+beacon.
+
+                                                   [Wednesday, 21st Sept.]
+
+Mr. Thomas Macurich, mate of the _Smeaton_, and James Scott, one of the
+crew, a young man about eighteen years of age, immediately went into
+their boat to make fast a hawser to the ring in the top of the floating
+buoy of the moorings, and were forthwith to proceed to land their cargo,
+so much wanted, at the rock.  The tides at this period were very strong,
+and the mooring-chain, when sweeping the ground, had caught hold of a
+rock or piece of wreck by which the chain was so shortened that when the
+tide flowed the buoy got almost under water, and little more than the
+ring appeared at the surface.  When Macurich and Scott were in the act of
+making the hawser fast to the ring, the chain got suddenly disentangled
+at the bottom, and this large buoy, measuring about seven feet in height
+and three feet in diameter at the middle, tapering to both ends, being
+what seamen term a _Nun-buoy_, vaulted or sprung up with such force that
+it upset the boat, which instantly filled with water.  Mr. Macurich, with
+much exertion, succeeded in getting hold of the boat’s gunwale, still
+above the surface of the water, and by this means was saved; but the
+young man Scott was unfortunately drowned.  He had in all probability
+been struck about the head by the ring of the buoy, for although
+surrounded with the oars and the thwarts of the boat which floated near
+him, yet he seemed entirely to want the power of availing himself of such
+assistance, and appeared to be quite insensible, while Pool, the master
+of the _Smeaton_, called loudly to him; and before assistance could be
+got from the tender, he was carried away by the strength of the current
+and disappeared.
+
+The young man Scott was a great favourite in the service, having had
+something uncommonly mild and complaisant in his manner; and his loss was
+therefore universally regretted.  The circumstances of his case were also
+peculiarly distressing to his mother, as her husband, who was a seaman,
+had for three years past been confined to a French prison, and the
+deceased was the chief support of the family.  In order in some measure
+to make up the loss to the poor woman for the monthly aliment regularly
+allowed her by her late son, it was suggested that a younger boy, a
+brother of the deceased, might be taken into the service.  This appeared
+to be rather a delicate proposition, but it was left to the
+landing-master to arrange according to circumstances; such was the
+resignation, and at the same time the spirit, of the poor woman, that she
+readily accepted the proposal, and in a few days the younger Scott was
+actually afloat in the place of his brother.  On representing this
+distressing case to the Board, the Commissioners were pleased to grant an
+annuity of £5 to Scott’s mother.
+
+The _Smeaton_, not having been made fast to the buoy, had, with the
+ebb-tide, drifted to leeward a considerable way eastward of the rock, and
+could not, till the return of the flood-tide, be worked up to her
+moorings, so that the present tide was lost, notwithstanding all
+exertions which had been made both ashore and afloat with this cargo.
+The artificers landed at six a.m.; but, as no materials could be got upon
+the rock this morning, they were employed in boring trenail holes and in
+various other operations, and after four hours’ work they returned on
+board the tender.  When the _Smeaton_ got up to her moorings, the
+landing-master’s crew immediately began to unload her.  There being too
+much wind for towing the praams in the usual way, they were warped to the
+rock in the most laborious manner by their windlasses, with successive
+grapplings and hawsers laid out for this purpose.  At six p.m. the
+artificers landed, and continued at work till half-past ten, when the
+remaining seventeen stones were laid which completed the third entire
+course, or fourth of the lighthouse, with which the building operations
+were closed for the season.
+
+
+
+III—OPERATIONS OF 1809
+
+
+                                                     [Wednesday, 24th May]
+
+The last night was the first that the writer, had passed in his old
+quarters on board of the floating light for about twelve months, when the
+weather was so fine and the sea so smooth that even here he felt but
+little or no motion, excepting at the turn of the tide, when the vessel
+gets into what the seamen term the _trough of the sea_.  At six a.m. Mr.
+Watt, who conducted the operations of the railways and beacon-house, had
+landed with nine artificers.  At half-past one p.m. Mr. Peter Logan had
+also landed with fifteen masons, and immediately proceeded to set up the
+crane.  The sheer-crane or apparatus for lifting the stones out of the
+praam-boats at the eastern creek had been already erected, and the
+railways now formed about two-thirds of an entire circle round the
+building: some progress had likewise been made with the reach towards the
+western landing-place.  The floors being laid, the beacon now assumed the
+appearance of a habitation.  The _Smeaton_ was at her moorings, with the
+_Fernie_ praam-boat astern, for which she was laying down moorings, and
+the tender being also at her station, the Bell Rock had again put on its
+former busy aspect.
+
+                                                     [Wednesday, 31st May]
+
+The landing-master’s bell, often no very favourite sound, rung at six
+this morning; but on this occasion, it is believed, it was gladly
+received by all on board, as the welcome signal of the return of better
+weather.  The masons laid thirteen stones to-day, which the seamen had
+landed, together with other building materials.  During these twenty-four
+hours the wind was from the south, blowing fresh breezes, accompanied
+with showers of snow.  In the morning the snow showers were so thick that
+it was with difficulty the landing-master, who always steered the leading
+boat, could make his way to the rock through the drift.  But at the Bell
+Rock neither snow nor rain, nor fog nor wind, retarded the progress of
+the work, if unaccompanied by a heavy swell or breach of the sea.
+
+The weather during the months of April and May had been uncommonly
+boisterous, and so cold that the thermometer seldom exceeded 40°, while
+the barometer was generally about 29.50.  We had not only hail and sleet,
+but the snow on the last day of May lay on the decks and rigging of the
+ship to the depth of about three inches; and, although now entering upon
+the month of June, the length of the day was the chief indication of
+summer.  Yet such is the effect of habit, and such was the expertness of
+the landing-master’s crew, that, even in this description of weather,
+seldom a tide’s work was lost.  Such was the ardour and zeal of the heads
+of the several departments at the rock, including Mr. Peter Logan,
+foreman builder, Mr. Francis Watt, foreman millwright, and Captain
+Wilson, landing-master, that it was on no occasion necessary to address
+them, excepting in the way of precaution or restraint.  Under these
+circumstances, however, the writer not unfrequently felt considerable
+anxiety, of which this day’s experience will afford an example.
+
+                                                      [Thursday, 1st June]
+
+This morning, at a quarter-past eight, the artificers were landed as
+usual, and, after three hours and three-quarters’ work, five stones were
+laid, the greater part of this tide having been taken up in completing
+the boring and trenailing of the stones formerly laid.  At noon the
+writer, with the seamen and artificers, proceeded to the tender, leaving
+on the beacon the joiners, and several of those who were troubled with
+sea-sickness—among whom was Mr. Logan, who remained with Mr.
+Watt—counting altogether eleven persons.  During the first and middle
+parts of these twenty-four hours the wind was from the east, blowing what
+the seamen term ‘fresh breezes’; but in the afternoon it shifted to
+E.N.E., accompanied with so heavy a swell of sea that the _Smeaton_ and
+tender struck their topmasts, launched in their bolt-sprits, and ‘made
+all snug’ for a gale.  At four p.m. the _Smeaton_ was obliged to slip her
+moorings, and passed the tender, drifting before the wind, with only the
+foresail set.  In passing, Mr. Pool hailed that he must run for the Firth
+of Forth to prevent the vessel from ‘riding under.’
+
+On board of the tender the writer’s chief concern was about the eleven
+men left upon the beacon.  Directions were accordingly given that
+everything about the vessel should be put in the best possible state, to
+present as little resistance to the wind as possible, that she might have
+the better chance of riding out the gale.  Among these preparations the
+best bower cable was bent, so as to have a second anchor in readiness in
+case the mooring-hawser should give way, that every means might be used
+for keeping the vessel within sight of the prisoners on the beacon, and
+thereby keep them in as good spirits as possible.  From the same motive
+the boats were kept afloat that they might be less in fear of the vessel
+leaving her station.  The landing-master had, however, repeatedly
+expressed his anxiety for the safety of the boats, and wished much to
+have them hoisted on board.  At seven p.m. one of the boats, as he
+feared, was unluckily filled with sea from a wave breaking into her, and
+it was with great difficulty that she could be baled out and got on
+board, with the loss of her oars, rudder, and loose thwarts.  Such was
+the motion of the ship that in taking this boat on board her gunwale was
+stove in, and she otherwise received considerable damage.  Night
+approached, but it was still found quite impossible to go near the rock.
+Consulting, therefore, the safety of the second boat, she also was
+hoisted on board of the tender.
+
+At this time the cabins of the beacon were only partially covered, and
+had neither been provided with bedding nor a proper fireplace, while the
+stock of provisions was but slender.  In these uncomfortable
+circumstances the people on the beacon were left for the night, nor was
+the situation of those on board of the tender much better.  The rolling
+and pitching motion of the ship was excessive; and, excepting to those
+who had been accustomed to a residence in the floating light, it seemed
+quite intolerable.  Nothing was heard but the hissing of the winds and
+the creaking of the bulkheads or partitions of the ship; the night was,
+therefore, spent in the most unpleasant reflections upon the condition of
+the people on the beacon, especially in the prospect of the tender being
+driven from her moorings.  But, even in such a case, it afforded some
+consolation that the stability of the fabric was never doubted, and that
+the boats of the floating light were at no great distance, and ready to
+render the people on the rock the earliest assistance which the weather
+would permit.  The writer’s cabin being in the sternmost part of the
+ship, which had what sailors term a good entry, or was sharp built, the
+sea, as before noticed, struck her counter with so much violence that the
+water, with a rushing noise, continually forced its way up the
+rudder-case, lifted the valve of the water-closet, and overran the cabin
+floor.  In these circumstances daylight was eagerly looked for, and
+hailed with delight, as well by those afloat as by the artificers upon
+the rock.
+
+                                                        [Friday, 2nd June]
+
+In the course of the night the writer held repeated conversations with
+the officer on watch, who reported that the weather continued much in the
+same state, and that the barometer still indicated 29.20 inches.  At six
+a.m. the landing-master considered the weather to have somewhat
+moderated; and, from certain appearances of the sky, he was of opinion
+that a change for the better would soon take place.  He accordingly
+proposed to attempt a landing at low-water, and either get the people off
+the rock, or at least ascertain what state they were in.  At nine a.m. he
+left the vessel with a boat well manned, carrying with him a supply of
+cooked provisions and a tea-kettle full of mulled port wine for the
+people on the beacon, who had not had any regular diet for about thirty
+hours, while they were exposed during that period, in a great measure,
+both to the winds and the sprays of the sea.  The boat having succeeded
+in landing, she returned at eleven a.m. with the artificers, who had got
+off with considerable difficulty, and who were heartily welcomed by all
+on board.
+
+Upon inquiry it appeared that three of the stones last laid upon the
+building had been partially lifted from their beds by the force of the
+sea, and were now held only by the trenails, and that the cast-iron
+sheer-crane had again been thrown down and completely broken.  With
+regard to the beacon, the sea at high-water had lifted part of the mortar
+gallery or lowest floor, and washed away all the lime-casks and other
+movable articles from it; but the principal parts of this fabric had
+sustained no damage.  On pressing Messrs. Logan and Watt on the situation
+of things in the course of the night, Mr. Logan emphatically said: ‘That
+the beacon had an _ill-faured_ {171a} _twist_ when the sea broke upon it
+at high-water, but that they were not very apprehensive of danger.’  On
+inquiring as to how they spent the night, it appeared that they had made
+shift to keep a small fire burning, and by means of some old sails
+defended themselves pretty well from the sea sprays.
+
+It was particularly mentioned that by the exertions of James Glen, one of
+the joiners, a number of articles were saved from being washed off the
+mortar gallery.  Glen was also very useful in keeping up the spirits of
+the forlorn party.  In the early part of life he had undergone many
+curious adventures at sea, which he now recounted somewhat after the
+manner of the tales of the _Arabian Nights_.  When one observed that the
+beacon was a most comfortless lodging, Glen would presently introduce
+some of his exploits and hardships, in comparison with which the state of
+things at the beacon bore an aspect of comfort and happiness.  Looking to
+their slender stock of provisions, and their perilous and uncertain
+chance of speedy relief, he would launch out into an account of one of
+his expeditions in the North Sea, when the vessel, being much disabled in
+a storm, was driven before the wind with the loss of almost all their
+provisions; and the ship being much infested with rats, the crew hunted
+these vermin with great eagerness to help their scanty allowance.  By
+such means Glen had the address to make his companions, in some measure,
+satisfied, or at least passive, with regard to their miserable prospects
+upon this half-tide rock in the middle of the ocean.  This incident is
+noticed, more particularly, to show the effects of such a happy turn of
+mind, even under the most distressing and ill-fated circumstances.
+
+                                                     [Saturday, 17th June]
+
+At eight a.m. the artificers and sailors, forty-five in number, landed on
+the rock, and after four hours’ work seven stones were laid.  The
+remainder of this tide, from the threatening appearance of the weather,
+was occupied in trenailing and making all things as secure as possible.
+At twelve noon the rock and building were again overflowed, when the
+masons and seamen went on board of the tender, but Mr. Watt, with his
+squad of ten men, remained on the beacon throughout the day.  As it blew
+fresh from the N.W. in the evening, it was found impracticable either to
+land the building artificers or to take the artificers off the beacon,
+and they were accordingly left there all night, but in circumstances very
+different from those of the 1st of this month.  The house, being now in a
+more complete state, was provided with bedding, and they spent the night
+pretty well, though they complained of having been much disturbed at the
+time of high-water by the shaking and tremulous motion of their house and
+by the plashing noise of the sea upon mortar gallery.  Here James Glen’s
+versatile powers were again at work in cheering up those who seemed to be
+alarmed, and in securing everything as far as possible.  On this occasion
+he had only to recall to the recollections of some of them the former
+night which they had spent on the beacon, the wind and sea being then
+much higher, and their habitation in a far less comfortable state.
+
+The wind still continuing to blow fresh from the N.W., at five p.m. the
+writer caused a signal to be made from the tender for the _Smeaton and
+Patriot_ to slip their moorings, when they ran for Lunan Bay, an
+anchorage on the east side of the Redhead.  Those on board of the tender
+spent but a very rough night, and perhaps slept less soundly than their
+companions on the beacon, especially as the wind was at N.W., which
+caused the vessel to ride with her stern towards the Bell Rock; so that,
+in the event of anything giving way, she could hardly have escaped being
+stranded upon it.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 18th June]
+
+The weather having moderated to-day, the wind shifted to the westward.
+At a quarter-past nine a.m. the artificers landed from the tender and had
+the pleasure to find their friends who had been left on the rock quite
+hearty, alleging that the beacon was the preferable quarters of the two.
+
+                                                     [Saturday, 24th June]
+
+Mr. Peter Logan, the foreman builder, and his squad, twenty-one in
+number, landed this morning at three o’clock, and continued at work four
+hours and a quarter, and after laying seventeen stones returned to the
+tender.  At six a.m. Mr. Francis Watt and his squad of twelve men landed,
+and proceeded with their respective operations at the beacon and
+railways, and were left on the rock during the whole day without the
+necessity of having any communication with the tender, the kitchen of the
+beacon-house being now fitted up.  It was to-day, also, that Peter
+Fortune—a most obliging and well-known character in the Lighthouse
+service—was removed from the tender to the beacon as cook and steward,
+with a stock of provisions as ample as his limited store-room would
+admit.
+
+When as many stones were built as comprised this day’s work, the demand
+for mortar was proportionally increased, and the task of the
+mortar-makers on these occasions was both laborious and severe.  This
+operation was chiefly performed by John Watt—a strong, active quarrier by
+profession,—who was a perfect character in his way, and extremely zealous
+in his department.  While the operations of the mortar-makers continued,
+the forge upon the gallery was not generally in use; but, as the working
+hours of the builders extended with the height of the building, the forge
+could not be so long wanted, and then a sad confusion often ensued upon
+the circumscribed floor of the mortar gallery, as the operations of Watt
+and his assistants trenched greatly upon those of the smiths.  Under
+these circumstances the boundary of the smiths was much circumscribed,
+and they were personally annoyed, especially in blowy weather, with the
+dust of the lime in its powdered state.  The mortar-makers, on the other
+hand, were often not a little distressed with the heat of the fire and
+the sparks elicited on the anvil, and not unaptly complained that they
+were placed between the ‘devil and the deep sea.’
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 25th June]
+
+The work being now about ten feet in height, admitted of a rope-ladder
+being distended {174a} between the beacon and the building.  By this
+‘Jacob’s Ladder,’ as the seamen termed it, a communication was kept up
+with the beacon while the rock was considerably under water.  One end of
+it being furnished with tackle-blocks, was fixed to the beams of the
+beacon, at the level of the mortar gallery, while the further end was
+connected with the upper course of the building by means of two Lewis
+bats which were lifted from course to course as the work advanced.  In
+the same manner a rope furnished with a travelling pulley was distended
+for the purpose of transporting the mortar-buckets, and other light
+articles between the beacon and the building, which also proved a great
+conveniency to the work.  At this period the rope-ladder and tackle for
+the mortar had a descent from the beacon to the building; by and by they
+were on a level, and towards the end of the season, when the solid part
+had attained its full height, the ascent was from the mortar gallery to
+the building.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 30th June]
+
+The artificers landed on the rock this morning at a quarter-past six, and
+remained at work five hours.  The cooking apparatus being now in full
+operation, all hands had breakfast on the beacon at the usual hour, and
+remained there throughout the day.  The crane upon the building had to be
+raised to-day from the eighth to the ninth course, an operation which now
+required all the strength that could be mustered for working the
+guy-tackles; for as the top of the crane was at this time about
+thirty-five feet above the rock, it became much more unmanageable.  While
+the beam was in the act of swinging round from one guy to another, a
+great strain was suddenly brought upon the opposite tackle, with the end
+of which the artificers had very improperly neglected to take a turn
+round some stationary object, which would have given them the complete
+command of the tackle.  Owing to this simple omission, the crane got a
+preponderancy to one side, and fell upon the building with a terrible
+crash.  The surrounding artificers immediately flew in every direction to
+get out of its way; but Michael Wishart, the principal builder, having
+unluckily stumbled upon one of the uncut trenails, fell upon his back.
+His body fortunately got between the movable beam and the upright shaft
+of the crane, and was thus saved; but his feet got entangled with the
+wheels of the crane and were severely injured.  Wishart, being a robust
+young man, endured his misfortune with wonderful firmness; he was laid
+upon one of the narrow framed beds of the beacon and despatched in a boat
+to the tender, where the writer was when this accident happened, not a
+little alarmed on missing the crane from the top of the building, and at
+the same time seeing a boat rowing towards the vessel with great speed.
+When the boat came alongside with poor Wishart, stretched upon a bed
+covered with blankets, a moment of great anxiety followed, which was,
+however, much relieved when, on stepping into the boat, he was accosted
+by Wishart, though in a feeble voice, and with an aspect pale as death
+from excessive bleeding.  Directions having been immediately given to the
+coxswain to apply to Mr. Kennedy at the workyard to procure the best
+surgical aid, the boat was sent off without delay to Arbroath.  The
+writer then landed at the rock, when the crane was in a very short time
+got into its place and again put in a working state.
+
+                                                        [Monday, 3rd July]
+
+The writer having come to Arbroath with the yacht, had an opportunity of
+visiting Michael Wishart, the artificer who had met with so severe an
+accident at the rock on the 30th ult., and had the pleasure to find him
+in a state of recovery.  From Dr. Stevenson’s account, under whose charge
+he had been placed, hopes were entertained that amputation would not be
+necessary, as his patient still kept free of fever or any appearance of
+mortification; and Wishart expressed a hope that he might, at least, be
+ultimately capable of keeping the light at the Bell Rock, as it was not
+now likely that he would assist further in building the house.
+
+                                                      [Saturday, 8th July]
+
+It was remarked to-day, with no small demonstration of joy, that the
+tide, being neap, did not, for the first time, overflow the building at
+high-water.  Flags were accordingly hoisted on the beacon-house, and
+crane on the top of the building, which were repeated from the floating
+light, Lighthouse yacht, tender, _Smeaton_, _Patriot_, and the two
+praams.  A salute of three guns was also fired from the yacht at
+high-water, when, all the artificers being collected on the top of the
+building, three cheers were given in testimony of this important
+circumstance.  A glass of rum was then served out to all hands on the
+rock and on board of the respective ships.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 16th July]
+
+Besides laying, boring, trenailing, wedging, and grouting thirty-two
+stones, several other operations were proceeded with on the rock at
+low-water, when some of the artificers were employed at the railways, and
+at high-water at the beacon-house.  The seamen having prepared a quantity
+of tarpaulin, or cloth laid over with successive coats of hot tar, the
+joiners had just completed the covering of the roof with it.  This sort
+of covering was lighter and more easily managed than sheet-lead in such a
+situation.  As a further defence against the weather the whole exterior
+of this temporary residence was painted with three coats of white-lead
+paint.  Between the timber framing of the habitable part of the beacon
+the interstices were to be stuffed with moss, as a light substance that
+would resist dampness and check sifting winds; the whole interior was
+then to be lined with green baize cloth, so that both without and within
+the cabins were to have a very comfortable appearance.
+
+Although the building artificers generally remained on the rock
+throughout the day, and the millwrights, joiners, and smiths, while their
+number was considerable, remained also during the night, yet the tender
+had hitherto been considered as their night quarters.  But the wind
+having in the course of the day shifted to the N.W., and as the passage
+to the tender, in the boats, was likely to be attended with difficulty,
+the whole of the artificers, with Mr. Logan, the foreman, preferred
+remaining all night on the beacon, which had of late become the solitary
+abode of George-Forsyth, a jobbing upholsterer, who had been employed in
+lining the beacon-house with cloth and in fitting up the bedding.
+Forsyth was a tall, thin, and rather loose-made man, who had an utter
+aversion at climbing upon the trap-ladders of the beacon, but especially
+at the process of boating, and the motion of the ship, which he said ‘was
+death itself.’  He therefore pertinaciously insisted with the
+landing-master in being left upon the beacon, with a small black dog as
+his only companion.  The writer, however, felt some delicacy in leaving a
+single individual upon the rock, who must have been so very helpless in
+case of accident.  This fabric had, from the beginning, been rather
+intended by the writer to guard against accident from the loss or damage
+of a boat, and as a place for making mortar, a smith’s shop, and a store
+for tools during the working months, than as permanent quarters; nor was
+it at all meant to be possessed until tile joiner-work was completely
+finished, and his own cabin, and that for the foreman, in readiness, when
+it was still to be left to the choice of the artificers to occupy the
+tender or the beacon.  He, however, considered Forsyth’s partiality and
+confidence in the latter as rather a fortunate occurrence.
+
+                                                    [Wednesday, 19th July]
+
+The whole of the artificers, twenty-three in number, now removed of their
+own accord from the tender, to lodge in the beacon, together with Peter
+Fortune, a person singularly adapted for a residence of this kind, both
+from the urbanity of his manners and the versatility of his talents.
+Fortune, in his person, was of small stature, and rather corpulent.
+Besides being a good Scots cook, he had acted both as groom and
+house-servant; he had been a soldier, a sutler, a writer’s clerk, and an
+apothecary, from which he possessed the art of writing and suggesting
+recipes, and had hence, also, perhaps, acquired a turn for making
+collections in natural history.  But in his practice in surgery on the
+Bell Rock, for which he received an annual fee of three guineas, he is
+supposed to have been rather partial to the use of the lancet.  In short,
+Peter was the _factotum_ of the beacon-house, where he ostensibly acted
+in the several capacities of cook, steward, surgeon, and barber, and kept
+a statement of the rations or expenditure of the provisions with the
+strictest integrity.
+
+In the present important state of the building, when it had just attained
+the height of sixteen feet, and the upper courses, and especially the
+imperfect one, were in the wash of the heaviest seas, an express boat
+arrived at the rock with a letter from Mr. Kennedy, of the workyard,
+stating that in consequence of the intended expedition to Walcheren, an
+embargo had been laid on shipping at all the ports of Great Britain: that
+both the _Smeaton_ and _Patriot_ were detained at Arbroath, and that but
+for the proper view which Mr. Ramsey, the port officer, had taken of his
+orders, neither the express boat nor one which had been sent with
+provisions and necessaries for the floating light would have been
+permitted to leave the harbour.  The writer set off without delay for
+Arbroath, and on landing used every possible means with the official
+people, but their orders were deemed so peremptory that even boats were
+not permitted to sail from any port upon the coast.  In the meantime, the
+collector of the Customs at Montrose applied to the Board at Edinburgh,
+but could, of himself, grant no relief to the Bell Rock shipping.
+
+At this critical period Mr. Adam Duff, then Sheriff of Forfarshire, now
+of the county of Edinburgh, and _ex officio_ one of the Commissioners of
+the Northern Lighthouses, happened to be at Arbroath.  Mr. Duff took an
+immediate interest in representing the circumstances of the case to the
+Board of Customs at Edinburgh.  But such were the doubts entertained on
+the subject that, on having previously received the appeal from the
+collector at Montrose, the case had been submitted to the consideration
+of the Lords of the Treasury, whose decision was now waited for.
+
+In this state of things the writer felt particularly desirous to get the
+thirteenth course finished, that the building might be in a more secure
+state in the event of bad weather.  An opportunity was therefore embraced
+on the 25th, in sailing with provisions for the floating light, to carry
+the necessary stones to the rock for this purpose, which were landed and
+built on the 26th and 27th.  But so closely was the watch kept up that a
+Custom-house officer was always placed on board of the _Smeaton_ and
+_Patriot_ while they were afloat, till the embargo was especially removed
+from the lighthouse vessels.  The artificers at the Bell Rock had been
+reduced to fifteen, who were regularly supplied with provisions, along
+with the crew of the floating light, mainly through the port officer’s
+liberal interpretation of his orders.
+
+                                                       [Tuesday, 1st Aug.]
+
+There being a considerable swell and breach of sea upon the rock
+yesterday, the stones could not be got landed till the day following,
+when the wind shifted to the southward and the weather improved.  But
+to-day no less than seventy-eight blocks of stone were landed, of which
+forty were built, which completed the fourteenth and part of the
+fifteenth courses.  The number of workmen now resident in the
+beacon-house was augmented to twenty-four, including the landing-master’s
+crew from the tender and the boat’s crew from the floating light, who
+assisted at landing the stones.  Those daily at work upon the rock at
+this period amounted to forty-six.  A cabin had been laid out for the
+writer on the beacon, but his apartment had been the last which was
+finished, and he had not yet taken possession of it; for though he
+generally spent the greater part of the day, at this time, upon the rock,
+yet he always slept on board of the tender.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 11th Aug.]
+
+The wind was at S. E. on the 11th, and there was so very heavy a swell of
+sea upon the rock that no boat could approach it.
+
+                                                     [Saturday, 12th Aug.]
+
+The gale still continuing from the S.E., the sea broke with great
+violence both upon the building and the beacon.  The former being
+twenty-three feet in height, the upper part of the crane erected on it
+having been lifted from course to course as the building advanced, was
+now about thirty-six feet above the rock.  From observations made on the
+rise of the sea by this crane, the artificers were enabled to estimate
+its height to be about fifty feet above the rock, while the sprays fell
+with a most alarming noise upon their cabins.  At low-water, in the
+evening, a signal was made from the beacon, at the earnest desire of some
+of the artificers, for the boats to come to the rock; and although this
+could not be effected without considerable hazard, it was, however,
+accomplished, when twelve of their number, being much afraid, applied to
+the foreman to be relieved, and went on board of the tender.  But the
+remaining fourteen continued on the rock, with Mr. Peter Logan, the
+foreman builder.  Although this rule of allowing an option to every man
+either to remain on the rock or return to the tender was strictly adhered
+to, yet, as it would have been extremely inconvenient to have the men
+parcelled out in this manner, it became necessary to embrace the first
+opportunity of sending those who had left the beacon to the workyard,
+with as little appearance of intention as possible, lest it should hurt
+their feelings, or prevent others from acting according to their wishes,
+either in landing on the rock or remaining on the beacon.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 15th Aug.]
+
+The wind had fortunately shifted to the S.W. this morning, and though a
+considerable breach was still upon the rock, yet the landing-master’s
+crew were enabled to get one praam-boat, lightly loaded with five stones,
+brought in safety to the western creek; these stones were immediately
+laid by the artificers, who gladly embraced the return of good weather to
+proceed with their operations.  The writer had this day taken possession
+of his cabin in the beacon-house.  It was small, but commodious, and was
+found particularly convenient in coarse and blowing weather, instead of
+being obliged to make a passage to the tender in an open boat at all
+times, both during the day and the night, which was often attended with
+much difficulty and danger.
+
+                                                     [Saturday, 19th Aug.]
+
+For some days past the weather had been occasionally so thick and foggy
+that no small difficulty was experienced in going even between the rock
+and the tender, though quite at hand.  But the floating light’s boat lost
+her way so far in returning on board that the first land she made, after
+rowing all night, was Fifeness, a distance of about fourteen miles.  The
+weather having cleared in the morning, the crew stood off again for the
+floating light, and got on board in a half-famished and much exhausted
+state, having been constantly rowing for about sixteen hours.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 20th Aug.]
+
+The weather being very favourable to-day, fifty-three stones were landed,
+and the builders were not a little gratified in having built the
+twenty-second course, consisting of fifty-one stones, being the first
+course which had been completed in one day.  This, as a matter of course,
+produced three hearty cheers.  At twelve noon prayers were read for the
+first time on the Bell Rock; those present, counting thirty, were crowded
+into the upper apartment of the beacon, where the writer took a central
+position, while two of the artificers, joining hands, supported the
+Bible.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 25th Aug.]
+
+To-day the artificers laid forty-five stones, which completed the
+twenty-fourth course, reckoning above the first entire one, and the
+twenty-sixth above the rock.  This finished the solid part of the
+building, and terminated the height of the outward casing of granite,
+which is thirty-one feet six inches above the rock or site of the
+foundation-stone, and about seventeen feet above high-water of
+spring-tides.  Being a particular crisis in the progress of the
+lighthouse, the landing and laying of the last stone for the season was
+observed with the usual ceremonies.
+
+From observations often made by the writer, in so far as such can be
+ascertained, it appears that no wave in the open seas, in an unbroken
+state, rises more than from seven to nine feet above the general surface
+of the ocean.  The Bell Rock Lighthouse may therefore now be considered
+at from eight to ten feet above the height of the waves; and, although
+the sprays and heavy seas have often been observed, in the present state
+of the building, to rise to the height of fifty feet, and fall with a
+tremendous noise on the beacon-house, yet such seas were not likely to
+make any impression on a mass of solid masonry, containing about 1400
+tons,
+
+                                                    [Wednesday, 30th Aug.]
+
+The whole of the artificers left the rock at mid-day, when the tender
+made sail for Arbroath, which she reached about six p.m.  The vessel
+being decorated with colours, and having fired a salute of three guns on
+approaching the harbour, the workyard artificers, with a multitude of
+people, assembled at the harbour, when mutual cheering and
+congratulations took place between those afloat and those on the quays.
+The tender had now, with little exception, been six months on the station
+at the Bell Rock, and during the last four months few of the squad of
+builders had been ashore.  In particular, Mr. Peter Logan, the foreman,
+and Mr. Robert Selkirk, principal builder, had never once left the rock.
+The artificers, having made good wages during their stay, like seamen
+upon a return voyage, were extremely happy, and spent the evening with
+much innocent mirth and jollity.
+
+In reflecting upon the state of the matters at the Bell Rock during the
+working months, when the writer was much with the artificers, nothing can
+equal the happy manner in which these excellent workmen spent their time.
+They always went from Arbroath to their arduous task cheering and they
+generally returned in the same hearty state.  While at the rock, between
+the tides, they amused themselves in reading, fishing, music, playing
+cards, draughts, etc., or in sporting with one another.  In the workyard
+at Arbroath the young men were almost, without exception, employed in the
+evening at school, in writing and arithmetic, and not a few were learning
+architectural drawing, for which they had every convenience and facility,
+and were, in a very obliging manner, assisted in their studies by Mr.
+David Logan, clerk of the works.  It therefore affords the most pleasing
+reflections to look back upon the pursuits of about sixty individuals who
+for years conducted themselves, on all occasions, in a sober and rational
+manner.
+
+
+
+IV—OPERATIONS OF 1810
+
+
+                                                      [Thursday, 10th May]
+
+The wind had shifted to-day to W.N.W., when the writer, with considerable
+difficulty, was enabled to land upon the rock for the first time this
+season, at ten a.m.  Upon examining the state of the building, and
+apparatus in general, he had the satisfaction to find everything in good
+order.  The mortar in all the joints was perfectly entire.  The building,
+now thirty feet in height, was thickly coated with _fuci_ to the height
+of about fifteen feet, calculating from the rock: on the eastern side,
+indeed, the growth of seaweed was observable to the full height of thirty
+feet, and even on the top or upper bed of the last-laid course,
+especially towards the eastern side, it had germinated, so as to render
+walking upon it somewhat difficult.
+
+The beacon-house was in a perfectly sound state, and apparently just as
+it had been left in the month of November.  But the tides being neap, the
+lower parts, particularly where the beams rested on the rock, could not
+now be seen.  The floor of the mortar gallery having been already laid
+down by Mr. Watt and his men on a former visit, was merely soaked with
+the sprays; but the joisting-beams which supported it had, in the course
+of the winter, been covered with a fine downy conferva produced by the
+range of the sea.  They were also a good deal whitened with the mute of
+the cormorant and other sea-fowls, which had roosted upon the beacon in
+winter.  Upon ascending to the apartments, it was found that the motion
+of the sea had thrown open the door of the cook-house: this was only shut
+with a single latch, that in case of shipwreck at the Bell Rock the
+mariner might find ready access to the shelter of this forlorn
+habitation, where a supply of provisions was kept; and being within two
+miles and a half of the floating light, a signal could readily be
+observed, when a boat might be sent to his relief as the weather
+permitted.  An arrangement for this purpose formed one of the
+instructions on board of the floating light, but happily no instance
+occurred for putting it in practice.  The hearth or fireplace of the
+cook-house was built of brick in as secure a manner as possible, to
+prevent accident from fire; but some of the plaster-work had shaken
+loose, from its damp state and the tremulous motion of the beacon in
+stormy weather.  The writer next ascended to the floor which was occupied
+by the cabins of himself and his assistants, which were in tolerably good
+order, having only a damp and musty smell.  The barrack for the
+artificers, over all, was next visited; it had now a very dreary and
+deserted appearance when its former thronged state was recollected.  In
+some parts the water had come through the boarding, and had discoloured
+the lining of green cloth, but it was, nevertheless, in a good habitable
+condition.  While the seamen were employed in landing a stock of
+provisions, a few of the artificers set to work with great eagerness to
+sweep and clean the several apartments.  The exterior of the beacon was,
+in the meantime, examined, and found in perfect order.  The painting,
+though it had a somewhat blanched appearance, adhered firmly both on the
+sides and roof, and only two or three panes of glass were broken in the
+cupola, which had either been blown out by the force of the wind, or
+perhaps broken by sea-fowl.
+
+Having on this occasion continued upon the building and beacon a
+considerable time after the tide had begun to flow, the artificers were
+occupied in removing the forge from the top of the building, to which the
+gangway or wooden bridge gave great facility; and, although it stretched
+or had a span of forty-two feet, its construction was extremely simple,
+while the road-way was perfectly firm and steady.  In returning from this
+visit to the rock every one was pretty well soused in spray before
+reaching the tender at two o’clock p.m., where things awaited the landing
+party in as comfortable a way as such a situation would admit.
+
+                                                        [Friday, 11th May]
+
+The wind was still easterly, accompanied with rather a heavy swell of sea
+for the operations in hand.  A landing was, however, made this morning,
+when the artificers were immediately employed in scraping the seaweed off
+the upper course of the building, in order to apply the moulds of the
+first course of the staircase, that the joggle-holes might be marked off
+in the upper course of the solid.  This was also necessary previously to
+the writer’s fixing the position of the entrance door, which was
+regulated chiefly by the appearance of the growth of the seaweed on the
+building, indicating the direction of the heaviest seas, on the opposite
+side of which the door was placed.  The landing-master’s crew succeeded
+in towing into the creek on the western side of the rock the praam-boat
+with the balance-crane, which had now been on board of the praam for five
+days.  The several pieces of this machine, having been conveyed along the
+railways upon the waggons to a position immediately under the bridge,
+were elevated to its level, or thirty feet above the rock, in the
+following manner.  A chain-tackle was suspended over a pulley from the
+cross-beam connecting the tops of the kingposts of the bridge, which was
+worked by a winch-machine with wheel, pinion, and barrel, round which
+last the chain was wound.  This apparatus was placed on the beacon side
+of the bridge, at the distance of about twelve feet from the cross-beam
+and pulley in the middle of the bridge.  Immediately under the cross-beam
+a hatch was formed in the roadway of the bridge, measuring seven feet in
+length and five feet in breadth, made to shut with folding boards like a
+double door, through which stones and other articles were raised; the
+folding doors were then let down, and the stone or load was gently
+lowered upon a waggon which was wheeled on railway trucks towards the
+lighthouse.  In this manner the several castings of the balance-crane
+were got up to the top of the solid of the building.
+
+The several apartments of the beacon-house having been cleaned out and
+supplied with bedding, a sufficient stock of provisions was put into the
+store, when Peter Fortune, formerly noticed, lighted his fire in the
+beacon for the first time this season.  Sixteen artificers at the same
+time mounted to their barrack-room, and all the foremen of the works also
+took possession of their cabin, all heartily rejoiced at getting rid of
+the trouble of boating and the sickly motion of the tender.
+
+                                                      [Saturday, 12th May]
+
+The wind was at E.N.E., blowing so fresh, and accompanied with so much
+sea, that no stones could be landed to-day.  The people on the rock,
+however, were busily employed in screwing together the balance-crane,
+cutting out the joggle-holes in the upper course, and preparing all
+things for commencing the building operations.
+
+                                                        [Sunday, 13th May]
+
+The weather still continues boisterous, although the barometer has all
+the while stood at about 30 inches.  Towards evening the wind blew so
+fresh at E. by S. that the boats both of the _Smeaton_ and tender were
+obliged to be hoisted in, and it was feared that the _Smeaton_ would have
+to slip her moorings.  The people on the rock were seen busily employed,
+and had the balance-crane apparently ready for use, but no communication
+could be had with them to-day.
+
+                                                        [Monday, 14th May]
+
+The wind continued to blow so fresh, and the _Smeaton_ rode so heavily
+with her cargo, that at noon a signal was made for her getting under
+weigh, when she stood towards Arbroath; and on board of the tender we are
+still without any communication with the people on the rock, where the
+sea was seen breaking over the top of the building in great sprays, and
+raging with much agitation among the beams of the beacon.
+
+                                                      [Thursday, 17th May]
+
+The wind, in the course of the day, had shifted from north to west; the
+sea being also considerably less, a boat landed on the rock at six p.m.,
+for the first time since the 11th, with the provisions and water brought
+off by the _Patriot_.  The inhabitants of the beacon were all well, but
+tired above measure for want of employment, as the balance-crane and
+apparatus was all in readiness.  Under these circumstances they felt no
+less desirous of the return of good weather than those afloat, who were
+continually tossed with the agitation of the sea.  The writer, in
+particular, felt himself almost as much fatigued and worn-out as he had
+been at any period since the commencement of the work.  The very backward
+state of the weather at so advanced a period of the season unavoidably
+created some alarm, lest he should be overtaken with bad weather at a
+late period of the season, with the building operations in an unfinished
+state.  These apprehensions were, no doubt, rather increased by the
+inconveniences of his situation afloat, as the tender rolled and pitched
+excessively at times.  This being also his first off-set for the season,
+every bone of his body felt sore with preserving a sitting posture while
+he endeavoured to pass away the time in reading; as for writing, it was
+wholly impracticable.  He had several times entertained thoughts of
+leaving the station for a few days and going into Arbroath with the
+tender till the weather should improve; but as the artificers had been
+landed on the rock he was averse to this at the commencement of the
+season, knowing also that he would be equally uneasy in every situation
+till the first cargo was landed: and he therefore resolved to continue at
+his post until this should be effected.
+
+                                                        [Friday, 18th May]
+
+The wind being now N.W., the sea was considerably run down, and this
+morning at five o’clock the landing-master’s crew, thirteen in number,
+left the tender; and having now no detention with the landing of
+artificers, they proceeded to unmoor the _Hedderwick_ praam-boat, and
+towed her alongside of the _Smeaton_: and in the course of the day
+twenty-three blocks of stone, three casks of pozzolano, three of sand,
+three of lime, and one of Roman cement, together with three bundles of
+trenails and three of wedges, were all landed on the rock and raised the
+top of the building by means of the tackle suspended from the cross-beam
+on the middle of the bridge.  The stones were then moved along the bridge
+on the waggon to the building within reach of the balance-crane, with
+which they were laid in their respective places on the building.  The
+masons immediately thereafter proceeded to bore the trenail-holes into
+the course below, and otherwise to complete the one in hand.  When the
+first stone was to be suspended by the balance-crane, the bell on the
+beacon was rung, and all the artificers and seamen were collected on the
+building.  Three hearty cheers were given while it was lowered into its
+place, and the steward served round a glass of rum, when success was
+drunk to the further progress of the building.
+
+                                                        [Sunday, 20th May]
+
+The wind was southerly to-day, but there was much less sea than
+yesterday, and the landing-master’s crew were enabled to discharge and
+land twenty-three pieces of stone and other articles for the work.  The
+artificers had completed the laying of the twenty-seventh or first course
+of the staircase this morning, and in the evening they finished the
+boring, trenailing, wedging, and grouting it with mortar.  At twelve
+o’clock noon the beacon-house bell was rung, and all hands were collected
+on the top of the building, where prayers were read for the first time on
+the lighthouse, which forcibly struck every one, and had, upon the whole,
+a very impressive effect.
+
+From the hazardous situation of the beacon-house with regard to fire,
+being composed wholly of timber, there was no small risk from accident:
+and on this account one of the most steady of the artificers was
+appointed to see that the fire of the cooking-house, and the lights in
+general, were carefully extinguished at stated hours.
+
+                                                        [Monday, 4th June]
+
+This being the birthday of our much-revered Sovereign King George III,
+now in the fiftieth year of his reign, the shipping of the Lighthouse
+service were this morning decorated with colours according to the taste
+of their respective captains.  Flags were also hoisted upon the
+beacon-house and balance-crane on the top of the building.  At twelve
+noon a salute was fired from the tender, when the King’s health was
+drunk, with all the honours, both on the rock and on board of the
+shipping.
+
+                                                       [Tuesday, 5th June]
+
+As the lighthouse advanced in height, the cubical contents of the stones
+were less, but they had to be raised to a greater height; and the walls,
+being thinner, were less commodious for the necessary machinery and the
+artificers employed, which considerably retarded the work.  Inconvenience
+was also occasionally experienced from the men dropping their coats,
+hats, mallets, and other tools, at high-water, which were carried away by
+the tide; and the danger to the people themselves was now greatly
+increased.  Had any of them fallen from the beacon or building at
+high-water, while the landing-master’s crew were generally engaged with
+the craft at a distance, it must have rendered the accident doubly
+painful to those on the rock, who at this time had no boat, and
+consequently no means of rendering immediate and prompt assistance.  In
+such cases it would have been too late to have got a boat by signal from
+the tender.  A small boat, which could be lowered at pleasure, was
+therefore suspended by a pair of davits projected from the cook-house,
+the keel being about thirty feet from the rock.  This boat, with its
+tackle was put under the charge of James Glen, of whose exertions on the
+beacon mention has already been made, and who, having in early life been
+a seaman, was also very expert in the management of a boat.  A life-buoy
+was likewise suspended from the bridge, to which a coil of line two
+hundred fathoms in length was attached, which could be let out to a
+person falling into the water, or to the people in the boat, should they
+not be able to work her with the oars.
+
+                                                       [Tuesday, 7th June]
+
+To-day twelve stones were landed on the rock, being the remainder of the
+_Patriot’s_ cargo; and the artificers built the thirty-ninth course,
+consisting of fourteen stones.  The Bell Rock works had now a very busy
+appearance, as the lighthouse was daily getting more into form.  Besides
+the artificers and their cook, the writer and his servant were also
+lodged on the beacon, counting in all twenty-nine; and at low-water the
+landing-master’s crew, consisting of from twelve to fifteen seamen, were
+employed in transporting the building materials, working the landing
+apparatus on the rock, and dragging the stone waggons along the railways.
+
+                                                        [Friday, 8th June]
+
+In the course of this day the weather varied much.  In the morning it was
+calm, in the middle part of the day there were light airs of wind from
+the south, and in the evening fresh breezes from the east.  The barometer
+in the writer’s cabin in the beacon-house oscillated from 30 inches to
+30.42, and the weather was extremely pleasant.  This, in any situation,
+forms one of the chief comforts of life; but, as may easily be conceived,
+it was doubly so to people stuck, as it were, upon a pinnacle in the
+middle of the ocean.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 10th June]
+
+One of the praam-boats had been brought to the rock with eleven stones,
+notwithstanding the perplexity which attended the getting of those
+formerly landed taken up to the building.  Mr. Peter Logan, the foreman
+builder, interposed, and prevented this cargo from being delivered; but
+the landing-master’s crew were exceedingly averse to this arrangement,
+from an idea that “ill luck” would in future attend the praam, her cargo,
+and those who navigated her, from thus reversing her voyage.  It may be
+noticed that this was the first instance of a praam-boat having been sent
+from the Bell Rock with any part of her cargo on board, and was
+considered so uncommon an occurrence that it became a topic of
+conversation among the seamen and artificers.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 12th June]
+
+To-day the stones formerly sent from the rock were safely landed,
+notwithstanding the augury of the seamen in consequence of their being
+sent away two days before.
+
+                                                     [Thursday, 14th June]
+
+To-day twenty-seven stones and eleven joggle-pieces were landed, part of
+which consisted of the forty-seventh course, forming the storeroom floor.
+The builders were at work this morning by four o’clock, in the hopes of
+being able to accomplish the laying of the eighteen stones of this
+course.  But at eight o’clock in the evening they had still two to lay,
+and as the stones of this course were very unwieldy, being six feet in
+length, they required much precaution and care both in lifting and laying
+them.  It was only on the writer’s suggestion to Mr. Logan that the
+artificers were induced to leave off, as they had intended to complete
+this floor before going to bed.  The two remaining stones were, however,
+laid in their places without mortar when the bell on the beacon was rung,
+and, all hands being collected on the top of the building, three hearty
+cheers were given on covering the first apartment.  The steward then
+served out a dram to each, when the whole retired to their barrack much
+fatigued, but with the anticipation of the most perfect repose even in
+the “hurricane-house,” amidst the dashing seas on the Bell Rock.
+
+While the workmen were at breakfast and dinner it was the writer’s usual
+practice to spend his time on the walls of the building, which,
+notwithstanding the narrowness of the track, nevertheless formed his
+principal walk when the rock was under water.  But this afternoon he had
+his writing-desk set upon the storeroom floor, when he wrote to Mrs.
+Stevenson—certainly the first letter dated from the Bell Rock
+_Lighthouse_—giving a detail of the fortunate progress of the work with
+an assurance that the lighthouse would soon be completed at the rate at
+which it now proceeded; and, the _Patriot_ having sailed for Arbroath in
+the evening, he felt no small degree of pleasure in despatching this
+communication to his family.
+
+The weather still continuing favourable for the operations at the rock,
+the work proceeded with much energy, through the exertions both of the
+seamen and artificers.  For the more speedy and effectual working of the
+several tackles in raising the materials as the building advanced in
+height, and there being a great extent of railway to attend to, which
+required constant repairs, two additional millwrights were added to the
+complement on the rock, which, including the writer, now counted
+thirty-one in all.  So crowded was the men’s barrack that the beds were
+ranged five tier in height, allowing only about one foot eight inches for
+each bed.  The artificers commenced this morning at five o’clock, and, in
+the course of the day, they laid the forty-eighth and forty-ninth
+courses, consisting each of sixteen blocks.  From the favourable state of
+the weather, and the regular manner in which the work now proceeded, the
+artificers had generally from four to seven extra hours’ work, which,
+including their stated wages of 3s. 4d., yielded them from 5s. 4d. to
+about 6s. 10d. per day besides their board; even the postage of their
+letters was paid while they were at the Bell Rock.  In these advantages
+the foremen also shared, having about double the pay and amount of
+premiums of the artificers.  The seamen being less out of their element
+in the Bell Rock operations than the landsmen, their premiums consisted
+in a slump sum payable at the end of the season, which extended from
+three to ten guineas.
+
+As the laying of the floors was somewhat tedious, the landing-master and
+his crew had got considerably beforehand with the building artificers in
+bringing materials faster to the rock than they could be built.  The
+seamen having, therefore, some spare time, were occasionally employed
+during fine weather in dredging or grappling for the several mushroom
+anchors and mooring-chains which had been lost in the vicinity of the
+Bell Rock during the progress of the work by the breaking loose and
+drifting of the floating buoys.  To encourage their exertions in this
+search, five guineas were offered as a premium for each set they should
+find; and, after much patient application, they succeeded to-day in
+hooking one of these lost anchors with its chain.
+
+It was a general remark at the Bell Rock, as before noticed, that fish
+were never plenty in its neighbourhood excepting in good weather.
+Indeed, the seamen used to speculate about the state of the weather from
+their success in fishing.  When the fish disappeared at the rock, it was
+considered a sure indication that a gale was not far off, as the fish
+seemed to seek shelter in deeper water from the roughness of the sea
+during these changes in the weather.  At this time the rock, at
+high-water, was completely covered with podlies, or the fry of the
+coal-fish, about six or eight inches in length.  The artificers sometimes
+occupied half an hour after breakfast and dinner in catching these little
+fishes, but were more frequently supplied from the boats of the tender.
+
+                                                     [Saturday, 16th June]
+
+The landing-master having this day discharged the _Smeaton_ and loaded
+the _Hedderwick and Dickie_ praam-boats with nineteen stones, they were
+towed to their respective moorings, when Captain Wilson, in consequence
+of the heavy swell of sea, came in his boat to the beacon-house to
+consult with the writer as to the propriety of venturing the loaded
+praam-boats with their cargoes to the rock while so much sea was running.
+After some dubiety expressed on the subject, in which the ardent mind of
+the landing-master suggested many arguments in favour of his being able
+to convey the praams in perfect safety, it was acceded to.  In bad
+weather, and especially on occasions of difficulty like the present, Mr.
+Wilson, who was an extremely active seaman, measuring about five feet
+three inches in height, of a robust habit, generally dressed himself in
+what he called a _monkey jacket_, made of thick duffle cloth, with a pair
+of Dutchman’s petticoat trousers, reaching only to his knees, where they
+were met with a pair of long water-tight boots; with this dress, his
+glazed hat, and his small brass speaking trumpet in his hand, he bade
+defiance to the weather.  When he made his appearance in this most
+suitable attire for the service his crew seemed to possess additional
+life, never failing to use their utmost exertions when the captain put on
+his _storm rigging_.  They had this morning commenced loading the
+praam-boats at four o’clock, and proceeded to tow them into the eastern
+landing-place, which was accomplished with much dexterity, though not
+without the risk of being thrown, by the force of the sea, on certain
+projecting ledges of the rock.  In such a case the loss even of a single
+stone would have greatly retarded the work.  For the greater safety in
+entering the creek it was necessary to put out several warps and
+guy-ropes to guide the boats into its narrow and intricate entrance; and
+it frequently happened that the sea made a clean breach over the praams,
+which not only washed their decks, but completely drenched the crew in
+water.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 17th June]
+
+It was fortunate, in the present state of the weather, that the fiftieth
+course was in a sheltered spot, within the reach of the tackle of the
+winch-machine upon the bridge; a few stones were stowed upon the bridge
+itself, and the remainder upon the building, which kept the artificers at
+work.  The stowing of the materials upon the rock was the department of
+Alexander Brebner, mason, who spared no pains in attending to the safety
+of the stones, and who, in the present state of the work, when the stones
+were landed faster than could be built, generally worked till the water
+rose to his middle.  At one o’clock to-day the bell rung for prayers, and
+all hands were collected into the upper barrack-room of the beacon-house,
+when the usual service was performed.
+
+The wind blew very hard in the course of last night from N.E., and to-day
+the sea ran so high that no boat could approach the rock.  During the
+dinner-hour, when the writer was going to the top of the building as
+usual, but just as he had entered the door and was about to ascend the
+ladder, a great noise was heard overhead, and in an instant he was soused
+in water from a sea which had most unexpectedly come over the walls,
+though now about fifty-eight feet in height.  On making his retreat he
+found himself completely whitened by the lime, which had mixed with the
+water while dashing down through the different floors; and, as nearly as
+he could guess, a quantity equal to about a hogshead had come over the
+walls, and now streamed out at the door.  After having shifted himself,
+he again sat down in his cabin, the sea continuing to run so high that
+the builders did not resume their operations on the walls this afternoon.
+The incident just noticed did not create more surprise in the mind of the
+writer than the sublime appearance of the waves as they rolled
+majestically over the rock.  This scene he greatly enjoyed while sitting
+at his cabin window; each wave approached the beacon like a vast scroll
+unfolding; and in passing discharged a quantity of air, which he not only
+distinctly felt, but was even sufficient to lift the leaves of a book
+which lay before him.  These waves might be ten or twelve feet in height,
+and about 250 feet in length, their smaller end being towards the north,
+where the water was deep, and they were opened or cut through by the
+interposition of the building and beacon.  The gradual manner in which
+the sea, upon these occasions, is observed to become calm or to subside,
+is a very remarkable feature of this phenomenon.  For example, when a
+gale is succeeded by a calm, every third or fourth wave forms one of
+these great seas, which occur in spaces of from three to five minutes, as
+noted by the writer’s watch; but in the course of the next tide they
+become less frequent, and take off so as to occur only in ten or fifteen
+minutes; and, singular enough, at the third tide after such gales, the
+writer has remarked that only one or two of these great waves appear in
+the course of the whole tide.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 19th June]
+
+The 19th was a very unpleasant and disagreeable day, both for the seamen
+and artificers, as it rained throughout with little intermission from
+four a.m. till eleven p.m., accompanied with thunder and lightning,
+during which period the work nevertheless continued unremittingly, and
+the builders laid the fifty-first and fifty-second courses.  This state
+of weather was no less severe upon the mortar-makers, who required to
+temper or prepare the mortar of a thicker or thinner consistency, in some
+measure, according to the state of the weather.  From the elevated
+position of the building, the mortar gallery on the beacon was now much
+lower, and the lime-buckets were made to traverse upon a rope distended
+between it and the building.  On occasions like the present, however,
+there was often a difference of opinion between the builders and the
+mortar-makers.  John Watt, who had the principal charge of the mortar,
+was a most active worker, but, being somewhat of an irascible temper, the
+builders occasionally amused themselves at his expense; for while he was
+eagerly at work with his large iron-shod pestle in the mortar-tub, they
+often sent down contradictory orders, some crying, ‘Make it a little
+stiffer, or thicker, John,’ while others called out to make it ‘thinner,’
+to which he generally returned very speedy and sharp replies, so that
+these conversations at times were rather amusing.
+
+During wet weather the situation of the artificers on the top of the
+building was extremely disagreeable; for although their work did not
+require great exertion, yet, as each man had his particular part to
+perform, either in working the crane or in laying the stones, it required
+the closest application and attention, not only on the part of Mr. Peter
+Logan, the foreman, who was constantly on the walls, but also of the
+chief workmen.  Robert Selkirk, the principal builder, for example, had
+every stone to lay in its place.  David Cumming, a mason, had the charge
+of working the tackle of the balance-weight, and James Scott, also a
+mason, took charge of the purchase with which the stones were laid; while
+the pointing the joints of the walls with cement was intrusted to William
+Reid and William Kennedy, who stood upon a scaffold suspended over the
+walls in rather a frightful manner.  The least act of carelessness or
+inattention on the part of any of these men might have been fatal, not
+only to themselves, but also to the surrounding workmen, especially if
+any accident had happened to the crane itself, while the material damage
+or loss of a single stone would have put an entire stop to the operations
+until another could have been brought from Arbroath.  The artificers,
+having wrought seven and a half hours of extra time to-day, had 3s. 9d.
+of extra pay, while the foremen had 7s. 6d. over and above their stated
+pay and board.  Although, therefore, the work was both hazardous and
+fatiguing, yet, the encouragement being considerable, they were always
+very cheerful, and perfectly reconciled to the confinement and other
+disadvantages of the place.
+
+During fine weather, and while the nights were short, the duty on board
+of the floating light was literally nothing but a waiting on, and
+therefore one of her boats, with a crew of five men, daily attended the
+rock, but always returned to the vessel at night.  The carpenter,
+however, was one of those who was left on board of the ship, as he also
+acted in the capacity of assistant lightkeeper, being, besides, a person
+who was apt to feel discontent and to be averse to changing his quarters,
+especially to work with the millwrights and joiners at the rock, who
+often, for hours together, wrought knee-deep, and not unfrequently up to
+the middle, in water.  Mr. Watt having about this time made a requisition
+for another hand, the carpenter was ordered to attend the rock in the
+floating light’s boat.  This he did with great reluctance, and found so
+much fault that he soon got into discredit with his messmates.  On this
+occasion he left the Lighthouse service, and went as a sailor in a vessel
+bound for America—a step which, it is believed, he soon regretted, as, in
+the course of things, he would, in all probability, have accompanied Mr.
+John Reid, the principal lightkeeper of the floating light, to the Bell
+Rock Lighthouse as his principal assistant.  The writer had a wish to be
+of service to this man, as he was one of those who came off to the
+floating light in the month of September 1807, while she was riding at
+single anchor after the severe gale of the 7th, at a time when it was
+hardly possible to make up this vessel’s crew; but the crossness of his
+manner prevented his reaping the benefit of such intentions.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 22nd June]
+
+The building operations had for some time proceeded more slowly, from the
+higher parts of the lighthouse requiring much longer time than an equal
+tonnage of the lower courses.  The duty of the landing-master’s crew had,
+upon the whole, been easy of late; for though the work was occasionally
+irregular, yet the stones being lighter, they were more speedily lifted
+from the hold of the stone vessel to the deck of the praam-boat, and
+again to the waggons on the railway, after which they came properly under
+the charge of the foreman builder.  It is, however, a strange, though not
+an uncommon, feature in the human character, that, when people have least
+to complain of, they are most apt to become dissatisfied, as was now the
+case with the seamen employed in the Bell Rock service about their
+rations of beer.  Indeed, ever since the carpenter of the floating light,
+formerly noticed, had been brought to the rock, expressions of discontent
+had been manifested upon various occasions.  This being represented to
+the writer, he sent for Captain Wilson, the landing-master, and Mr.
+Taylor, commander of the tender, with whom he talked over the subject.
+They stated that they considered the daily allowance of the seamen in
+every respect ample, and that, the work being now much lighter than
+formerly, they had no just ground for complaint; Mr. Taylor adding that,
+if those who now complained ‘were even to be fed upon soft bread and
+turkeys, they would not think themselves right.’  At twelve noon the work
+of the landing-master’s crew was completed for the day; but at four
+o’clock, while the rock was under water, those on the beacon were
+surprised by the arrival of a boat from the tender without any signal
+having been made from the beacon.  It brought the following note to the
+writer from the landing-master’s crew:—
+
+                                               ‘_Sir Joseph Banks Tender_.
+
+    ‘SIR,—We are informed by our masters that our allowance is to be as
+    before, and it is not sufficient to serve us, for we have been at
+    work since four o’clock this morning, and we have come on board to
+    dinner, and there is no beer for us before to-morrow morning, to
+    which a sufficient answer is required before we go from the beacon;
+    and we are, Sir, your most obedient servants.’
+
+On reading this, the writer returned a verbal message, intimating that an
+answer would be sent on board of the tender, at the same time ordering
+the boat instantly to quit the beacon.  He then addressed the following
+note to the landing-master:—
+
+                                      ‘_Beacon-house_, 22_nd_ _June_ 1810,
+                                                       _Five o’clock p.m_.
+
+    ‘SIR,—I have just now received a letter purporting to be from the
+    landing-master’s crew and seamen on board of the _Sir Joseph Banks_,
+    though without either date or signature; in answer to which I enclose
+    a statement of the daily allowance of provisions for the seamen in
+    this service, which you will post up in the ship’s galley, and at
+    seven o’clock this evening I will come on board to inquire into this
+    unexpected and most unnecessary demand for an additional allowance of
+    beer.  In the enclosed you will not find any alteration from the
+    original statement, fixed in the galley at the beginning of the
+    season.  I have, however, judged this mode of giving your people an
+    answer preferable to that of conversing with them on the beacon. —I
+    am, Sir, your most obedient servant,
+
+                                                         ROBERT STEVENSON.
+
+    ‘To CAPTAIN WILSON.’
+
+    ‘_Beacon House_, 22_nd_ _June_ 1810.—Schedule of the daily allowance
+    of provisions to be served out on board of the _Sir Joseph Banks_
+    tender: “1½ lb. beef; 1 lb. bread; 8 oz. oatmeal; 2 oz. barley; 2 oz.
+    butter; 3 quarts beer; vegetables and salt no stated allowance.  When
+    the seamen are employed in unloading the _Smeaton_ and _Patriot_, a
+    draught of beer is, as formerly, to be allowed from the stock of
+    these vessels.  Further, in wet and stormy weather, or when the work
+    commences very early in the morning, or continues till a late hour at
+    night, a glass of spirits will also be served out to the crew as
+    heretofore, on the requisition of the landing-master.”
+
+                                                        ROBERT STEVENSON.’
+
+On writing this letter and schedule, a signal was made on the beacon for
+the landing-master’s boat, which immediately came to the rock, and the
+schedule was afterwards stuck up in the tender’s galley.  When sufficient
+time had been allowed to the crew to consider of their conduct, a second
+signal was made for a boat, and at seven o’clock the writer left the Bell
+Rock, after a residence of four successive weeks in the beacon-house.
+The first thing which occupied his attention on board of the tender was
+to look round upon the lighthouse, which he saw, with some degree of
+emotion and surprise, now vying in height with the beacon-house; for
+although he had often viewed it from the extremity of the western railway
+on the rock, yet the scene, upon the whole, seemed far more interesting
+from the tender’s moorings at the distance of about half a mile.
+
+The _Smeaton_ having just arrived at her moorings with a cargo, a signal
+was made for Captain Pool to come on board of the tender, that he might
+be at hand to remove from the service any of those who might persist in
+their discontented conduct.  One of the two principal leaders in this
+affair, the master of one of the praam-boats, who had also steered the
+boat which brought the letter to the beacon, was first called upon deck,
+and asked if he had read the statement fixed up in the galley this
+afternoon, and whether he was satisfied with it.  He replied that he had
+read the paper, but was not satisfied, as it held out no alteration in
+the allowance, on which he was immediately ordered into the _Smeaton’s_
+boat.  The next man called had but lately entered the service, and, being
+also interrogated as to his resolution, he declared himself to be of the
+same mind with the praam-master, and was also forthwith ordered into the
+boat.  The writer, without calling any more of the seamen, went forward
+to the gangway, where they were collected and listening to what was
+passing upon deck.  He addressed them at the hatchway, and stated that
+two of their companions had just been dismissed the service and sent on
+board of the _Smeaton_ to be conveyed to Arbroath.  He therefore wished
+each man to consider for himself how far it would be proper, by any
+unreasonableness of conduct, to place themselves in a similar situation,
+especially as they were aware that it was optional in him either to
+dismiss them or send them on board a man-of-war.  It might appear that
+much inconveniency would be felt at the rock by a change of hands at this
+critical period, by checking for a time the progress of a building so
+intimately connected with the best interests of navigation; yet this
+would be but of a temporary nature, while the injury to themselves might
+be irreparable.  It was now therefore, required of any man who, in this
+disgraceful manner, chose to leave the service, that he should instantly
+make his appearance on deck while the _Smeaton’s_ boat was alongside.
+But those below having expressed themselves satisfied with their
+situation-viz., William Brown, George Gibb, Alexander Scott, John Dick,
+Robert Couper, Alexander Shephard, James Grieve, David Carey, William
+Pearson, Stuart Eaton, Alexander Lawrence, and John Spink—were
+accordingly considered as having returned to their duty.  This
+disposition to mutiny, which had so strongly manifested itself, being now
+happily suppressed, Captain Pool got orders to proceed for Arbroath Bay,
+and land the two men he had on board, and to deliver the following letter
+at the office of the workyard:—
+
+                              ‘_On board of the Tender off the Bell Rock_,
+                                  22_nd_ _June_ 1810, _eight o’clock p.m._
+
+    ‘DEAR SIR,—A discontented and mutinous spirit having manifested
+    itself of late among the landing-master’s crew, they struck work
+    to-day and demanded an additional allowance of beer, and I have found
+    it necessary to dismiss D---d and M---e, who are now sent on shore
+    with the _Smeaton_.  You will therefore be so good as to pay them
+    their wages, including this day only.  Nothing can be more
+    unreasonable than the conduct of the seamen on this occasion, as the
+    landing-master’s crew not only had their allowance on board of the
+    tender, but, in the course of this day, they had drawn no fewer than
+    twenty-four quart pots of beer from the stock of the _Patriot_ while
+    unloading her. —I remain, yours truly,
+
+                                                         ROBERT STEVENSON.
+
+    ‘To Mr. LACHLAN KENNEDY,
+          Bell Rock Office, Arbroath.’
+
+On despatching this letter to Mr. Kennedy, the writer returned to the
+beacon about nine o’clock, where this afternoon’s business had produced
+many conjectures, especially when the _Smeaton_ got under weigh, instead
+of proceeding to land her cargo.  The bell on the beacon being rung, the
+artificers were assembled on the bridge, when the affair was explained to
+them.  He, at the same time, congratulated them upon the first appearance
+of mutiny being happily set at rest by the dismissal of its two principal
+abettors.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 24th June]
+
+At the rock the landing of the materials and the building operations of
+the light-room store went on successfully, and in a way similar to those
+of the provision store.  To-day it blew fresh breezes; but the seamen
+nevertheless landed twenty-eight stones, and the artificers built the
+fifty-eighth and fifty-ninth courses.  The works were visited by Mr.
+Murdoch, junior, from Messrs. Boulton and Watt’s works of Soho.  He
+landed just as the bell rung for prayers, after which the writer enjoyed
+much pleasure from his very intelligent conversation; and, having been
+almost the only stranger he had seen for some weeks, he parted with him,
+after a short interview, with much regret.
+
+                                                     [Thursday, 28th June]
+
+Last night the wind had shifted to north-east, and, blowing fresh, was
+accompanied with a heavy surf upon the rock.  Towards high-water it had a
+very grand and wonderful appearance.  Waves of considerable magnitude
+rose as high as the solid or level of the entrance-door, which, being
+open to the south-west, was fortunately to the leeward; but on the
+windward side the sprays flew like lightning up the sloping sides of the
+building; and although the walls were now elevated sixty-four feet above
+the rock, and about fifty-two feet from high-water mark, yet the
+artificers were nevertheless wetted, and occasionally interrupted, in
+their operations on the top of the walls.  These appearances were, in a
+great measure, new at the Bell Rock, there having till of late been no
+building to conduct the seas, or object to compare with them.  Although,
+from the description of the Eddystone Lighthouse, the mind was prepared
+for such effects, yet they were not expected to the present extent in the
+summer season; the sea being most awful to-day, whether observed from the
+beacon or the building.  To windward, the sprays fell from the height
+above noticed in the most wonderful cascades, and streamed down the walls
+of the building in froth as white as snow.  To leeward of the lighthouse
+the collision or meeting of the waves produced a pure white kind of
+_drift_; it rose about thirty feet in height, like a fine downy mist,
+which, in its fall, fell upon the face and hands more like a dry powder
+than a liquid substance.  The effect of these seas, as they raged among
+the beams and dashed upon the higher parts of the beacon, produced a
+temporary tremulous motion throughout the whole fabric, which to a
+stranger must have been frightful.
+
+                                                        [Sunday, 1st July]
+
+The writer had now been at the Bell Rock since the latter end of May, or
+about six weeks, during four of which he had been a constant inhabitant
+of the beacon without having been once off the rock.  After witnessing
+the laying of the sixty-seventh or second course of the bedroom
+apartment, he left the rock with the tender and went ashore, as some
+arrangements were to be made for the future conduct of the works at
+Arbroath, which were soon to be brought to a close; the landing-master’s
+crew having, in the meantime, shifted on board of the _Patriot_.  In
+leaving the rock, the writer kept his eyes fixed upon the lighthouse,
+which had recently got into the form of a house, having several tiers or
+stories of windows.  Nor was he unmindful of his habitation in the
+beacon—now far overtopped by the masonry,—where he had spent several
+weeks in a kind of active retirement, making practical experiment of the
+fewness of the positive wants of man.  His cabin measured not more than
+four feet three inches in breadth on the floor; and though, from the
+oblique direction of the beams of the beacon, it widened towards the top,
+yet it did not admit of the full extension of his arms when he stood on
+the floor; while its length was little more than sufficient for
+suspending a cot-bed during the night, calculated for being triced up to
+the roof through the day, which left free room for the admission of
+occasional visitants.  His folding table was attached with hinges,
+immediately under the small window of the apartment, and his books,
+barometer, thermometer, portmanteau, and two or three camp-stools, formed
+the bulk of his movables.  His diet being plain, the paraphernalia of the
+table were proportionally simple; though everything had the appearance of
+comfort, and even of neatness, the walls being covered with green cloth
+formed into panels with red tape, and his bed festooned with curtains of
+yellow cotton-stuff.  If, in speculating upon the abstract wants of man
+in such a state of exclusion, one were reduced to a single book, the
+Sacred Volume—whether considered for the striking diversity of its story,
+the morality of its doctrine, or the important truths of its gospel—would
+have proved by far the greatest treasure.
+
+                                                        [Monday, 2nd July]
+
+In walking over the workyard at Arbroath this morning, the writer found
+that the stones of the course immediately under the cornice were all in
+hand, and that a week’s work would now finish the whole, while the
+intermediate courses lay ready numbered and marked for shipping to the
+rock.  Among other subjects which had occupied his attention to-day was a
+visit from some of the relations of George Dall, a young man who had been
+impressed near Dundee in the month of February last; a dispute had arisen
+between the magistrates of that burgh and the Regulating Officer as to
+his right of impressing Dall, who was _bonâ fide_ one of the protected
+seamen in the Bell Rock service.  In the meantime, the poor lad was
+detained, and ultimately committed to the prison of Dundee, to remain
+until the question should be tried before the Court of Session.  His
+friends were naturally very desirous to have him relieved upon bail.
+But, as this was only to be done by the judgment of the Court, all that
+could be said was that his pay and allowances should be continued in the
+same manner as if he had been upon the sick-list.  The circumstances of
+Dall’s case were briefly these:—He had gone to see some of his friends in
+the neighbourhood of Dundee, in winter, while the works were suspended,
+having got leave of absence from Mr. Taylor, who commanded the Bell Rock
+tender, and had in his possession one of the Protection Medals.
+Unfortunately, however, for Dall, the Regulating Officer thought proper
+to disregard these documents, as, according to the strict and literal
+interpretation of the Admiralty regulations, a seaman does not stand
+protected unless he is actually on board of his ship, or in a boat
+belonging to her, or has the Admiralty protection in his possession.
+This order of the Board, however, cannot be rigidly followed in practice;
+and therefore, when the matter is satisfactorily stated to the Regulating
+Officer, the impressed man is generally liberated.  But in Dall’s case
+this was peremptorily refused, and he was retained at the instance of the
+magistrates.  The writer having brought the matter under the
+consideration of the Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouses, they
+authorised it to be tried on the part of the Lighthouse Board, as one of
+extreme hardship.  The Court, upon the first hearing, ordered Dall to be
+liberated from prison; and the proceedings never went further.
+
+                                                     [Wednesday, 4th July]
+
+Being now within twelve courses of being ready for building the cornice,
+measures were taken for getting the stones of it and the parapet-wall of
+the light-room brought from Edinburgh, where, as before noticed, they had
+been prepared and were in readiness for shipping.  The honour of
+conveying the upper part of the lighthouse, and of landing the last stone
+of the building on the rock, was considered to belong to Captain Pool of
+the _Smeaton_, who had been longer in the service than the master of the
+_Patriot_.  The _Smeaton_ was, therefore, now partly loaded with old
+iron, consisting of broken railways and other lumber which had been lying
+about the rock.  After landing these at Arbroath, she took on board James
+Craw, with his horse and cart, which could now be spared at the workyard,
+to be employed in carting the stones from Edinburgh to Leith.  Alexander
+Davidson and William Kennedy, two careful masons, were also sent to take
+charge of the loading of the stones at Greenside, and stowing them on
+board of the vessel at Leith.  The writer also went on board, with a view
+to call at the Bell Rock and to take his passage up the Firth of Forth.
+The wind, however, coming to blow very fresh from the eastward, with
+thick and foggy weather, it became necessary to reef the mainsail and set
+the second jib.  When in the act of making a tack towards the tender, the
+sailors who worked the head-sheets were, all of a sudden, alarmed with
+the sound of the smith’s hammer and anvil on the beacon, and had just
+time to put the ship about to save her from running ashore on the
+northwestern point of the rock, marked ‘James Craw’s Horse.’  On looking
+towards the direction from whence the sound came, the building and
+beacon-house were seen, with consternation, while the ship was hailed by
+those on the rock, who were no less confounded at seeing the near
+approach of the _Smeaton_; and, just as the vessel cleared the danger,
+the smith and those in the mortar gallery made signs in token of their
+happiness at our fortunate escape.  From this occurrence the writer had
+an experimental proof of the utility of the large bells which were in
+preparation to be rung by the machinery of the revolving light; for, had
+it not been the sound of the smith’s anvil, the _Smeaton_, in all
+probability, would have been wrecked upon the rock.  In case the vessel
+had struck, those on board might have been safe, having now the
+beacon-house, as a place of refuge; but the vessel, which was going at a
+great velocity, must have suffered severely, and it was more than
+probable that the horse would have been drowned, there being no means of
+getting him out of the vessel.  Of this valuable animal and his master we
+shall take an opportunity of saying more in another place.
+
+                                                      [Thursday, 5th July]
+
+The weather cleared up in the course of the night, but the wind shifted
+to the N.E. and blew very fresh.  From the force of the wind, being now
+the period of spring-tides, a very heavy swell was experienced at the
+rock.  At two o’clock on the following morning the people on the beacon
+were in a state of great alarm about their safety, as the sea had broke
+up part of the floor of the mortar gallery!, which was thus cleared of
+the lime-casks and other buoyant articles; and, the alarm-bell being
+rung, all hands were called to render what assistance was in their power
+for the safety of themselves and the materials.  At this time some would
+willingly have left the beacon and gone into the building: the sea,
+however, ran so high that there was no passage along the bridge of
+communication, and, when the interior of the lighthouse came to be
+examined in the morning, it appeared that great quantities of water had
+come over the walls—now eighty feet in height—and had run down through
+the several apartments and out at the entrance door.
+
+The upper course of the lighthouse at the workyard of Arbroath was
+completed on the 6th, and the whole of the stones were, therefore, now
+ready for being shipped to the rock.  From the present state of the works
+it was impossible that the two squads of artificers at Arbroath and the
+Bell Rock could meet together at this period; and as in public works of
+this kind, which had continued for a series of years, it is not customary
+to allow the men to separate without what is termed a “finishing-pint,”
+five guineas were for this purpose placed at the disposal of Mr. David
+Logan, clerk of works.  With this sum the stone-cutters at Arbroath had a
+merry meeting in their barrack, collected their sweethearts and friends,
+and concluded their labours with a dance.  It was remarked, however, that
+their happiness on this occasion was not without alloy.  The
+consideration of parting and leaving a steady and regular employment, to
+go in quest of work and mix with other society, after having been
+harmoniously lodged for years together in one large “guildhall or
+barrack,” was rather painful.
+
+                                                        [Friday, 6th July]
+
+While the writer was at Edinburgh he was fortunate enough to meet with
+Mrs. Dickson, only daughter of the late celebrated Mr. Smeaton, whose
+works at the Eddystone Lighthouse had been of such essential consequence
+to the operations at the Bell Rock.  Even her own elegant accomplishments
+are identified with her father’s work, she having herself made the
+drawing of the vignette on the title-page of the _Narrative of the
+Eddystone Lighthouse_.  Every admirer of the works of that singularly
+eminent man must also feel an obligation to her for the very
+comprehensive and distinct account given of his life, which is attached
+to his reports, published, in three volumes quarto, by the Society of
+Civil Engineers.  Mrs. Dickson, being at this time returning from a tour
+to the Hebrides and Western Highlands of Scotland, had heard of the Bell
+Rock works, and from their similarity to those of the Eddystone was
+strongly impressed with a desire of visiting the spot.  But on inquiring
+for the writer at Edinburgh, and finding from him that the upper part of
+the lighthouse, consisting of nine courses, might be seen in the
+immediate vicinity, and also that one of the vessels which, in compliment
+to her father’s memory, had been named the _Smeaton_, might also now be
+seen in Leith, she considered herself extremely fortunate; and having
+first visited the works at Greenside, she afterwards went to Leith to see
+the _Smeaton_, then loading for the Bell Rock.  On stepping on board,
+Mrs. Dickson seemed to be quite overcome with so many concurrent
+circumstances, tending in a peculiar manner to revive and enliven the
+memory of her departed father, and, on leaving the vessel, she would not
+be restrained from presenting the crew with a piece of money.  The
+_Smeaton_ had been named spontaneously, from a sense of the obligation
+which a public work of the description of the Bell Rock owed to the
+labours and abilities of Mr. Smeaton.  The writer certainly never could
+have anticipated the satisfaction which he this day felt in witnessing
+the pleasure it afforded to the only representative of this great man’s
+family.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 20th July]
+
+The gale from the N.E. still continued so strong, accompanied with a
+heavy sea, that the _Patriot_ could not approach her moorings; and
+although the tender still kept her station, no landing was made to-day at
+the rock.  At high-water it was remarked that the spray rose to the
+height of about sixty feet upon the building.  The _Smeaton_ now lay in
+Leith loaded, but, the wind and weather being so unfavourable for her
+getting down the Firth, she did not sail till this afternoon.  It may be
+here proper to notice that the loading of the centre of the light-room
+floor, or last principal stone of the building, did not fail, when put on
+board, to excite an interest among those connected with the work.  When
+the stone was laid upon the cart to be conveyed to Leith, the seamen
+fixed an ensign-staff and flag into the circular hole in the centre of
+the stone, and decorated their own hats, and that of James Craw, the Bell
+Rock carter, with ribbons; even his faithful and trusty horse Brassey was
+ornamented with bows and streamers of various colours.  The masons also
+provided themselves with new aprons, and in this manner the cart was
+attended in its progress to the ship.  When the cart came opposite the
+Trinity House of Leith, the officer of that corporation made his
+appearance dressed in his uniform, with his staff of office; and when it
+reached the harbour, the shipping in the different tiers where the
+_Smeaton_ lay hoisted their colours, manifesting by these trifling
+ceremonies the interest with which the progress of this work was regarded
+by the public, as ultimately tending to afford safety and protection to
+the mariner.  The wind had fortunately shifted to the S.W., and about
+five o’clock this afternoon the _Smeaton_ reached the Bell Rock.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 27th July]
+
+The artificers had finished the laying of the balcony course, excepting
+the centre-stone of the light-room floor, which, like the centres of the
+other floors, could not be laid in its place till after the removal of
+the foot and shaft of the balance-crane.  During the dinner-hour, when
+the men were off work the writer generally took some exercise by walking
+round the walls when the rock was under water; but to-day his boundary
+was greatly enlarged, for, instead of the narrow wall as a path, he felt
+no small degree of pleasure in walking round the balcony and passing out
+and in at the space allotted for the light-room door.  In the labours of
+this day both the artificers and seamen felt their work to be extremely
+easy compared with what it had been for some days past.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 29th July]
+
+Captain Wilson and his crew had made preparations for landing the last
+stone, and, as may well be supposed, this was a day of great interest at
+the Bell Rock.  ‘That it might lose none of its honours,’ as he expressed
+himself, the _Hedderwick_ praam-boat, with which the first stone of the
+building had been landed, was appointed also to carry the last.  At seven
+o’clock this evening the seamen hoisted three flags upon the
+_Hedderwick_, when the colours of the _Dickie_ praam-boat, tender,
+_Smeaton_, floating light, beacon-house, and lighthouse were also
+displayed; and, the weather being remarkably fine, the whole presented a
+very gay appearance, and, in connection with the associations excited,
+the effect was very pleasing.  The praam which carried the stone was
+towed by the seamen in gallant style to the rock, and, on its arrival,
+cheers were given as a finale to the landing department.
+
+                                                       [Monday, 30th July]
+
+The ninetieth or last course of the building having been laid to-day,
+which brought the masonry to the height of one hundred and two feet six
+inches, the lintel of the light-room door, being the finishing-stone of
+the exterior walls, was laid with due formality by the writer, who, at
+the same time, pronounced the following benediction: “May the Great
+Architect of the Universe, under whose blessing this perilous work has
+prospered, preserve it as a guide to the mariner.”
+
+                                                        [Friday, 3rd Aug.]
+
+At three p.m., the necessary preparations having been made, the
+artificers commenced the completing of the floors of the several
+apartments, and at seven o’clock the centre-stone of the light-room floor
+was laid, which may be held as finishing the masonry of this important
+national edifice.  After going through the usual ceremonies observed by
+the brotherhood on occasions of this kind, the writer, addressing himself
+to the artificers and seamen who were present, briefly alluded to the
+utility of the undertaking as a monument of the wealth of British
+commerce, erected through the spirited measures of the Commissioners of
+the Northern Lighthouses by means of the able assistance of those who now
+surrounded him.  He then took an opportunity of stating that toward those
+connected with this arduous work he would ever retain the most heartfelt
+regard in all their interests.
+
+                                                      [Saturday, 4th Aug.]
+
+When the bell was rung as usual on the beacon this morning, every one
+seemed as if he were at a loss what to make of himself.  At this period
+the artificers at the rock consisted of eighteen masons, two joiners, one
+millwright, one smith, and one mortar-maker, besides Messrs. Peter Logan
+and Francis Watt, foremen, counting in all twenty-five; and matters were
+arranged for proceeding to Arbroath this afternoon with all hands.  The
+_Sir Joseph Banks_ tender had by this time been afloat, with little
+intermission, for six months, during greater part of which the artificers
+had been almost constantly off at the rock, and were now much in want of
+necessaries of almost every description.  Not a few had lost different
+articles of clothing, which had dropped into the sea from the beacon and
+building.  Some wanted jackets; others, from want of hats, wore
+nightcaps; each was, in fact, more or less curtailed in his wardrobe, and
+it must be confessed that at best the party were but in a very tattered
+condition.  This morning was occupied in removing the artificers and
+their bedding on board of the tender; and although their personal luggage
+was easily shifted, the boats had, nevertheless, many articles to remove
+from the beacon-house, and were consequently employed in this service
+till eleven a.m.  All hands being collected and just ready to embark, as
+the water had nearly overflowed the rock, the writer, in taking leave,
+after alluding to the harmony which had ever marked the conduct of those
+employed on the Bell Rock, took occasion to compliment the great zeal,
+attention, and abilities of Mr. Peter Logan and Mr. Francis Watt,
+foremen; Captain James Wilson, landing-master; and Captain David Taylor,
+commander of the tender, who, in their several departments, had so
+faithfully discharged the duties assigned to them, often under
+circumstances the most difficult and trying.  The health of these
+gentlemen was drunk with much warmth of feeling by the artificers and
+seamen, who severally expressed the satisfaction they had experienced in
+acting under them; after which the whole party left the rock.
+
+In sailing past the floating light mutual compliments were made by a
+display of flags between that vessel and the tender; and at five p.m. the
+latter vessel entered the harbour of Arbroath, where the party were
+heartily welcomed by a numerous company of spectators, who had collected
+to see the artificers arrive after so long an absence from the port.  In
+the evening the writer invited the foremen and captains of the service,
+together with Mr. David Logan, clerk of works at Arbroath, and Mr.
+Lachlan Kennedy, engineer’s clerk and book-keeper, and some of their
+friends, to the principal inn, where the evening was spent very happily;
+and after ‘His Majesty’s Health’ and ‘The Commissioners of the Northern
+Lighthouses’ had been given, ‘Stability to the Bell Rock Lighthouse’ was
+hailed as a standing toast in the Lighthouse service.
+
+                                                        [Sunday, 5th Aug.]
+
+The author has formerly noticed the uniformly decent and orderly
+deportment of the artificers who were employed at the Bell Rock
+Lighthouse, and to-day, it is believed, they very generally attended
+church, no doubt with grateful hearts for the narrow escapes from
+personal danger which all of them had more or less experienced during
+their residence at the rock.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 14th Aug.]
+
+The _Smeaton_ sailed to-day at one p.m., having on board sixteen
+artificers, with Mr. Peter Logan, together with a supply of provisions
+and necessaries, who left the harbour pleased and happy to find
+themselves once more afloat in the Bell Rock service.  At seven o’clock
+the tender was made fast to her moorings, when the artificers landed on
+the rock and took possession of their old quarters in the beacon-house,
+with feelings very different from those of 1807, when the works
+commenced.
+
+The barometer for some days past had been falling from 29.90, and to-day
+it was 29.50, with the wind at N.E., which, in the course of this day,
+increased to a strong gale accompanied with a sea which broke with great
+violence upon the rock.  At twelve noon the tender rode very heavily at
+her moorings, when her chain broke at about ten fathoms from the ships
+bows. The kedge-anchor was immediately let go, to hold her till the
+floating buoy and broken chain should be got on board.  But while this
+was in operation the hawser of the kedge was chafed through on the rocky
+bottom and parted, when the vessel was again adrift.  Most fortunately,
+however, she cast off with her head from the rock, and narrowly cleared
+it, when she sailed up the Firth of Forth to wait the return of better
+weather.  The artificers were thus left upon the rock with so heavy a sea
+running that it was ascertained to have risen to a height of eighty feet
+on the building.  Under such perilous circumstances it would be difficult
+to describe the feelings of those who, at this time, were cooped up in
+the beacon in so forlorn a situation, with the sea not only raging under
+them, but occasionally falling from a great height upon the roof of their
+temporary lodging, without even the attending vessel in view to afford
+the least gleam of hope in the event of any accident.  It is true that
+they now had the masonry of the lighthouse to resort to, which, no doubt,
+lessened the actual danger of their situation; but the building was still
+without a roof, and the deadlights, or storm-shutters, not being yet
+fitted, the windows of the lower story were stove in and broken, and at
+high-water the sea ran in considerable quantities out at the entrance
+door.
+
+                                                     [Thursday, 16th Aug.]
+
+The gale continues with unabated violence to-day, and the sprays rise to
+a still greater height, having been carried over the masonry of the
+building, or about ninety feet above the level of the sea.  At four
+o’clock this morning it was breaking into the cook’s berth, when he rang
+the alarm-bell, and all hands turned out to attend to their personal
+safety.  The floor of the smith’s, or mortar gallery, was now completely
+burst up by the force of the sea, when the whole of the deals and the
+remaining articles upon the floor were swept away, such as the cast-iron
+mortar-tubs, the iron hearth of the forge, the smith’s bellows, and even
+his anvil were thrown down upon the rock.  Before the tide rose to its
+full height to-day some of the artificers passed along the bridge into
+the lighthouse, to observe the effects of the sea upon it, and they
+reported that they had felt a slight tremulous motion in the building
+when great seas struck it in a certain direction, about high-water mark.
+On this occasion the sprays were again observed to wet the balcony, and
+even to come over the parapet wall into the interior of the light-room.
+
+                                                     [Thursday, 23rd Aug.]
+
+The wind being at W.S.W., and the weather more moderate, both the tender
+and the _Smeaton_ got to their moorings on the 23rd, when all hands were
+employed in transporting the sash-frames from on board of the _Smeaton_
+to the rock.  In the act of setting up one of these frames upon the
+bridge, it was unguardedly suffered to lose its balance, and in saving it
+from damage Captain Wilson met with a severe bruise in the groin, on the
+seat of a gun-shot wound received in the early part of his life.  This
+accident laid him aside for several days.
+
+                                                       [Monday, 27th Aug.]
+
+The sash-frames of the light-room, eight in number, and weighing each 254
+pounds, having been got safely up to the top of the building, were ranged
+on the balcony in the order in which they were numbered for their places
+on the top of the parapet-wall; and the balance-crane, that useful
+machine having now lifted all the heavier articles, was unscrewed and
+lowered, to use the landing-master’s phrase, ‘in mournful silence.’
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 2nd Sept.]
+
+The steps of the stair being landed, and all the weightier articles of
+the light-room got up to the balcony, the wooden bridge was now to be
+removed, as it had a very powerful effect upon the beacon when a heavy
+sea struck it, and could not possibly have withstood the storms of a
+winter.  Everything having been cleared from the bridge, and nothing left
+but the two principal beams with their horizontal braces, James Glen, at
+high-water, proceeded with a saw to cut through the beams at the end next
+the beacon, which likewise disengaged their opposite extremity, inserted
+a few inches into the building.  The frame was then gently lowered into
+the water, and floated off to the _Smeaton_ to be towed to Arbroath, to
+be applied as part of the materials in the erection of the lightkeepers’
+houses.  After the removal of the bridge, the aspect of things at the
+rock was much altered.  The beacon-house and building had both a naked
+look to those accustomed to their former appearance; a curious optical
+deception was also remarked, by which the lighthouse seemed to incline
+from the perpendicular towards the beacon.  The horizontal rope-ladder
+before noticed was again stretched to preserve the communication, and the
+artificers were once more obliged to practise the awkward and straddling
+manner of their passage between them during 1809.
+
+At twelve noon the bell rung for prayers, after which the artificers went
+to dinner, when the writer passed along the rope-ladder to the
+lighthouse, and went through the several apartments, which were now
+cleared of lumber.  In the afternoon all hands were summoned to the
+interior of the house, when he had the satisfaction of laying the upper
+step of the stair, or last stone of the building.  This ceremony
+concluded with three cheers, the sound of which had a very loud and
+strange effect within the walls of the lighthouse.  At six o’clock Mr.
+Peter Logan and eleven of the artificers embarked with the writer for
+Arbroath, leaving Mr. James Glen with the special charge of the beacon
+and railways, Mr. Robert Selkirk with the building, with a few artificers
+to fit the temporary windows to render the house habitable.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 14th Oct.]
+
+On returning from his voyage to the Northern Lighthouses, the writer
+landed at the Bell Rock on Sunday, the 14th of October, and had the
+pleasure to find, from the very favourable state of the weather, that the
+artificers had been enabled to make great progress with the fitting-up of
+the light-room.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 19th Oct.]
+
+The light-room work had proceeded, as usual, to-day under the direction
+of Mr. Dove, assisted in the plumber-work by Mr. John Gibson, and in the
+brazier-work by Mr. Joseph Fraser; while Mr. James Slight, with the
+joiners, were fitting up the storm-shuttters of the windows.  In these
+several departments the artificers were at work till seven o’clock p.m.,
+and it being then dark, Mr. Dove gave orders to drop work in the
+light-room; and all hands proceeded from thence to the beacon-house, when
+Charles Henderson, smith, and Henry Dickson, brazier, left the work
+together.  Being both young men, who had been for several weeks upon the
+rock, they had become familiar, and even playful, on the most difficult
+parts about the beacon and building.  This evening they were trying to
+outrun each other in descending from the light-room, when Henderson led
+the way; but they were in conversation with each other till they came to
+the rope-ladder distended between the entrance-door of the lighthouse and
+the beacon.  Dickson, on reaching the cook-room, was surprised at not
+seeing his companion, and inquired hastily for Henderson.  Upon which the
+cook replied, ‘Was he before you upon the rope-ladder?’  Dickson
+answered, ‘Yes; and I thought I heard something fall.’  Upon this the
+alarm was given, and links were immediately lighted, with which the
+artificers descended on the legs of the beacon, as near the surface of
+the water as possible, it being then about full tide, and the sea
+breaking to a considerable height upon the building, with the wind at
+S.S.E.  But, after watching till low-water, and searching in every
+direction upon the rock, it appeared that poor Henderson must have
+unfortunately fallen through the rope-ladder, and been washed into the
+deep water.
+
+The deceased had passed along this rope-ladder many hundred times, both
+by day and night, and the operations in which he was employed being
+nearly finished, he was about to leave the rock when this melancholy
+catastrophe took place.  The unfortunate loss of Henderson cast a deep
+gloom upon the minds of all who were at the rock, and it required some
+management on the part of those who had charge to induce the people to
+remain patiently at their work; as the weather now became more
+boisterous, and the nights long, they found their habitation extremely
+cheerless, while the winds were howling about their ears, and the waves
+lashing with fury against the beams of their insulated habitation.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 23rd Oct.]
+
+The wind had shifted in the night to N.W., and blew a fresh gale, while
+the sea broke with violence upon the rock.  It was found impossible to
+land, but the writer, from the boat, hailed Mr. Dove, and directed the
+ball to be immediately fixed.  The necessary preparations were
+accordingly made, while the vessel made short tacks on the southern side
+of the rock, in comparatively smooth water.  At noon Mr. Dove, assisted
+by Mr. James Slight, Mr. Robert Selkirk, Mr. James Glen, and Mr. John
+Gibson, plumber, with considerable difficulty, from the boisterous state
+of the weather, got the gilded ball screwed on, measuring two feet in
+diameter, and forming the principal ventilator at the upper extremity of
+the cupola of the light-room.  At Mr. Hamilton’s desire, a salute of
+seven guns was fired on this occasion, and, all hands being called to the
+quarter-deck, ‘Stability to the Bell Rock Lighthouse’ was not forgotten.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 30th Oct.]
+
+On reaching the rock it was found that a very heavy sea still ran upon
+it; but the writer having been disappointed on two former occasions, and,
+as the erection of the house might now be considered complete, there
+being nothing wanted externally, excepting some of the storm-shutters for
+the defence of the windows, he was the more anxious at this time to
+inspect it.  Two well-manned boats were therefore ordered to be in
+attendance; and, after some difficulty, the wind being at N.N.E., they
+got safely into the western creek, though not without encountering
+plentiful sprays.  It would have been impossible to have attempted a
+landing to-day, under any other circumstances than with boats perfectly
+adapted to the purpose, and with seamen who knew every ledge of the rock,
+and even the length of the sea-weeds at each particular spot, so as to
+dip their oars into the water accordingly, and thereby prevent them from
+getting entangled.  But what was of no less consequence to the safety of
+the party, Captain Wilson, who always steered the boat, had a perfect
+knowledge of the set of the different waves, while the crew never shifted
+their eyes from observing his motions, and the strictest silence was
+preserved by every individual except himself.
+
+On entering the house, the writer had the pleasure to find it in a
+somewhat habitable condition, the lower apartments being closed in with
+temporary windows, and fitted with proper storm-shutters.  The lowest
+apartment at the head of the staircase was occupied with water, fuel, and
+provisions, put up in a temporary way until the house could be furnished
+with proper utensils.  The second, or light-room store, was at present
+much encumbered with various tools and apparatus for the use of the
+workmen.  The kitchen immediately over this had, as yet, been supplied
+only with a common ship’s caboose and plate-iron funnel, while the
+necessary cooking utensils had been taken from the beacon.  The bedroom
+was for the present used as the joiners’ workshop, and the strangers’
+room, immediately under the light-room, was occupied by the artificers,
+the beds being ranged in tiers, as was done in the barrack of the beacon.
+The light-room, though unprovided with its machinery, being now covered
+over with the cupola, glazed and painted, had a very complete and cleanly
+appearance.  The balcony was only as yet fitted with a temporary rail,
+consisting of a few iron stanchions, connected with ropes; and in this
+state it was necessary to leave it during the winter.
+
+Having gone over the whole of the low-water works on the rock, the
+beacon, and lighthouse, and being satisfied that only the most untoward
+accident in the landing of the machinery could prevent the exhibition of
+the light in the course of the winter, Mr. John Reid, formerly of the
+floating light, was now put in charge of the lighthouse as principal
+keeper; Mr. James Slight had charge of the operations of the artificers,
+while Mr. James Dove and the smiths, having finished the frame of the
+light-room, left the rock for the present.  With these arrangements the
+writer bade adieu to the works for the season.  At eleven a.m. the tide
+was far advanced; and there being now little or no shelter for the boats
+at the rock, they had to be pulled through the breach of sea, which came
+on board in great quantities, and it was with extreme difficulty that
+they could be kept in the proper direction of the landing-creek.  On this
+occasion he may be permitted to look back with gratitude on the many
+escapes made in the course of this arduous undertaking, now brought so
+near to a successful conclusion.
+
+                                                        [Monday, 5th Nov.]
+
+On Monday, the 5th, the yacht again visited the rock, when Mr. Slight and
+the artificers returned with her to the workyard, where a number of
+things were still to prepare connected with the temporary fitting up of
+the accommodation for the lightkeepers.  Mr. John Reid and Peter Fortune
+were now the only inmates of the house.  This was the smallest number of
+persons hitherto left in the lighthouse.  As four lightkeepers were to be
+the complement, it was intended that three should always be at the rock.
+Its present inmates, however, could hardly have been better selected for
+such a situation; Mr. Reid being a person possessed of the strictest
+notions of duty and habits of regularity from long service on board of a
+man-of-war, while Mr. Fortune had one of the most happy and contented
+dispositions imaginable.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 13th Nov.]
+
+From Saturday the 10th till Tuesday the 13th, the wind had been from N.E.
+blowing a heavy gale; but to-day, the weather having greatly moderated,
+Captain Taylor, who now commanded the _Smeaton_, sailed at two o’clock
+a.m. for the Bell Rock.  At five the floating light was hailed and found
+to be all well.  Being a fine moonlight morning, the seamen were changed
+from the one ship to the other.  At eight, the _Smeaton_ being off the
+rock, the boats were manned, and taking a supply of water, fuel, and
+other necessaries, landed at the western side, when Mr. Reid and Mr.
+Fortune were found in good health and spirits.
+
+Mr. Reid stated that during the late gales, particularly on Friday, the
+30th, the wind veering from S.E. to N.E., both he and Mr. Fortune
+sensibly felt the house tremble when particular seas struck, about the
+time of high-water; the former observing that it was a tremor of that
+sort which rather tended to convince him that everything about the
+building was sound, and reminded him of the effect produced when a good
+log of timber is struck sharply with a mallet; but, with every confidence
+in the stability of the building, he nevertheless confessed that, in so
+forlorn a situation, they were not insensible to those emotions which, he
+emphatically observed, ‘made a man look back upon his former life.’
+
+                                                   [1881 Friday, 1st Feb.]
+
+The day, long wished for, on which the mariner was to see a light
+exhibited on the Bell Rock at length arrived.  Captain Wilson, as usual,
+hoisted the float’s lanterns to the topmast on the evening of the 1st of
+February; but the moment that the light appeared on the rock, the crew,
+giving three cheers, lowered them, and finally extinguished the lights.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+         Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
+                    at the Edinburgh University Press.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+
+{2a}  An error: Stevensons owned at this date the barony of Dolphingston
+in Haddingtonshire, Montgrennan in Ayrshire, and several other lesser
+places.
+
+{3a}  Pitcairn’s _Criminal Trials_, at large.—[R. L. S.]
+
+{4a}  Fountainhall’s _Decisions_, vol. i. pp. 56, 132, 186, 204, 368.—[R.
+L. S.]
+
+{4b}  _Ibid._ pp. 158, 299.—[R. L. S.]
+
+{4c}  Working farmer:  Fr. _laboureur_.
+
+{7a}  This John Stevenson was not the only ‘witness’ of the name; other
+Stevensons were actually killed during the persecutions, in the Glen of
+Trool, on Pentland, etc.; and it is very possible that the author’s own
+ancestor was one of the mounted party embodied by Muir of Caldwell, only
+a day too late for Pentland.
+
+{7b}  Wodrow Society’s _Select Biographies_, vol. ii.—[R. L. S.]
+
+{9a}  Though the districts here named are those in which the name of
+Stevenson is most common, it is in point of fact far more wide-spread
+than the text indicates, and occurs from Dumfries and Berwickshire to
+Aberdeen and Orkney.
+
+{12a}  Mr. J. H. Stevenson is satisfied that these speculations as to a
+possible Norse, Highland, or French origin are vain.  All we know about
+the engineer family is that it was sprung from a stock of Westland Whigs
+settled in the latter part of the seventeenth century in the parish of
+Neilston, as mentioned at the beginning of the next chapter.  It may be
+noted that the Ayrshire parish of Stevenston, the lands of which are said
+to have received the name in the twelfth century, lies within thirteen
+miles south-west of this place.  The lands of Stevenson in Lanarkshire
+first mentioned in the next century, in the Ragman Roll, lie within
+twenty miles east.
+
+{54a}  This is only a probable hypothesis; I have tried to identify my
+father’s anecdote in my grandfather’s diary, and may very well have been
+deceived.—[R. L. S.]
+
+{91a}  This is, of course, the tradition commemorated by Southey in his
+ballad of ‘The Inchcape Bell.’  Whether true or not, it points to the
+fact that from the infancy of Scottish navigation, the seafaring mind had
+been fully alive to the perils of this reef.  Repeated attempts had been
+made to mark the place with beacons, but all efforts were unavailing (one
+such beacon having been carried away within eight days of its erection)
+until Robert Stevenson conceived and carried out the idea of the stone
+tower.  But the number of vessels actually lost upon the reef was as
+nothing to those that were cast away in fruitless efforts to avoid it.
+Placed right in the fairway of two navigations, and one of these the
+entrance to the only harbour of refuge between the Downs and the Moray
+Firth, it breathed abroad along the whole coast an atmosphere of terror
+and perplexity; and no ship sailed that part of the North Sea at night,
+but what the ears of those on board would be strained to catch the
+roaring of the seas on the Bell Rock.
+
+{92a}  The particular event which concentrated Mr. Stevenson’s attention
+on the problem of the Bell Rock was the memorable gale of December 1799,
+when, among many other vessels, H.M.S. _York_, a seventy-four-gun ship,
+went down with all hands on board.  Shortly after this disaster Mr.
+Stevenson made a careful survey, and prepared his models for a stone
+tower, the idea of which was at first received with pretty general
+scepticism, Smeaton’s Eddystone tower could not be cited as affording a
+parallel, for there the rock is not submerged even at high-water, while
+the problem of the Bell Rock was to build a tower of masonry on a sunken
+reef far distant from land, covered at every tide to a depth of twelve
+feet or more, and having thirty-two fathoms’ depth of water within a mile
+of its eastern edge.
+
+{94a}  The grounds for the rejection of the Bill by the House of Lords in
+1802–3 had been that the extent of coast over which dues were proposed to
+be levied would be too great.  Before going to Parliament again, the
+Board of Northern Lights, desiring to obtain support and corroboration
+for Mr. Stevenson’s views, consulted first Telford, who was unable to
+give the matter his attention, and then (on Stevenson’s suggestion)
+Rennie, who concurred in affirming the practicability of a stone tower,
+and supported the Bill when it came again before Parliament in 1806.
+Rennie was afterwards appointed by the Commissioners as advising
+engineer, whom Stevenson might consult in cases of emergency.  It seems
+certain that the title of chief engineer had in this instance no more
+meaning than the above.  Rennie, in point of fact, proposed certain
+modifications in Stevenson’s plans, which the latter did not accept;
+nevertheless Rennie continued to take a kindly interest in the work, and
+the two engineers remained in friendly correspondence during its
+progress.  The official view taken by the Board as to the quarter in
+which lay both the merit and the responsibility of the work may be
+gathered from a minute of the Commissioners at their first meeting held
+after Stevenson died; in which they record their regret ‘at the death of
+this zealous, faithful, and able officer, _to whom is due the honour of
+conceiving and executing the Bell Rock Lighthouse_.’  The matter is
+briefly summed up in the _Life_ of Robert Stevenson by his son David
+Stevenson (A. & C. Black, 1878), and fully discussed, on the basis of
+official facts and figures, by the same writer in a letter to the _Civil
+Engineers’ and Architects’ Journal_, 1862.
+
+{122a}  ‘Nothing was said, but I was _looked out of countenance_,’ he
+says in a letter.
+
+{171a}  Ill-formed—ugly.—[R. L. S.]
+
+{174a}  This is an incurable illusion of my grandfather’s; he always
+writes ‘distended’ for ‘extended.’—[R. L. S.]
+
+
+
+
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" />
+<title>Records of a Family of Engineers, by Robert Louis Stevenson</title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Records of a Family of Engineers, by Robert
+Louis Stevenson
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Records of a Family of Engineers
+
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 3, 2010  [eBook #280]
+[This file was first posted on July 9, 1995]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECORDS OF A FAMILY OF ENGINEERS***
+</pre>
+<p>Transcribed from the 1912 Chatto &amp; Windus edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org.&nbsp; Additional proofing by Peter
+Barnes.</p>
+<h1>RECORDS OF A<br />
+FAMILY OF ENGINEERS</h1>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">by</span></p>
+<p style="text-align: center">ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p0b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Decorative graphic for Chatto &amp; Windus"
+title=
+"Decorative graphic for Chatto &amp; Windus"
+src="images/p0s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center">LONDON</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">CHATTO &amp; WINDUS</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">1912</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>All rights reserved</i></p>
+<h2>INTRODUCTION: THE SURNAME OF STEVENSON</h2>
+<p>From the thirteenth century onwards, the name, under the
+various disguises of Stevinstoun, Stevensoun, Stevensonne,
+Stenesone, and Stewinsoune, spread across Scotland from the mouth
+of the Firth of Forth to the mouth of the Firth of Clyde.&nbsp;
+Four times at least it occurs as a place-name.&nbsp; There is a
+parish of Stevenston in Cunningham; a second place of the name in
+the Barony of Bothwell in Lanark; a third on Lyne, above Drochil
+Castle; the fourth on the Tyne, near Traprain Law.&nbsp;
+Stevenson of Stevenson (co. Lanark) swore fealty to Edward I in
+1296, and the last of that family died after the
+Restoration.&nbsp; Stevensons of Hirdmanshiels, in Midlothian,
+rode in the Bishops&rsquo; Raid of Aberlady, served as jurors,
+stood bail for neighbours&mdash;Hunter of Polwood, for
+instance&mdash;and became extinct about the same period, or
+possibly earlier.&nbsp; A Stevenson of Luthrie and another of
+Pitroddie make their bows, give their names, and vanish.&nbsp;
+And by the year 1700 it does not appear that any acre of Scots
+land was vested in any Stevenson. <a name="citation2a"></a><a
+href="#footnote2a" class="citation">[2a]</a></p>
+<p>Here is, so far, a melancholy picture of backward progress,
+and a family posting towards extinction.&nbsp; But the law
+(however administered, and I am bound to aver that, in Scotland,
+&lsquo;it couldna weel be waur&rsquo;) acts as a kind of dredge,
+and with dispassionate impartiality brings up into the light of
+day, and shows us for a moment, in the jury-box or on the
+gallows, the creeping things of the past.&nbsp; By these broken
+glimpses we are able to trace the existence of many other and
+more inglorious Stevensons, picking a private way through the
+brawl that makes Scots history.&nbsp; They were members of
+Parliament for Peebles, Stirling, Pittenweem, Kilrenny, and
+Inverurie.&nbsp; We find them burgesses of Edinburgh; indwellers
+in Biggar, Perth, and Dalkeith.&nbsp; Thomas was the forester of
+Newbattle Park, Gavin was a baker, John a maltman, Francis a
+chirurgeon, and &lsquo;Schir William&rsquo; a priest.&nbsp; In
+the feuds of Humes and Heatleys, Cunninghams, Montgomeries,
+Mures, Ogilvies, and Turnbulls, we find them inconspicuously
+involved, and apparently getting rather better than they
+gave.&nbsp; Schir William (reverend gentleman) was cruellie
+slaughtered on the Links of Kincraig in 1582; James (&lsquo;in
+the mill-town of Roberton&rsquo;), murdered in 1590; Archibald
+(&lsquo;in Gallowfarren&rsquo;), killed with shots of pistols and
+hagbuts in 1608.&nbsp; Three violent deaths in about seventy
+years, against which we can only put the case of Thomas, servant
+to Hume of Cowden Knowes, who was arraigned with his two young
+masters for the death of the Bastard of Mellerstanes in
+1569.&nbsp; John (&lsquo;in Dalkeith&rsquo;) stood sentry without
+Holyrood while the banded lords were despatching Rizzio
+within.&nbsp; William, at the ringing of Perth bell, ran before
+Gowrie House &lsquo;with ane sword, and, entering to the yearde,
+saw George Craiggingilt with ane twa-handit sword and utheris
+nychtbouris; at quilk time James Boig cryit ower ane wynds,
+&ldquo;Awa hame! ye will all be hangit&rdquo;&rsquo;&mdash;a
+piece of advice which William took, and immediately
+&lsquo;depairtit.&rsquo;&nbsp; John got a maid with child to him
+in Biggar, and seemingly deserted her; she was hanged on the
+Castle Hill for infanticide, June 1614; and Martin, elder in
+Dalkeith, eternally disgraced the name by signing witness in a
+witch trial, 1661.&nbsp; These are two of our black sheep. <a
+name="citation3a"></a><a href="#footnote3a"
+class="citation">[3a]</a>&nbsp; Under the Restoration, one
+Stevenson was a bailie in Edinburgh, and another the lessee of
+the Canonmills.&nbsp; There were at the same period two
+physicians of the name in Edinburgh, one of whom, Dr. Archibald,
+appears to have been a famous man in his day and
+generation.&nbsp; The Court had continual need of him; it was he
+who reported, for instance, on the state of Rumbold; and he was
+for some time in the enjoyment of a pension of a thousand pounds
+Scots (about eighty pounds sterling) at a time when five hundred
+pounds is described as &lsquo;an opulent future.&rsquo;&nbsp; I
+do not know if I should be glad or sorry that he failed to keep
+favour; but on 6th January 1682 (rather a cheerless New
+Year&rsquo;s present) his pension was expunged. <a
+name="citation4a"></a><a href="#footnote4a"
+class="citation">[4a]</a>&nbsp; There need be no doubt, at least,
+of my exultation at the fact that he was knighted and recorded
+arms.&nbsp; Not quite so genteel, but still in public life, Hugh
+was Under-Clerk to the Privy Council, and liked being so
+extremely.&nbsp; I gather this from his conduct in September
+1681, when, with all the lords and their servants, he took the
+woful and soul-destroying Test, swearing it &lsquo;word by word
+upon his knees.&rsquo;&nbsp; And, behold! it was in vain, for
+Hugh was turned out of his small post in 1684. <a
+name="citation4b"></a><a href="#footnote4b"
+class="citation">[4b]</a>&nbsp; Sir Archibald and Hugh were both
+plainly inclined to be trimmers; but there was one witness of the
+name of Stevenson who held high the banner of the
+Covenant&mdash;John, &lsquo;Land-Labourer, <a
+name="citation4c"></a><a href="#footnote4c"
+class="citation">[4c]</a> in the parish of Daily, in
+Carrick,&rsquo; that &lsquo;eminently pious man.&rsquo;&nbsp; He
+seems to have been a poor sickly soul, and shows himself disabled
+with scrofula, and prostrate and groaning aloud with fever; but
+the enthusiasm of the martyr burned high within him.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I was made to take joyfully the spoiling of my goods,
+and with pleasure for His name&rsquo;s sake wandered in deserts
+and in mountains, in dens and caves of the earth.&nbsp; I lay
+four months in the coldest season of the year in a haystack in my
+father&rsquo;s garden, and a whole February in the open fields
+not far from Camragen, and this I did without the least prejudice
+from the night air; one night, when lying in the fields near to
+the Carrick-Miln, I was all covered with snow in the
+morning.&nbsp; Many nights have I lain with pleasure in the
+churchyard of Old Daily, and made a grave my pillow; frequently
+have I resorted to the old walls about the glen, near to
+Camragen, and there sweetly rested.&rsquo;&nbsp; The visible band
+of God protected and directed him.&nbsp; Dragoons were turned
+aside from the bramble-bush where he lay hidden.&nbsp; Miracles
+were performed for his behoof.&nbsp; &lsquo;I got a horse and a
+woman to carry the child, and came to the same mountain, where I
+wandered by the mist before; it is commonly known by the name of
+Kellsrhins: when we came to go up the mountain, there came on a
+great rain, which we thought was the occasion of the
+child&rsquo;s weeping, and she wept so bitterly, that all we
+could do could not divert her from it, so that she was ready to
+burst.&nbsp; When we got to the top of the mountain, where the
+Lord had been formerly kind to my soul in prayer, I looked round
+me for a stone, and espying one, I went and brought it.&nbsp;
+When the woman with me saw me set down the stone, she smiled, and
+asked what I was going to do with it.&nbsp; I told her I was
+going to set it up as my Ebenezer, because hitherto, and in that
+place, the Lord had formerly helped, and I hoped would yet
+help.&nbsp; The rain still continuing, the child weeping
+bitterly, I went to prayer, and no sooner did I cry to God, but
+the child gave over weeping, and when we got up from prayer, the
+rain was pouring down on every side, but in the way where we were
+to go there fell not one drop; the place not rained on was as big
+as an ordinary avenue.&rsquo;&nbsp; And so great a saint was the
+natural butt of Satan&rsquo;s persecutions.&nbsp; &lsquo;I
+retired to the fields for secret prayer about mid-night.&nbsp;
+When I went to pray I was much straitened, and could not get one
+request, but &ldquo;Lord pity,&rdquo; &ldquo;Lord help&rdquo;;
+this I came over frequently; at length the terror of Satan fell
+on me in a high degree, and all I could say even then
+was&mdash;&ldquo;Lord help.&rdquo;&nbsp; I continued in the duty
+for some time, notwithstanding of this terror.&nbsp; At length I
+got up to my feet, and the terror still increased; then the enemy
+took me by the arm-pits, and seemed to lift me up by my
+arms.&nbsp; I saw a loch just before me, and I concluded he
+designed to throw me there by force; and had he got leave to do
+so, it might have brought a great reproach upon religion. <a
+name="citation7a"></a><a href="#footnote7a"
+class="citation">[7a]</a>&nbsp; But it was otherwise ordered, and
+the cause of piety escaped that danger. <a
+name="citation7b"></a><a href="#footnote7b"
+class="citation">[7b]</a></p>
+<p>On the whole, the Stevensons may be described as decent,
+reputable folk, following honest trades&mdash;millers, maltsters,
+and doctors, playing the character parts in the Waverley Novels
+with propriety, if without distinction; and to an orphan looking
+about him in the world for a potential ancestry, offering a plain
+and quite unadorned refuge, equally free from shame and
+glory.&nbsp; John, the land-labourer, is the one living and
+memorable figure, and he, alas! cannot possibly be more near than
+a collateral.&nbsp; It was on August 12, 1678, that he heard Mr.
+John Welsh on the Craigdowhill, and &lsquo;took the heavens,
+earth, and sun in the firmament that was shining on us, as also
+the ambassador who made the offer, and <i>the clerk who raised
+the psalms</i>, to witness that I did give myself away to the
+Lord in a personal and perpetual covenant never to be
+forgotten&rsquo;; and already, in 1675, the birth of my direct
+ascendant was registered in Glasgow.&nbsp; So that I have been
+pursuing ancestors too far down; and John the land-labourer is
+debarred me, and I must relinquish from the trophies of my house
+his <i>rare soul-strengthening and comforting cordial</i>.&nbsp;
+It is the same case with the Edinburgh bailie and the miller of
+the Canonmills, worthy man! and with that public character, Hugh
+the Under-Clerk, and, more than all, with Sir Archibald, the
+physician, who recorded arms.&nbsp; And I am reduced to a family
+of inconspicuous maltsters in what was then the clean and
+handsome little city on the Clyde.</p>
+<p>The name has a certain air of being Norse.&nbsp; But the story
+of Scottish nomenclature is confounded by a continual process of
+translation and half-translation from the Gaelic which in olden
+days may have been sometimes reversed.&nbsp; Roy becomes Reid;
+Gow, Smith.&nbsp; A great Highland clan uses the name of
+Robertson; a sept in Appin that of Livingstone; Maclean in
+Glencoe answers to Johnstone at Lockerby.&nbsp; And we find such
+hybrids as Macalexander for Macallister.&nbsp; There is but one
+rule to be deduced: that however uncompromisingly Saxon a name
+may appear, you can never be sure it does not designate a
+Celt.&nbsp; My great-grandfather wrote the name <i>Stevenson</i>
+but pronounced it <i>Steenson</i>, after the fashion of the
+immortal minstrel in <i>Redgauntlet</i>; and this elision of a
+medial consonant appears a Gaelic process; and, curiously enough,
+I have come across no less than two Gaelic forms: <i>John
+Macstophane cordinerius in Crossraguel</i>, 1573, and <i>William
+M&rsquo;Steen</i> in Dunskeith (co. Ross), 1605.&nbsp; Stevenson,
+Steenson, Macstophane, M&rsquo;Steen: which is the original?
+which the translation?&nbsp; Or were these separate creations of
+the patronymic, some English, some Gaelic?&nbsp; The curiously
+compact territory in which we find them seated&mdash;Ayr, Lanark,
+Peebles, Stirling, Perth, Fife, and the Lothians&mdash;would seem
+to forbid the supposition. <a name="citation9a"></a><a
+href="#footnote9a" class="citation">[9a]</a></p>
+<p>&lsquo;<span class="smcap">Stevenson</span>&mdash;or according
+to tradition of one of the proscribed of the clan MacGregor, who
+was born among the willows or in a hill-side
+sheep-pen&mdash;&ldquo;Son of my love,&rdquo; a heraldic bar
+sinister, but history reveals a reason for the birth among the
+willows far other than the sinister aspect of the name&rsquo;:
+these are the dark words of Mr. Cosmo Innes; but history or
+tradition, being interrogated, tells a somewhat tangled
+tale.&nbsp; The heir of Macgregor of Glenorchy, murdered about
+1858 by the Argyll Campbells, appears to have been the original
+&lsquo;Son of my love&rsquo;; and his more loyal clansmen took
+the name to fight under.&nbsp; It may be supposed the story of
+their resistance became popular, and the name in some sort
+identified with the idea of opposition to the Campbells.&nbsp;
+Twice afterwards, on some renewed aggression, in 1502 and 1552,
+we find the Macgregors again banding themselves into a sept of
+&lsquo;Sons of my love&rsquo;; and when the great disaster fell
+on them in 1603, the whole original legend reappears, and we have
+the heir of Alaster of Glenstrae born &lsquo;among the
+willows&rsquo; of a fugitive mother, and the more loyal clansmen
+again rallying under the name of Stevenson.&nbsp; A story would
+not be told so often unless it had some base in fact; nor (if
+there were no bond at all between the Red Macgregors and the
+Stevensons) would that extraneous and somewhat uncouth name be so
+much repeated in the legends of the Children of the Mist.</p>
+<p>But I am enabled, by my very lively and obliging
+correspondent, Mr. George A. Macgregor Stevenson of New York, to
+give an actual instance.&nbsp; His grandfather,
+great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and
+great-great-great-grandfather, all used the names of Macgregor
+and Stevenson as occasion served; being perhaps Macgregor by
+night and Stevenson by day.&nbsp; The
+great-great-great-grandfather was a mighty man of his hands,
+marched with the clan in the &lsquo;Forty-five, and returned with
+<i>spolia opima</i> in the shape of a sword, which he had wrested
+from an officer in the retreat, and which is in the possession of
+my correspondent to this day.&nbsp; His great-grandson (the
+grandfather of my correspondent), being converted to Methodism by
+some wayside preacher, discarded in a moment his name, his old
+nature, and his political principles, and with the zeal of a
+proselyte sealed his adherence to the Protestant Succession by
+baptising his next son George.&nbsp; This George became the
+publisher and editor of the <i>Wesleyan Times</i>.&nbsp; His
+children were brought up in ignorance of their Highland pedigree;
+and my correspondent was puzzled to overhear his father speak of
+him as a true Macgregor, and amazed to find, in rummaging about
+that peaceful and pious house, the sword of the Hanoverian
+officer.&nbsp; After he was grown up and was better informed of
+his descent, &lsquo;I frequently asked my father,&rsquo; he
+writes, &lsquo;why he did not use the name of Macgregor; his
+replies were significant, and give a picture of the man:
+&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t a good <i>Methodist</i> name.&nbsp; You can
+use it, but it will do you no <i>good</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yet the
+old gentleman, by way of pleasantry, used to announce himself to
+friends as &ldquo;Colonel Macgregor.&rdquo;&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Here, then, are certain Macgregors habitually using the name
+of Stevenson, and at last, under the influence of Methodism,
+adopting it entirely.&nbsp; Doubtless a proscribed clan could not
+be particular; they took a name as a man takes an umbrella
+against a shower; as Rob Roy took Campbell, and his son took
+Drummond.&nbsp; But this case is different; Stevenson was not
+taken and left&mdash;it was consistently adhered to.&nbsp; It
+does not in the least follow that all Stevensons are of the clan
+Alpin; but it does follow that some may be.&nbsp; And I cannot
+conceal from myself the possibility that James Stevenson in
+Glasgow, my first authentic ancestor, may have had a Highland
+<i>alias</i> upon his conscience and a claymore in his back
+parlour.</p>
+<p>To one more tradition I may allude, that we are somehow
+descended from a French barber-surgeon who came to St. Andrews in
+the service of one of the Cardinal Beatons.&nbsp; No details were
+added.&nbsp; But the very name of France was so detested in my
+family for three generations, that I am tempted to suppose there
+may be something in it. <a name="citation12a"></a><a
+href="#footnote12a" class="citation">[12a]</a></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER I: DOMESTIC ANNALS</h2>
+<p>It is believed that in 1665, James Stevenson in Nether
+Carsewell, parish of Neilston, county of Renfrew, and presumably
+a tenant farmer, married one Jean Keir; and in 1675, without
+doubt, there was born to these two a son Robert, possibly a
+maltster in Glasgow.&nbsp; In 1710, Robert married, for a second
+time, Elizabeth Cumming, and there was born to them, in 1720,
+another Robert, certainly a maltster in Glasgow.&nbsp; In 1742,
+Robert the second married Margaret Fulton (Margret, she called
+herself), by whom he had ten children, among whom were Hugh, born
+February 1749, and Alan, born June 1752.</p>
+<p>With these two brothers my story begins.&nbsp; Their deaths
+were simultaneous; their lives unusually brief and full.&nbsp;
+Tradition whispered me in childhood they were the owners of an
+islet near St. Kitts; and it is certain they had risen to be at
+the head of considerable interests in the West Indies, which Hugh
+managed abroad and Alan at home, at an age when others are still
+curveting a clerk&rsquo;s stool.&nbsp; My kinsman, Mr. Stevenson
+of Stirling, has heard his father mention that there had been
+&lsquo;something romantic&rsquo; about Alan&rsquo;s marriage:
+and, alas! he has forgotten what.&nbsp; It was early at
+least.&nbsp; His wife was Jean, daughter of David Lillie, a
+builder in Glasgow, and several times &lsquo;Deacon of the
+Wrights&rsquo;: the date of the marriage has not reached me; but
+on 8th June 1772, when Robert, the only child of the union, was
+born, the husband and father had scarce passed, or had not yet
+attained, his twentieth year.&nbsp; Here was a youth making haste
+to give hostages to fortune.&nbsp; But this early scene of
+prosperity in love and business was on the point of closing.</p>
+<p>There hung in the house of this young family, and successively
+in those of my grandfather and father, an oil painting of a ship
+of many tons burthen.&nbsp; Doubtless the brothers had an
+interest in the vessel; I was told she had belonged to them
+outright; and the picture was preserved through years of
+hardship, and remains to this day in the possession of the
+family, the only memorial of my great-grandsire Alan.&nbsp; It
+was on this ship that he sailed on his last adventure, summoned
+to the West Indies by Hugh.&nbsp; An agent had proved unfaithful
+on a serious scale; and it used to be told me in my childhood how
+the brothers pursued him from one island to another in an open
+boat, were exposed to the pernicious dews of the tropics, and
+simultaneously struck down.&nbsp; The dates and places of their
+deaths (now before me) would seem to indicate a more scattered
+and prolonged pursuit: Hugh, on the 16th April 1774, in Tobago,
+within sight of Trinidad; Alan, so late as 26th May, and so far
+away as &lsquo;Santt Kittes,&rsquo; in the Leeward
+Islands&mdash;both, says the family Bible, &lsquo;of a
+fiver&rsquo;(!).&nbsp; The death of Hugh was probably announced
+by Alan in a letter, to which we may refer the details of the
+open boat and the dew.&nbsp; Thus, at least, in something like
+the course of post, both were called away, the one twenty-five,
+the other twenty-two; their brief generation became extinct,
+their short-lived house fell with them; and &lsquo;in these
+lawless parts and lawless times&rsquo;&mdash;the words are my
+grandfather&rsquo;s&mdash;their property was stolen or became
+involved.&nbsp; Many years later, I understand some small
+recovery to have been made; but at the moment almost the whole
+means of the family seem to have perished with the young
+merchants.&nbsp; On the 27th April, eleven days after Hugh
+Stevenson, twenty-nine before Alan, died David Lillie, the Deacon
+of the Wrights; so that mother and son were orphaned in one
+month.&nbsp; Thus, from a few scraps of paper bearing little
+beyond dates, we construct the outlines of the tragedy that
+shadowed the cradle of Robert Stevenson.</p>
+<p>Jean Lillie was a young woman of strong sense, well fitted to
+contend with poverty, and of a pious disposition, which it is
+like that these misfortunes heated.&nbsp; Like so many other
+widowed Scots-women, she vowed her son should wag his head in a
+pulpit; but her means were inadequate to her ambition.&nbsp; A
+charity school, and some time under a Mr. M&rsquo;Intyre,
+&lsquo;a famous linguist,&rsquo; were all she could afford in the
+way of education to the would-be minister.&nbsp; He learned no
+Greek; in one place he mentions that the Orations of Cicero were
+his highest book in Latin; in another that he had
+&lsquo;delighted&rsquo; in Virgil and Horace; but his delight
+could never have been scholarly.&nbsp; This appears to have been
+the whole of his training previous to an event which changed his
+own destiny and moulded that of his descendants&mdash;the second
+marriage of his mother.</p>
+<p>There was a Merchant-Burgess of Edinburgh of the name of
+Thomas Smith.&nbsp; The Smith pedigree has been traced a little
+more particularly than the Stevensons&rsquo;, with a similar
+dearth of illustrious names.&nbsp; One character seems to have
+appeared, indeed, for a moment at the wings of history: a skipper
+of Dundee who smuggled over some Jacobite big-wig at the time of
+the &lsquo;Fifteen, and was afterwards drowned in Dundee harbour
+while going on board his ship.&nbsp; With this exception, the
+generations of the Smiths present no conceivable interest even to
+a descendant; and Thomas, of Edinburgh, was the first to issue
+from respectable obscurity.&nbsp; His father, a skipper out of
+Broughty Ferry, was drowned at sea while Thomas was still
+young.&nbsp; He seems to have owned a ship or two&mdash;whalers,
+I suppose, or coasters&mdash;and to have been a member of the
+Dundee Trinity House, whatever that implies.&nbsp; On his death
+the widow remained in Broughty, and the son came to push his
+future in Edinburgh.&nbsp; There is a story told of him in the
+family which I repeat here because I shall have to tell later on
+a similar, but more perfectly authenticated, experience of his
+stepson, Robert Stevenson.&nbsp; Word reached Thomas that his
+mother was unwell, and he prepared to leave for Broughty on the
+morrow.&nbsp; It was between two and three in the morning, and
+the early northern daylight was already clear, when he awoke and
+beheld the curtains at the bed-foot drawn aside and his mother
+appear in the interval, smile upon him for a moment, and then
+vanish.&nbsp; The sequel is stereo-type; he took the time by his
+watch, and arrived at Broughty to learn it was the very moment of
+her death.&nbsp; The incident is at least curious in having
+happened to such a person&mdash;as the tale is being told of
+him.&nbsp; In all else, he appears as a man ardent, passionate,
+practical, designed for affairs and prospering in them far beyond
+the average.&nbsp; He founded a solid business in lamps and oils,
+and was the sole proprietor of a concern called the Greenside
+Company&rsquo;s Works&mdash;&lsquo;a multifarious concern it
+was,&rsquo; writes my cousin, Professor Swan, &lsquo;of
+tinsmiths, coppersmiths, brass-founders, blacksmiths, and
+japanners.&rsquo;&nbsp; He was also, it seems, a shipowner and
+underwriter.&nbsp; He built himself &lsquo;a
+land&rsquo;&mdash;Nos. 1 and 2 Baxter&rsquo;s Place, then no such
+unfashionable neighbourhood&mdash;and died, leaving his only son
+in easy circumstances, and giving to his three surviving
+daughters portions of five thousand pounds and upwards.&nbsp;
+There is no standard of success in life; but in one of its
+meanings, this is to succeed.</p>
+<p>In what we know of his opinions, he makes a figure highly
+characteristic of the time.&nbsp; A high Tory and patriot, a
+captain&mdash;so I find it in my notes&mdash;of Edinburgh
+Spearmen, and on duty in the Castle during the Muir and Palmer
+troubles, he bequeathed to his descendants a bloodless sword and
+a somewhat violent tradition, both long preserved.&nbsp; The
+judge who sat on Muir and Palmer, the famous Braxfield, let fall
+from the bench the <i>obiter dictum</i>&mdash;&lsquo;I never
+liked the French all my days, but now I hate them.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+If Thomas Smith, the Edinburgh Spearman, were in court, he must
+have been tempted to applaud.&nbsp; The people of that land were
+his abhorrence; he loathed Buonaparte like Antichrist.&nbsp;
+Towards the end he fell into a kind of dotage; his family must
+entertain him with games of tin soldiers, which he took a
+childish pleasure to array and overset; but those who played with
+him must be upon their guard, for if his side, which was always
+that of the English against the French, should chance to be
+defeated, there would be trouble in Baxter&rsquo;s Place.&nbsp;
+For these opinions he may almost be said to have suffered.&nbsp;
+Baptised and brought up in the Church of Scotland, he had, upon
+some conscientious scruple, joined the communion of the
+Baptists.&nbsp; Like other Nonconformists, these were inclined to
+the Liberal side in politics, and, at least in the beginning,
+regarded Buonaparte as a deliverer.&nbsp; From the time of his
+joining the Spearmen, Thomas Smith became in consequence a
+bugbear to his brethren in the faith.&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;They
+that take the sword shall perish with the sword,&rsquo; they told
+him; they gave him &lsquo;no rest&rsquo;; &lsquo;his position
+became intolerable&rsquo;; it was plain he must choose between
+his political and his religious tenets; and in the last years of
+his life, about 1812, he returned to the Church of his
+fathers.</p>
+<p>August 1786 was the date of his chief advancement, when,
+having designed a system of oil lights to take the place of the
+primitive coal fires before in use, he was dubbed engineer to the
+newly-formed Board of Northern Lighthouses.&nbsp; Not only were
+his fortunes bettered by the appointment, but he was introduced
+to a new and wider field for the exercise of his abilities, and a
+new way of life highly agreeable to his active
+constitution.&nbsp; He seems to have rejoiced in the long
+journeys, and to have combined them with the practice of field
+sports.&nbsp; &lsquo;A tall, stout man coming ashore with his gun
+over his arm&rsquo;&mdash;so he was described to my
+father&mdash;the only description that has come down to me by a
+light-keeper old in the service.&nbsp; Nor did this change come
+alone.&nbsp; On the 9th July of the same year, Thomas Smith had
+been left for the second time a widower.&nbsp; As he was still
+but thirty-three years old, prospering in his affairs, newly
+advanced in the world, and encumbered at the time with a family
+of children, five in number, it was natural that he should
+entertain the notion of another wife.&nbsp; Expeditious in
+business, he was no less so in his choice; and it was not later
+than June 1787&mdash;for my grandfather is described as still in
+his fifteenth year&mdash;that he married the widow of Alan
+Stevenson.</p>
+<p>The perilous experiment of bringing together two families for
+once succeeded.&nbsp; Mr. Smith&rsquo;s two eldest daughters,
+Jean and Janet, fervent in piety, unwearied in kind deeds, were
+well qualified both to appreciate and to attract the stepmother;
+and her son, on the other hand, seems to have found immediate
+favour in the eyes of Mr. Smith.&nbsp; It is, perhaps, easy to
+exaggerate the ready-made resemblances; the tired woman must have
+done much to fashion girls who were under ten; the man, lusty and
+opinionated, must have stamped a strong impression on the boy of
+fifteen.&nbsp; But the cleavage of the family was too marked, the
+identity of character and interest produced between the two men
+on the one hand, and the three women on the other, was too
+complete to have been the result of influence alone.&nbsp;
+Particular bonds of union must have pre-existed on each
+side.&nbsp; And there is no doubt that the man and the boy met
+with common ambitions, and a common bent, to the practice of that
+which had not so long before acquired the name of civil
+engineering.</p>
+<p>For the profession which is now so thronged, famous, and
+influential, was then a thing of yesterday.&nbsp; My grandfather
+had an anecdote of Smeaton, probably learned from John Clerk of
+Eldin, their common friend.&nbsp; Smeaton was asked by the Duke
+of Argyll to visit the West Highland coast for a professional
+purpose.&nbsp; He refused, appalled, it seems, by the rough
+travelling.&nbsp; &lsquo;You can recommend some other fit
+person?&rsquo; asked the Duke.&nbsp; &lsquo;No,&rsquo; said
+Smeaton, &lsquo;I&rsquo;m sorry I can&rsquo;t.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;What!&rsquo; cried the Duke, &lsquo;a profession with only
+one man in it!&nbsp; Pray, who taught you?&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Why,&rsquo; said Smeaton, &lsquo;I believe I may say I was
+self-taught, an&rsquo;t please your grace.&rsquo;&nbsp; Smeaton,
+at the date of Thomas Smith&rsquo;s third marriage, was yet
+living; and as the one had grown to the new profession from his
+place at the instrument-maker&rsquo;s, the other was beginning to
+enter it by the way of his trade.&nbsp; The engineer of to-day is
+confronted with a library of acquired results; tables and
+formulae to the value of folios full have been calculated and
+recorded; and the student finds everywhere in front of him the
+footprints of the pioneers.&nbsp; In the eighteenth century the
+field was largely unexplored; the engineer must read with his own
+eyes the face of nature; he arose a volunteer, from the workshop
+or the mill, to undertake works which were at once inventions and
+adventures.&nbsp; It was not a science then&mdash;it was a living
+art; and it visibly grew under the eyes and between the hands of
+its practitioners.</p>
+<p>The charm of such an occupation was strongly felt by
+stepfather and stepson.&nbsp; It chanced that Thomas Smith was a
+reformer; the superiority of his proposed lamp and reflectors
+over open fires of coal secured his appointment; and no sooner
+had he set his hand to the task than the interest of that
+employment mastered him.&nbsp; The vacant stage on which he was
+to act, and where all had yet to be created&mdash;the greatness
+of the difficulties, the smallness of the means intrusted
+him&mdash;would rouse a man of his disposition like a call to
+battle.&nbsp; The lad introduced by marriage under his roof was
+of a character to sympathise; the public usefulness of the
+service would appeal to his judgment, the perpetual need for
+fresh expedients stimulate his ingenuity.&nbsp; And there was
+another attraction which, in the younger man at least, appealed
+to, and perhaps first aroused, a profound and enduring sentiment
+of romance: I mean the attraction of the life.&nbsp; The seas
+into which his labours carried the new engineer were still scarce
+charted, the coasts still dark; his way on shore was often far
+beyond the convenience of any road; the isles in which he must
+sojourn were still partly savage.&nbsp; He must toss much in
+boats; he must often adventure on horseback by the dubious
+bridle-track through unfrequented wildernesses; he must sometimes
+plant his lighthouse in the very camp of wreckers; and he was
+continually enforced to the vicissitudes of outdoor life.&nbsp;
+The joy of my grandfather in this career was strong as the love
+of woman.&nbsp; It lasted him through youth and manhood, it
+burned strong in age, and at the approach of death his last
+yearning was to renew these loved experiences.&nbsp; What he felt
+himself he continued to attribute to all around him.&nbsp; And to
+this supposed sentiment in others I find him continually, almost
+pathetically, appealing; often in vain.</p>
+<p>Snared by these interests, the boy seems to have become almost
+at once the eager confidant and adviser of his new connection;
+the Church, if he had ever entertained the prospect very warmly,
+faded from his view; and at the age of nineteen I find him
+already in a post of some authority, superintending the
+construction of the lighthouse on the isle of Little Cumbrae, in
+the Firth of Clyde.&nbsp; The change of aim seems to have caused
+or been accompanied by a change of character.&nbsp; It sounds
+absurd to couple the name of my grandfather with the word
+indolence; but the lad who had been destined from the cradle to
+the Church, and who had attained the age of fifteen without
+acquiring more than a moderate knowledge of Latin, was at least
+no unusual student.&nbsp; And from the day of his charge at
+Little Cumbrae he steps before us what he remained until the end,
+a man of the most zealous industry, greedy of occupation, greedy
+of knowledge, a stern husband of time, a reader, a writer,
+unflagging in his task of self-improvement.&nbsp; Thenceforward
+his summers were spent directing works and ruling workmen, now in
+uninhabited, now in half-savage islands; his winters were set
+apart, first at the Andersonian Institution, then at the
+University of Edinburgh to improve himself in mathematics,
+chemistry, natural history, agriculture, moral philosophy, and
+logic; a bearded student&mdash;although no doubt scrupulously
+shaved.&nbsp; I find one reference to his years in class which
+will have a meaning for all who have studied in Scottish
+Universities.&nbsp; He mentions a recommendation made by the
+professor of logic.&nbsp; &lsquo;The high-school men,&rsquo; he
+writes, &lsquo;and <i>bearded men like myself</i>, were all
+attention.&rsquo;&nbsp; If my grandfather were throughout life a
+thought too studious of the art of getting on, much must be
+forgiven to the bearded and belated student who looked across,
+with a sense of difference, at &lsquo;the high-school
+men.&rsquo;&nbsp; Here was a gulf to be crossed; but already he
+could feel that he had made a beginning, and that must have been
+a proud hour when he devoted his earliest earnings to the
+repayment of the charitable foundation in which he had received
+the rudiments of knowledge.</p>
+<p>In yet another way he followed the example of his
+father-in-law, and from 1794 to 1807, when the affairs of the
+Bell Rock made it necessary for him to resign, he served in
+different corps of volunteers.&nbsp; In the last of these he rose
+to a position of distinction, no less than captain of the
+Grenadier Company, and his colonel, in accepting his resignation,
+entreated he would do them &lsquo;the favour of continuing as an
+honorary member of a corps which has been so much indebted for
+your zeal and exertions.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>To very pious women the men of the house are apt to appear
+worldly.&nbsp; The wife, as she puts on her new bonnet before
+church, is apt to sigh over that assiduity which enabled her
+husband to pay the milliner&rsquo;s bill.&nbsp; And in the
+household of the Smiths and Stevensons the women were not only
+extremely pious, but the men were in reality a trifle
+worldly.&nbsp; Religious they both were; conscious, like all
+Scots, of the fragility and unreality of that scene in which we
+play our uncomprehended parts; like all Scots, realising daily
+and hourly the sense of another will than ours and a perpetual
+direction in the affairs of life.&nbsp; But the current of their
+endeavours flowed in a more obvious channel.&nbsp; They had got
+on so far; to get on further was their next ambition&mdash;to
+gather wealth, to rise in society, to leave their descendants
+higher than themselves, to be (in some sense) among the founders
+of families.&nbsp; Scott was in the same town nourishing similar
+dreams.&nbsp; But in the eyes of the women these dreams would be
+foolish and idolatrous.</p>
+<p>I have before me some volumes of old letters addressed to Mrs.
+Smith and the two girls, her favourites, which depict in a strong
+light their characters and the society in which they moved.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;My very dear and much esteemed
+Friend,&rsquo; writes one correspondent, &lsquo;this day being
+the anniversary of our acquaintance, I feel inclined to address
+you; but where shall I find words to express the fealings of a
+graitful <i>Heart</i>, first to the Lord who graiciously inclined
+you on this day last year to notice an afflicted Strainger
+providentially cast in your way far from any Earthly friend? . .
+.&nbsp; Methinks I shall hear him say unto you, &ldquo;Inasmuch
+as ye shewed kindness to my afflicted handmaiden, ye did it unto
+me.&rdquo;&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>This is to Jean; but the same afflicted lady wrote
+indifferently to Jean, to Janet, and to Ms. Smith, whom she calls
+&lsquo;my Edinburgh mother.&rsquo;&nbsp; It is plain the three
+were as one person, moving to acts of kindness, like the Graces,
+inarmed.&nbsp; Too much stress must not be laid on the style of
+this correspondence; Clarinda survived, not far away, and may
+have met the ladies on the Calton Hill; and many of the writers
+appear, underneath the conventions of the period, to be genuinely
+moved.&nbsp; But what unpleasantly strikes a reader is, that
+these devout unfortunates found a revenue in their
+devotion.&nbsp; It is everywhere the same tale; on the side of
+the soft-hearted ladies, substantial acts of help; on the side of
+the correspondents, affection, italics, texts, ecstasies, and
+imperfect spelling.&nbsp; When a midwife is recommended, not at
+all for proficiency in her important art, but because she has
+&lsquo;a sister whom I [the correspondent] esteem and respect,
+and [who] is a spiritual daughter of my Hond Father in the
+Gosple,&rsquo; the mask seems to be torn off, and the wages of
+godliness appear too openly.&nbsp; Capacity is a secondary matter
+in a midwife, temper in a servant, affection in a daughter, and
+the repetition of a shibboleth fulfils the law.&nbsp; Common
+decency is at times forgot in the same page with the most
+sanctified advice and aspiration.&nbsp; Thus I am introduced to a
+correspondent who appears to have been at the time the
+housekeeper at Invermay, and who writes to condole with my
+grandmother in a season of distress.&nbsp; For nearly half a
+sheet she keeps to the point with an excellent discretion in
+language then suddenly breaks out:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;It was fully my intention to have left this
+at Martinmass, but the Lord fixes the bounds of our
+habitation.&nbsp; I have had more need of patience in my
+situation here than in any other, partly from the very violent,
+unsteady, deceitful temper of the Mistress of the Family, and
+also from the state of the house.&nbsp; It was in a train of
+repair when I came here two years ago, and is still in
+Confusion.&nbsp; There is above six Thousand Pounds&rsquo; worth
+of Furniture come from London to be put up when the rooms are
+completely finished; and then, woe be to the Person who is
+Housekeeper at Invermay!&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>And by the tail of the document, which is torn, I see she goes
+on to ask the bereaved family to seek her a new place.&nbsp; It
+is extraordinary that people should have been so deceived in so
+careless an impostor; that a few sprinkled &lsquo;God
+willings&rsquo; should have blinded them to the essence of this
+venomous letter; and that they should have been at the pains to
+bind it in with others (many of them highly touching) in their
+memorial of harrowing days.&nbsp; But the good ladies were
+without guile and without suspicion; they were victims marked for
+the axe, and the religious impostors snuffed up the wind as they
+drew near.</p>
+<p>I have referred above to my grandmother; it was no slip of the
+pen: for by an extraordinary arrangement, in which it is hard not
+to suspect the managing hand of a mother, Jean Smith became the
+wife of Robert Stevenson.&nbsp; Mrs. Smith had failed in her
+design to make her son a minister, and she saw him daily more
+immersed in business and worldly ambition.&nbsp; One thing
+remained that she might do: she might secure for him a godly
+wife, that great means of sanctification; and she had two under
+her hand, trained by herself, her dear friends and daughters both
+in law and love&mdash;Jean and Janet.&nbsp; Jean&rsquo;s
+complexion was extremely pale, Janet&rsquo;s was florid; my
+grandmother&rsquo;s nose was straight, my great-aunt&rsquo;s
+aquiline; but by the sound of the voice, not even a son was able
+to distinguish one from other.&nbsp; The marriage of a man of
+twenty-seven and a girl of twenty who have lived for twelve years
+as brother and sister, is difficult to conceive.&nbsp; It took
+place, however, and thus in 1799 the family was still further
+cemented by the union of a representative of the male or worldly
+element with one of the female and devout.</p>
+<p>This essential difference remained unbridged, yet never
+diminished the strength of their relation.&nbsp; My grandfather
+pursued his design of advancing in the world with some measure of
+success; rose to distinction in his calling, grew to be the
+familiar of members of Parliament, judges of the Court of
+Session, and &lsquo;landed gentlemen&rsquo;; learned a ready
+address, had a flow of interesting conversation, and when he was
+referred to as &lsquo;a highly respectable
+<i>bourgeois</i>,&rsquo; resented the description.&nbsp; My
+grandmother remained to the end devout and unambitious, occupied
+with her Bible, her children, and her house; easily shocked, and
+associating largely with a clique of godly parasites.&nbsp; I do
+not know if she called in the midwife already referred to; but
+the principle on which that lady was recommended, she accepted
+fully.&nbsp; The cook was a godly woman, the butcher a Christian
+man, and the table suffered.&nbsp; The scene has been often
+described to me of my grandfather sawing with darkened
+countenance at some indissoluble joint&mdash;&lsquo;Preserve me,
+my dear, what kind of a reedy, stringy beast is
+this?&rsquo;&mdash;of the joint removed, the pudding substituted
+and uncovered; and of my grandmother&rsquo;s anxious glance and
+hasty, deprecatory comment, &lsquo;Just mismanaged!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Yet with the invincible obstinacy of soft natures, she would
+adhere to the godly woman and the Christian man, or find others
+of the same kidney to replace them.&nbsp; One of her confidants
+had once a narrow escape; an unwieldy old woman, she had fallen
+from an outside stair in a close of the Old Town; and my
+grandmother rejoiced to communicate the providential circumstance
+that a baker had been passing underneath with his bread upon his
+head.&nbsp; &lsquo;I would like to know what kind of providence
+the baker thought it!&rsquo; cried my grandfather.</p>
+<p>But the sally must have been unique.&nbsp; In all else that I
+have heard or read of him, so far from criticising, he was doing
+his utmost to honour and even to emulate his wife&rsquo;s
+pronounced opinions.&nbsp; In the only letter which has come to
+my hand of Thomas Smith&rsquo;s, I find him informing his wife
+that he was &lsquo;in time for afternoon church&rsquo;; similar
+assurances or cognate excuses abound in the correspondence of
+Robert Stevenson; and it is comical and pretty to see the two
+generations paying the same court to a female piety more highly
+strung: Thomas Smith to the mother of Robert
+Stevenson&mdash;Robert Stevenson to the daughter of Thomas
+Smith.&nbsp; And if for once my grandfather suffered himself to
+be hurried, by his sense of humour and justice, into that remark
+about the case of Providence and the Baker, I should be sorry for
+any of his children who should have stumbled into the same
+attitude of criticism.&nbsp; In the apocalyptic style of the
+housekeeper of Invermay, woe be to that person!&nbsp; But there
+was no fear; husband and sons all entertained for the pious,
+tender soul the same chivalrous and moved affection.&nbsp; I have
+spoken with one who remembered her, and who had been the intimate
+and equal of her sons, and I found this witness had been struck,
+as I had been, with a sense of disproportion between the warmth
+of the adoration felt and the nature of the woman, whether as
+described or observed.&nbsp; She diligently read and marked her
+Bible; she was a tender nurse; she had a sense of humour under
+strong control; she talked and found some amusement at her (or
+rather at her husband&rsquo;s) dinner-parties.&nbsp; It is
+conceivable that even my grandmother was amenable to the
+seductions of dress; at least, I find her husband inquiring
+anxiously about &lsquo;the gowns from Glasgow,&rsquo; and very
+careful to describe the toilet of the Princess Charlotte, whom he
+had seen in church &lsquo;in a Pelisse and Bonnet of the same
+colour of cloth as the Boys&rsquo; Dress jackets, trimmed with
+blue satin ribbons; the hat or Bonnet, Mr. Spittal said, was a
+Parisian slouch, and had a plume of three white
+feathers.&rsquo;&nbsp; But all this leaves a blank impression,
+and it is rather by reading backward in these old musty letters,
+which have moved me now to laughter and now to impatience, that I
+glean occasional glimpses of how she seemed to her
+contemporaries, and trace (at work in her queer world of godly
+and grateful parasites) a mobile and responsive nature.&nbsp;
+Fashion moulds us, and particularly women, deeper than we
+sometimes think; but a little while ago, and, in some circles,
+women stood or fell by the degree of their appreciation of old
+pictures; in the early years of the century (and surely with more
+reason) a character like that of my grandmother warmed, charmed,
+and subdued, like a strain of music, the hearts of the men of her
+own household.&nbsp; And there is little doubt that Mrs. Smith,
+as she looked on at the domestic life of her son and her
+stepdaughter, and numbered the heads in their increasing nursery,
+must have breathed fervent thanks to her Creator.</p>
+<p>Yet this was to be a family unusually tried; it was not for
+nothing that one of the godly women saluted Miss Janet Smith as
+&lsquo;a veteran in affliction&rsquo;; and they were all before
+middle life experienced in that form of service.&nbsp; By the 1st
+of January 1808, besides a pair of still-born twins, children had
+been born and still survived to the young couple.&nbsp; By the
+11th two were gone; by the 28th a third had followed, and the two
+others were still in danger.&nbsp; In the letters of a former
+nurserymaid&mdash;I give her name, Jean Mitchell, <i>honoris
+causa</i>&mdash;we are enabled to feel, even at this distance of
+time, some of the bitterness of that month of bereavement.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;I have this day received,&rsquo; she writes
+to Miss Janet, &lsquo;the melancholy news of my dear babys&rsquo;
+deaths.&nbsp; My heart is like to break for my dear Mrs.
+Stevenson.&nbsp; O may she be supported on this trying
+occasion!&nbsp; I hope her other three babys will be spared to
+her.&nbsp; O, Miss Smith, did I think when I parted from my sweet
+babys that I never was to see them more?&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;I
+received,&rsquo; she begins her next, &lsquo;the mournful news of
+my dear Jessie&rsquo;s death.&nbsp; I also received the hair of
+my three sweet babys, which I will preserve as dear to their
+memorys and as a token of Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson&rsquo;s
+friendship and esteem.&nbsp; At my leisure hours, when the
+children are in bed, they occupy all my thoughts, I dream of
+them.&nbsp; About two weeks ago I dreamed that my sweet little
+Jessie came running to me in her usual way, and I took her in my
+arms.&nbsp; O my dear babys, were mortal eyes permitted to see
+them in heaven, we would not repine nor grieve for their
+loss.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>By the 29th of February, the Reverend John Campbell, a man of
+obvious sense and human value, but hateful to the present
+biographer, because he wrote so many letters and conveyed so
+little information, summed up this first period of affliction in
+a letter to Miss Smith: &lsquo;Your dear sister but a little
+while ago had a full nursery, and the dear blooming creatures
+sitting around her table filled her breast with hope that one day
+they should fill active stations in society and become an
+ornament in the Church below.&nbsp; But ah!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Near a hundred years ago these little creatures ceased to be,
+and for not much less a period the tears have been dried.&nbsp;
+And to this day, looking in these stitched sheaves of letters, we
+hear the sound of many soft-hearted women sobbing for the
+lost.&nbsp; Never was such a massacre of the innocents; teething
+and chincough and scarlet fever and smallpox ran the round; and
+little Lillies, and Smiths, and Stevensons fell like moths about
+a candle; and nearly all the sympathetic correspondents deplore
+and recall the little losses of their own.&nbsp; &lsquo;It is
+impossible to describe the Heavnly looks of the Dear Babe the
+three last days of his life,&rsquo; writes Mrs. Laurie to Mrs.
+Smith.&nbsp; &lsquo;Never&mdash;never, my dear aunt, could I wish
+to eface the rememberance of this Dear Child.&nbsp; Never, never,
+my dear aunt!&rsquo;&nbsp; And so soon the memory of the dead and
+the dust of the survivors are buried in one grave.</p>
+<p>There was another death in 1812; it passes almost unremarked;
+a single funeral seemed but a small event to these
+&lsquo;veterans in affliction&rsquo;; and by 1816 the nursery was
+full again.&nbsp; Seven little hopefuls enlivened the house; some
+were growing up; to the elder girl my grandfather already wrote
+notes in current hand at the tail of his letters to his wife: and
+to the elder boys he had begun to print, with laborious care,
+sheets of childish gossip and pedantic applications.&nbsp; Here,
+for instance, under date of 26th May 1816, is part of a
+mythological account of London, with a moral for the three
+gentlemen, &lsquo;Messieurs Alan, Robert, and James
+Stevenson,&rsquo; to whom the document is addressed:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;There are many prisons here like Bridewell,
+for, like other large towns, there are many bad men here as well
+as many good men.&nbsp; The natives of London are in general not
+so tall and strong as the people of Edinburgh, because they have
+not so much pure air, and instead of taking porridge they eat
+cakes made with sugar and plums.&nbsp; Here you have thousands of
+carts to draw timber, thousands of coaches to take you to all
+parts of the town, and thousands of boats to sail on the river
+Thames.&nbsp; But you must have money to pay, otherwise you can
+get nothing.&nbsp; Now the way to get money is, become clever men
+and men of education, by being good scholars.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>From the same absence, he writes to his wife on a Sunday:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;It is now about eight o&rsquo;clock with
+me, and I imagine you to be busy with the young folks, hearing
+the questions [<i>Anglic&eacute;</i>, catechism], and indulging
+the boys with a chapter from the large Bible, with their
+interrogations and your answers in the soundest doctrine.&nbsp; I
+hope James is getting his verse as usual, and that Mary is not
+forgetting her little <i>hymn</i>.&nbsp; While Jeannie will be
+reading Wotherspoon, or some other suitable and instructive book,
+I presume our friend, Aunt Mary, will have just arrived with the
+news of <i>a throng kirk</i> [a crowded church] and a great
+sermon.&nbsp; You may mention, with my compliments to my mother,
+that I was at St. Paul&rsquo;s to-day, and attended a very
+excellent service with Mr. James Lawrie.&nbsp; The text was
+&ldquo;Examine and see that ye be in the faith.&rdquo;&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>A twinkle of humour lights up this evocation of the distant
+scene&mdash;the humour of happy men and happy homes.&nbsp; Yet it
+is penned upon the threshold of fresh sorrow.&nbsp; James and
+Mary&mdash;he of the verse and she of the hymn&mdash;did not much
+more than survive to welcome their returning father.&nbsp; On the
+25th, one of the godly women writes to Janet:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;My dearest beloved madam, when I last
+parted from you, you was so affected with your affliction [you?
+or I?] could think of nothing else.&nbsp; But on Saturday, when I
+went to inquire after your health, how was I startled to hear
+that dear James was gone!&nbsp; Ah, what is this?&nbsp; My dear
+benefactors, doing so much good to many, to the Lord, suddenly to
+be deprived of their most valued comforts!&nbsp; I was thrown
+into great perplexity, could do nothing but murmur, why these
+things were done to such a family.&nbsp; I could not rest, but at
+midnight, whether spoken [or not] it was presented to my
+mind&mdash;&ldquo;Those whom ye deplore are walking with me in
+white.&rdquo;&nbsp; I conclude from this the Lord saying to sweet
+Mrs. Stevenson: &ldquo;I gave them to be brought up for me: well
+done, good and faithful! they are fully prepared, and now I must
+present them to my father and your father, to my God and your
+God.&rdquo;&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It would be hard to lay on flattery with a more sure and
+daring hand.&nbsp; I quote it as a model of a letter of
+condolence; be sure it would console.&nbsp; Very different,
+perhaps quite as welcome, is this from a lighthouse inspector to
+my grandfather:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;In reading your letter the trickling tear
+ran down ray cheeks in silent sorrow for your departed dear ones,
+my sweet little friends.&nbsp; Well do I remember, and you will
+call to mind, their little innocent and interesting
+stories.&nbsp; Often have they come round me and taken me by the
+hand, but alas!&nbsp; I am no more destined to behold
+them.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The child who is taken becomes canonised, and the looks of the
+homeliest babe seem in the retrospect &lsquo;heavenly the three
+last days of his life.&rsquo;&nbsp; But it appears that James and
+Mary had indeed been children more than usually engaging; a
+record was preserved a long while in the family of their remarks
+and &lsquo;little innocent and interesting stories,&rsquo; and
+the blow and the blank were the more sensible.</p>
+<p>Early the next month Robert Stevenson must proceed upon his
+voyage of inspection, part by land, part by sea.&nbsp; He left
+his wife plunged in low spirits; the thought of his loss, and
+still more of her concern, was continually present in his mind,
+and he draws in his letters home an interesting picture of his
+family relations:</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: right">&lsquo;<i>Windygates
+Inn</i>, <i>Monday</i> (<i>Postmark July</i> 16<i>th</i>)</p>
+<p>&lsquo;<span class="smcap">My dearest
+Jeannie</span>,&mdash;While the people of the inn are getting me
+a little bit of something to eat, I sit down to tell you that I
+had a most excellent passage across the water, and got to Wemyss
+at mid-day.&nbsp; I hope the children will be very good, and that
+Robert will take a course with you to learn his Latin lessons
+daily; he may, however, read English in company.&nbsp; Let them
+have strawberries on Saturdays.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">&lsquo;<i>Westhaven</i>, 17<i>th</i>
+<i>July</i>.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I have been occupied to-day at the harbour of Newport,
+opposite Dundee, and am this far on my way to Arbroath.&nbsp; You
+may tell the boys that I slept last night in Mr. Steadman&rsquo;s
+tent.&nbsp; I found my bed rather hard, but the lodgings were
+otherwise extremely comfortable.&nbsp; The encampment is on the
+Fife side of the Tay, immediately opposite to Dundee.&nbsp; From
+the door of the tent you command the most beautiful view of the
+Firth, both up and down, to a great extent.&nbsp; At night all
+was serene and still, the sky presented the most beautiful
+appearance of bright stars, and the morning was ushered in with
+the song of many little birds.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">&lsquo;<i>Aberdeen</i>, <i>July</i>
+19<i>th</i>.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I hope, my dear, that you are going out of doors
+regularly and taking much exercise.&nbsp; I would have you to
+<i>make the markets daily</i>&mdash;and by all means to take a
+seat in the coach once or twice in the week and see what is going
+on in town.&nbsp; [The family were at the sea-side.]&nbsp; It
+will be good not to be too great a stranger to the house.&nbsp;
+It will be rather painful at first, but as it is to be done, I
+would have you not to be too strange to the house in town.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Tell the boys that I fell in with a soldier&mdash;his
+name is Henderson&mdash;who was twelve years with Lord Wellington
+and other commanders.&nbsp; He returned very lately with only
+eightpence-halfpenny in his pocket, and found his father and
+mother both in life, though they had never heard from him, nor he
+from them.&nbsp; He carried my great-coat and umbrella a few
+miles.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">&lsquo;<i>Fraserburgh</i>,
+<i>July</i> 20<i>th</i>.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Fraserburgh is the same dull place which [Auntie] Mary
+and Jeannie found it.&nbsp; As I am travelling along the coast
+which they are acquainted with, you had better cause Robert bring
+down the map from Edinburgh; and it will be a good exercise in
+geography for the young folks to trace my course.&nbsp; I hope
+they have entered upon the writing.&nbsp; The library will afford
+abundance of excellent books, which I wish you would employ a
+little.&nbsp; I hope you are doing me the favour to go much out
+with the boys, which will do you much good and prevent them from
+getting so very much overheated.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p style="text-align: center">[<i>To the
+Boys&mdash;Printed</i>.]</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;When I had last the pleasure of writing to
+you, your dear little brother James and your sweet little sister
+Mary were still with us.&nbsp; But it has pleased God to remove
+them to another and a better world, and we must submit to the
+will of Providence.&nbsp; I must, however, request of you to
+think sometimes upon them, and to be very careful not to do
+anything that will displease or vex your mother.&nbsp; It is
+therefore proper that you do not roamp [Scottish indeed] too much
+about, and that you learn your lessons.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I went to Fraserburgh and visited Kinnaird Head
+Lighthouse, which I found in good order.&nbsp; All this time I
+travelled upon good roads, and paid many a toll-man by the way;
+but from Fraserburgh to Banff there is no toll-bars, and the road
+is so bad that I had to walk up and down many a hill, and for
+want of bridges the horses had to drag the chaise up to the
+middle of the wheels in water.&nbsp; At Banff I saw a large ship
+of 300 tons lying on the sands upon her beam-ends, and a wreck
+for want of a good harbour.&nbsp; Captain Wilson&mdash;to whom I
+beg my compliments&mdash;will show you a ship of 300 tons.&nbsp;
+At the towns of Macduff, Banff, and Portsoy, many of the houses
+are built of marble, and the rocks on this part of the coast or
+sea-side are marble.&nbsp; But, my dear Boys, unless marble be
+polished and dressed, it is a very coarse-looking stone, and has
+no more beauty than common rock.&nbsp; As a proof of this, ask
+the favour of your mother to take you to Thomson&rsquo;s Marble
+Works in South Leith, and you will see marble in all its stages,
+and perhaps you may there find Portsoy marble!&nbsp; The use I
+wish to make of this is to tell you that, without education, a
+man is just like a block of rough, unpolished marble.&nbsp;
+Notice, in proof of this, how much Mr. Neill and Mr.
+M&rsquo;Gregor [the tutor] know, and observe how little a man
+knows who is not a good scholar.&nbsp; On my way to Fochabers I
+passed through many thousand acres of Fir timber, and saw many
+deer running in these woods.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">[<i>To Mrs. Stevenson</i>.]</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">&lsquo;<i>Inverness</i>, <i>July</i>
+21<i>st</i>.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I propose going to church in the afternoon, and as I
+have breakfasted late, I shall afterwards take a walk, and dine
+about six o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp; I do not know who is the clergyman
+here, but I shall think of you all.&nbsp; I travelled in the
+mail-coach [from Banff] almost alone.&nbsp; While it was daylight
+I kept the top, and the passing along a country I had never
+before seen was a considerable amusement.&nbsp; But, my dear, you
+are all much in my thoughts, and many are the objects which
+recall the recollection of our tender and engaging children we
+have so recently lost.&nbsp; We must not, however, repine.&nbsp;
+I could not for a moment wish any change of circumstances in
+their case; and in every comparative view of their state, I see
+the Lord&rsquo;s goodness in removing them from an evil world to
+an abode of bliss; and I must earnestly hope that you may be
+enabled to take such a view of this affliction as to live in the
+happy prospect of our all meeting again to part no more&mdash;and
+that under such considerations you are getting up your
+spirits.&nbsp; I wish you would walk about, and by all means go
+to town, and do not sit much at home.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">&lsquo;<i>Inverness</i>, <i>July</i>
+23<i>rd</i>.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I am duly favoured with your much-valued letter, and I
+am happy to find that you are so much with my mother, because
+that sort of variety has a tendency to occupy the mind, and to
+keep it from brooding too much upon one subject.&nbsp;
+Sensibility and tenderness are certainly two of the most
+interesting and pleasing qualities of the mind.&nbsp; These
+qualities are also none of the least of the many endearingments
+of the female character.&nbsp; But if that kind of sympathy and
+pleasing melancholy, which is familiar to us under distress, be
+much indulged, it becomes habitual, and takes such a hold of the
+mind as to absorb all the other affections, and unfit us for the
+duties and proper enjoyments of life.&nbsp; Resignation sinks
+into a kind of peevish discontent.&nbsp; I am far, however, from
+thinking there is the least danger of this in your case, my dear;
+for you have been on all occasions enabled to look upon the
+fortunes of this life as under the direction of a higher power,
+and have always preserved that propriety and consistency of
+conduct in all circumstances which endears your example to your
+family in particular, and to your friends.&nbsp; I am therefore,
+my dear, for you to go out much, and to go to the house up-stairs
+[he means to go up-stairs in the house, to visit the place of the
+dead children], and to put yourself in the way of the visits of
+your friends.&nbsp; I wish you would call on the Miss Grays, and
+it would be a good thing upon a Saturday to dine with my mother,
+and take Meggy and all the family with you, and let them have
+their strawberries in town.&nbsp; The tickets of one of the
+<i>old-fashioned coaches</i> would take you all up, and if the
+evening were good, they could all walk down, excepting Meggy and
+little David.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">&lsquo;<i>Inverness</i>, <i>July</i>
+25<i>th</i>, 11 <i>p.m.</i></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Captain Wemyss, of Wemyss, has come to Inverness to go
+the voyage with me, and as we are sleeping in a double-bedded
+room, I must no longer transgress.&nbsp; You must remember me the
+best way you can to the children.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">&lsquo;<i>On board of the Lighthouse
+Yacht</i>, <i>July</i> 29<i>th</i>.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I got to Cromarty yesterday about mid-day, and went to
+church.&nbsp; It happened to be the sacrament there, and I heard
+a Mr. Smith at that place conclude the service with a very
+suitable exhortation.&nbsp; There seemed a great concourse of
+people, but they had rather an unfortunate day for them at the
+tent, as it rained a good deal.&nbsp; After drinking tea at the
+inn, Captain Wemyss accompanied me on board, and we sailed about
+eight last night.&nbsp; The wind at present being rather a
+beating one, I think I shall have an opportunity of standing into
+the bay of Wick, and leaving this letter to let you know my
+progress and that I am well.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">&lsquo;<i>Lighthouse Yacht</i>,
+<i>Stornoway</i>, <i>August</i> 4<i>th</i>.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;To-day we had prayers on deck as usual when at
+sea.&nbsp; I read the 14th chapter, I think, of Job.&nbsp;
+Captain Wemyss has been in the habit of doing this on board his
+own ship, agreeably to the Articles of War.&nbsp; Our passage
+round the Cape [Cape Wrath] was rather a cross one, and as the
+wind was northerly, we had a pretty heavy sea, but upon the whole
+have made a good passage, leaving many vessels behind us in
+Orkney.&nbsp; I am quite well, my dear; and Captain Wemyss, who
+has much spirit, and who is much given to observation, and a
+perfect enthusiast in his profession, enlivens the voyage
+greatly.&nbsp; Let me entreat you to move about much, and take a
+walk with the boys to Leith.&nbsp; I think they have still many
+places to see there, and I wish you would indulge them in this
+respect.&nbsp; Mr. Scales is the best person I know for showing
+them the sailcloth-weaving, etc., and he would have great
+pleasure in undertaking this.&nbsp; My dear, I trust soon to be
+with you, and that through the goodness of God we shall meet all
+well.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;There are two vessels lying here with emigrants for
+America, each with eighty people on board, at all ages, from a
+few days to upwards of sixty!&nbsp; Their prospects must be very
+forlorn to go with a slender purse for distant and unknown
+countries.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">&lsquo;<i>Lighthouse Yacht</i>,
+<i>off Greenock</i>, <i>Aug.</i> 18<i>th</i>.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;It was after <i>church-time</i> before we got here, but
+we had prayers upon deck on the way up the Clyde.&nbsp; This has,
+upon the whole, been a very good voyage, and Captain Wemyss, who
+enjoys it much, has been an excellent companion; we met with
+pleasure, and shall part with regret.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Strange that, after his long experience, my grandfather should
+have learned so little of the attitude and even the dialect of
+the spiritually-minded; that after forty-four years in a most
+religious circle, he could drop without sense of incongruity from
+a period of accepted phrases to &lsquo;trust his wife was
+<i>getting up her spirits</i>,&rsquo; or think to reassure her as
+to the character of Captain Wemyss by mentioning that he had read
+prayers on the deck of his frigate &lsquo;<i>agreeably to the
+Articles of War</i>&rsquo;!&nbsp; Yet there is no doubt&mdash;and
+it is one of the most agreeable features of the kindly
+series&mdash;that he was doing his best to please, and there is
+little doubt that he succeeded.&nbsp; Almost all my
+grandfather&rsquo;s private letters have been destroyed.&nbsp;
+This correspondence has not only been preserved entire, but
+stitched up in the same covers with the works of the godly women,
+the Reverend John Campbell, and the painful Mrs. Ogle.&nbsp; I
+did not think to mention the good dame, but she comes in usefully
+as an example.&nbsp; Amongst the treasures of the ladies of my
+family, her letters have been honoured with a volume to
+themselves.&nbsp; I read about a half of them myself; then handed
+over the task to one of stauncher resolution, with orders to
+communicate any fact that should be found to illuminate these
+pages.&nbsp; Not one was found; it was her only art to
+communicate by post second-rate sermons at second-hand; and such,
+I take it, was the correspondence in which my grandmother
+delighted.&nbsp; If I am right, that of Robert Stevenson, with
+his quaint smack of the contemporary &lsquo;Sandford and
+Merton,&rsquo; his interest in the whole page of experience, his
+perpetual quest, and fine scent of all that seems romantic to a
+boy, his needless pomp of language, his excellent good sense, his
+unfeigned, unstained, unwearied human kindliness, would seem to
+her, in a comparison, dry and trivial and worldly.&nbsp; And if
+these letters were by an exception cherished and preserved, it
+would be for one or both of two reasons&mdash;because they dealt
+with and were bitter-sweet reminders of a time of sorrow; or
+because she was pleased, perhaps touched, by the writer&rsquo;s
+guileless efforts to seem spiritually-minded.</p>
+<p>After this date there were two more births and two more
+deaths, so that the number of the family remained unchanged; in
+all five children survived to reach maturity and to outlive their
+parents.</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER II: THE SERVICE OF THE NORTHERN LIGHTS</h2>
+<h3>I</h3>
+<p>It were hard to imagine a contrast more sharply defined than
+that between the lives of the men and women of this family: the
+one so chambered, so centred in the affections and the
+sensibilities; the other so active, healthy, and
+expeditious.&nbsp; From May to November, Thomas Smith and Robert
+Stevenson were on the mail, in the saddle, or at sea; and my
+grandfather, in particular, seems to have been possessed with a
+demon of activity in travel.&nbsp; In 1802, by direction of the
+Northern Lighthouse Board, he had visited the coast of England
+from St. Bees, in Cumberland, and round by the Scilly Islands to
+some place undecipherable by me; in all a distance of 2500
+miles.&nbsp; In 1806 I find him starting &lsquo;on a tour round
+the south coast of England, from the Humber to the
+Severn.&rsquo;&nbsp; Peace was not long declared ere he found
+means to visit Holland, where he was in time to see, in the
+navy-yard at Helvoetsluys, &lsquo;about twenty of
+Bonaparte&rsquo;s <i>English flotilla</i> lying in a state of
+decay, the object of curiosity to Englishmen.&rsquo;&nbsp; By
+1834 he seems to have been acquainted with the coast of France
+from Dieppe to Bordeaux; and a main part of his duty as Engineer
+to the Board of Northern Lights was one round of dangerous and
+laborious travel.</p>
+<p>In 1786, when Thomas Smith first received the appointment, the
+extended and formidable coast of Scotland was lighted at a single
+point&mdash;the Isle of May, in the jaws of the Firth of Forth,
+where, on a tower already a hundred and fifty years old, an open
+coal-fire blazed in an iron chauffer.&nbsp; The whole
+archipelago, thus nightly plunged in darkness, was shunned by
+sea-going vessels, and the favourite courses were north about
+Shetland and west about St. Kilda.&nbsp; When the Board met, four
+new lights formed the extent of their intentions&mdash;Kinnaird
+Head, in Aberdeenshire, at the eastern elbow of the coast; North
+Ronaldsay, in Orkney, to keep the north and guide ships passing
+to the south&rsquo;ard of Shetland; Island Glass, on Harris, to
+mark the inner shore of the Hebrides and illuminate the
+navigation of the Minch; and the Mull of Kintyre.&nbsp; These
+works were to be attempted against obstacles, material and
+financial, that might have staggered the most bold.&nbsp; Smith
+had no ship at his command till 1791; the roads in those
+outlandish quarters where his business lay were scarce passable
+when they existed, and the tower on the Mull of Kintyre stood
+eleven months unlighted while the apparatus toiled and foundered
+by the way among rocks and mosses.&nbsp; Not only had towers to
+be built and apparatus transplanted; the supply of oil must be
+maintained, and the men fed, in the same inaccessible and distant
+scenes; a whole service, with its routine and hierarchy, had to
+be called out of nothing; and a new trade (that of lightkeeper)
+to be taught, recruited, and organised.&nbsp; The funds of the
+Board were at the first laughably inadequate.&nbsp; They embarked
+on their career on a loan of twelve hundred pounds, and their
+income in 1789, after relief by a fresh Act of Parliament,
+amounted to less than three hundred.&nbsp; It must be supposed
+that the thoughts of Thomas Smith, in these early years, were
+sometimes coloured with despair; and since he built and lighted
+one tower after another, and created and bequeathed to his
+successors the elements of an excellent administration, it may be
+conceded that he was not after all an unfortunate choice for a
+first engineer.</p>
+<p>War added fresh complications.&nbsp; In 1794 Smith came
+&lsquo;very near to be taken&rsquo; by a French squadron.&nbsp;
+In 1813 Robert Stevenson was cruising about the neighbourhood of
+Cape Wrath in the immediate fear of Commodore Rogers.&nbsp; The
+men, and especially the sailors, of the lighthouse service must
+be protected by a medal and ticket from the brutal activity of
+the press-gang.&nbsp; And the zeal of volunteer patriots was at
+times embarrassing.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;I set off on foot,&rsquo; writes my
+grandfather, &lsquo;for Marazion, a town at the head of
+Mount&rsquo;s Bay, where I was in hopes of getting a boat to
+freight.&nbsp; I had just got that length, and was making the
+necessary inquiry, when a young man, accompanied by several
+idle-looking fellows, came up to me, and in a hasty tone said,
+&ldquo;Sir, in the king&rsquo;s name I seize your person and
+papers.&rdquo;&nbsp; To which I replied that I should be glad to
+see his authority, and know the reason of an address so
+abrupt.&nbsp; He told me the want of time prevented his taking
+regular steps, but that it would be necessary for me to return to
+Penzance, as I was suspected of being a French spy.&nbsp; I
+proposed to submit my papers to the nearest Justice of Peace, who
+was immediately applied to, and came to the inn where I
+was.&nbsp; He seemed to be greatly agitated, and quite at a loss
+how to proceed.&nbsp; The complaint preferred against me was
+&ldquo;that I had examined the Longships Lighthouse with the most
+minute attention, and was no less particular in my inquiries at
+the keepers of the lighthouse regarding the sunk rocks lying off
+the Land&rsquo;s End, with the sets of the currents and tides
+along the coast: that I seemed particularly to regret the
+situation of the rocks called the Seven Stones, and the loss of a
+beacon which the Trinity Board had caused to be fixed on the Wolf
+Rock; that I had taken notes of the bearings of several sunk
+rocks, and a drawing of the lighthouse, and of Cape
+Cornwall.&nbsp; Further, that I had refused the honour of Lord
+Edgecombe&rsquo;s invitation to dinner, offering as an apology
+that I had some particular business on hand.&rdquo;&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>My grandfather produced in answer his credentials and letter
+of credit; but the justice, after perusing them, &lsquo;very
+gravely observed that they were &ldquo;musty bits of
+paper,&rdquo;&rsquo; and proposed to maintain the arrest.&nbsp;
+Some more enlightened magistrates at Penzance relieved him of
+suspicion and left him at liberty to pursue his
+journey,&mdash;&lsquo;which I did with so much eagerness,&rsquo;
+he adds, &lsquo;that I gave the two coal lights on the Lizard
+only a very transient look.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Lighthouse operations in Scotland differed essentially in
+character from those in England.&nbsp; The English coast is in
+comparison a habitable, homely place, well supplied with towns;
+the Scottish presents hundreds of miles of savage islands and
+desolate moors.&nbsp; The Parliamentary committee of 1834,
+profoundly ignorant of this distinction, insisted with my
+grandfather that the work at the various stations should be let
+out on contract &lsquo;in the neighbourhood,&rsquo; where sheep
+and deer, and gulls and cormorants, and a few ragged gillies,
+perhaps crouching in a bee-hive house, made up the only
+neighbours.&nbsp; In such situations repairs and improvements
+could only be overtaken by collecting (as my grandfather
+expressed it) a few &lsquo;lads,&rsquo; placing them under charge
+of a foreman, and despatching them about the coast as occasion
+served.&nbsp; The particular danger of these seas increased the
+difficulty.&nbsp; The course of the lighthouse tender lies amid
+iron-bound coasts, among tide-races, the whirlpools of the
+Pentland Firth, flocks of islands, flocks of reefs, many of them
+uncharted.&nbsp; The aid of steam was not yet.&nbsp; At first in
+random coasting sloop, and afterwards in the cutter belonging to
+the service, the engineer must ply and run amongst these
+multiplied dangers, and sometimes late into the stormy
+autumn.&nbsp; For pages together my grandfather&rsquo;s diary
+preserves a record of these rude experiences; of hard winds and
+rough seas; and of &lsquo;the try-sail and storm-jib, those old
+friends which I never like to see.&rsquo;&nbsp; They do not tempt
+to quotation, but it was the man&rsquo;s element, in which he
+lived, and delighted to live, and some specimen must be
+presented.&nbsp; On Friday, September 10th, 1830, the
+<i>Regent</i> lying in Lerwick Bay, we have this entry:
+&lsquo;The gale increases, with continued rain.&rsquo;&nbsp; On
+the morrow, Saturday, 11th, the weather appeared to moderate, and
+they put to sea, only to be driven by evening into
+Levenswick.&nbsp; There they lay, &lsquo;rolling much,&rsquo;
+with both anchors ahead and the square yard on deck, till the
+morning of Saturday, 18th.&nbsp; Saturday and Sunday they were
+plying to the southward with a &lsquo;strong breeze and a heavy
+sea,&rsquo; and on Sunday evening anchored in Otterswick.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Monday, 20th, it blows so fresh that we have no
+communication with the shore.&nbsp; We see Mr. Rome on the beach,
+but we cannot communicate with him.&nbsp; It blows &ldquo;mere
+fire,&rdquo; as the sailors express it.&rsquo;&nbsp; And for
+three days more the diary goes on with tales of davits unshipped,
+high seas, strong gales from the southward, and the ship driven
+to refuge in Kirkwall or Deer Sound.&nbsp; I have many a passage
+before me to transcribe, in which my grandfather draws himself as
+a man of minute and anxious exactitude about details.&nbsp; It
+must not be forgotten that these voyages in the tender were the
+particular pleasure and reward of his existence; that he had in
+him a reserve of romance which carried him delightedly over these
+hardships and perils; that to him it was &lsquo;great gain&rsquo;
+to be eight nights and seven days in the savage bay of
+Levenswick&mdash;to read a book in the much agitated
+cabin&mdash;to go on deck and hear the gale scream in his ears,
+and see the landscape dark with rain and the ship plunge at her
+two anchors&mdash;and to turn in at night and wake again at
+morning, in his narrow berth, to the glamorous and continued
+voices of the gale.</p>
+<p>His perils and escapes were beyond counting.&nbsp; I shall
+only refer to two: the first, because of the impression made upon
+himself; the second, from the incidental picture it presents of
+the north islanders.&nbsp; On the 9th October 1794 he took
+passage from Orkney in the sloop <i>Elizabeth</i> of
+Stromness.&nbsp; She made a fair passage till within view of
+Kinnaird Head, where, as she was becalmed some three miles in the
+offing, and wind seemed to threaten from the south-east, the
+captain landed him, to continue his journey more expeditiously
+ashore.&nbsp; A gale immediately followed, and the
+<i>Elizabeth</i> was driven back to Orkney and lost with all
+hands.&nbsp; The second escape I have been in the habit of
+hearing related by an eye-witness, my own father, from the
+earliest days of childhood.&nbsp; On a September night, the
+<i>Regent</i> lay in the Pentland Firth in a fog and a violent
+and windless swell.&nbsp; It was still dark, when they were
+alarmed by the sound of breakers, and an anchor was immediately
+let go.&nbsp; The peep of dawn discovered them swinging in
+desperate proximity to the Isle of Swona <a
+name="citation54a"></a><a href="#footnote54a"
+class="citation">[54a]</a> and the surf bursting close under
+their stern.&nbsp; There was in this place a hamlet of the
+inhabitants, fisher-folk and wreckers; their huts stood close
+about the head of the beach.&nbsp; All slept; the doors were
+closed, and there was no smoke, and the anxious watchers on board
+ship seemed to contemplate a village of the dead.&nbsp; It was
+thought possible to launch a boat and tow the <i>Regent</i> from
+her place of danger; and with this view a signal of distress was
+made and a gun fired with a red-hot poker from the galley.&nbsp;
+Its detonation awoke the sleepers.&nbsp; Door after door was
+opened, and in the grey light of the morning fisher after fisher
+was seen to come forth, yawning and stretching himself, nightcap
+on head.&nbsp; Fisher after fisher, I wrote, and my pen tripped;
+for it should rather stand wrecker after wrecker.&nbsp; There was
+no emotion, no animation, it scarce seemed any interest; not a
+hand was raised; but all callously awaited the harvest of the
+sea, and their children stood by their side and waited
+also.&nbsp; To the end of his life, my father remembered that
+amphitheatre of placid spectators on the beach; and with a
+special and natural animosity, the boys of his own age.&nbsp; But
+presently a light air sprang up, and filled the sails, and
+fainted, and filled them again; and little by little the
+<i>Regent</i> fetched way against the swell, and clawed off shore
+into the turbulent firth.</p>
+<p>The purpose of these voyages was to effect a landing on open
+beaches or among shelving rocks, not for persons only, but for
+coals and food, and the fragile furniture of light-rooms.&nbsp;
+It was often impossible.&nbsp; In 1831 I find my grandfather
+&lsquo;hovering for a week&rsquo; about the Pentland Skerries for
+a chance to land; and it was almost always difficult.&nbsp; Much
+knack and enterprise were early developed among the seamen of the
+service; their management of boats is to this day a matter of
+admiration; and I find my grandfather in his diary depicting the
+nature of their excellence in one happily descriptive phrase,
+when he remarks that Captain Soutar had landed &lsquo;the small
+stores and nine casks of oil <i>with all the activity of a
+smuggler</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp; And it was one thing to land, another
+to get on board again.&nbsp; I have here a passage from the
+diary, where it seems to have been touch-and-go.&nbsp; &lsquo;I
+landed at Tarbetness, on the eastern side of the point, in a
+<i>mere gale or blast of wind</i> from west-south-west, at 2
+p.m.&nbsp; It blew so fresh that the captain, in a kind of
+despair, went off to the ship, leaving myself and the steward
+ashore.&nbsp; While I was in the light-room, I felt it shaking
+and waving, not with the tremor of the Bell Rock, but with the
+<i>waving of a tree</i>!&nbsp; This the light-keepers seemed to
+be quite familiar to, the principal keeper remarking that
+&ldquo;it was very pleasant,&rdquo; perhaps meaning interesting
+or curious.&nbsp; The captain worked the vessel into smooth water
+with admirable dexterity, and I got on board again about 6 p.m.
+from the other side of the point.&rsquo;&nbsp; But not even the
+dexterity of Soutar could prevail always; and my grandfather must
+at times have been left in strange berths and with but rude
+provision.&nbsp; I may instance the case of my father, who was
+storm-bound three days upon an islet, sleeping in the uncemented
+and unchimneyed houses of the islanders, and subsisting on a diet
+of nettle-soup and lobsters.</p>
+<p>The name of Soutar has twice escaped my pen, and I feel I owe
+him a vignette.&nbsp; Soutar first attracted notice as mate of a
+praam at the Bell Rock, and rose gradually to be captain of the
+<i>Regent</i>.&nbsp; He was active, admirably skilled in his
+trade, and a man incapable of fear.&nbsp; Once, in London, he
+fell among a gang of confidence-men, naturally deceived by his
+rusticity and his prodigious accent.&nbsp; They plied him with
+drink&mdash;a hopeless enterprise, for Soutar could not be made
+drunk; they proposed cards, and Soutar would not play.&nbsp; At
+last, one of them, regarding him with a formidable countenance,
+inquired if he were not frightened?&nbsp; &lsquo;I&rsquo;m
+no&rsquo; very easy fleyed,&rsquo; replied the captain.&nbsp; And
+the rooks withdrew after some easier pigeon.&nbsp; So many perils
+shared, and the partial familiarity of so many voyages, had given
+this man a stronghold in my grandfather&rsquo;s estimation; and
+there is no doubt but he had the art to court and please him with
+much hypocritical skill.&nbsp; He usually dined on Sundays in the
+cabin.&nbsp; He used to come down daily after dinner for a glass
+of port or whisky, often in his full rig of sou&rsquo;-wester,
+oilskins, and long boots; and I have often heard it described how
+insinuatingly he carried himself on these appearances, artfully
+combining the extreme of deference with a blunt and seamanlike
+demeanour.&nbsp; My father and uncles, with the devilish
+penetration of the boy, were far from being deceived; and my
+father, indeed, was favoured with an object-lesson not to be
+mistaken.&nbsp; He had crept one rainy night into an apple-barrel
+on deck, and from this place of ambush overheard Soutar and a
+comrade conversing in their oilskins.&nbsp; The smooth sycophant
+of the cabin had wholly disappeared, and the boy listened with
+wonder to a vulgar and truculent ruffian.&nbsp; Of Soutar, I may
+say <i>tantum vidi</i>, having met him in the Leith docks now
+more than thirty years ago, when he abounded in the praises of my
+grandfather, encouraged me (in the most admirable manner) to
+pursue his footprints, and left impressed for ever on my memory
+the image of his own Bardolphian nose.&nbsp; He died not long
+after.</p>
+<p>The engineer was not only exposed to the hazards of the sea;
+he must often ford his way by land to remote and scarce
+accessible places, beyond reach of the mail or the post-chaise,
+beyond even the tracery of the bridle-path, and guided by natives
+across bog and heather.&nbsp; Up to 1807 my grand-father seems to
+have travelled much on horseback; but he then gave up the
+idea&mdash;&lsquo;such,&rsquo; he writes with characteristic
+emphasis and capital letters, &lsquo;is the Plague of
+Baiting.&rsquo;&nbsp; He was a good pedestrian; at the age of
+fifty-eight I find him covering seventeen miles over the moors of
+the Mackay country in less than seven hours, and that is not bad
+travelling for a scramble.&nbsp; The piece of country traversed
+was already a familiar track, being that between Loch Eriboll and
+Cape Wrath; and I think I can scarce do better than reproduce
+from the diary some traits of his first visit.&nbsp; The tender
+lay in Loch Eriboll; by five in the morning they sat down to
+breakfast on board; by six they were ashore&mdash;my grandfather,
+Mr. Slight an assistant, and Soutar of the jolly nose, and had
+been taken in charge by two young gentlemen of the neighbourhood
+and a pair of gillies.&nbsp; About noon they reached the Kyle of
+Durness and passed the ferry.&nbsp; By half-past three they were
+at Cape Wrath&mdash;not yet known by the emphatic abbreviation of
+&lsquo;The Cape&rsquo;&mdash;and beheld upon all sides of them
+unfrequented shores, an expanse of desert moor, and the
+high-piled Western Ocean.&nbsp; The site of the tower was
+chosen.&nbsp; Perhaps it is by inheritance of blood, but I know
+few things more inspiriting than this location of a lighthouse in
+a designated space of heather and air, through which the
+sea-birds are still flying.&nbsp; By 9 p.m. the return journey
+had brought them again to the shores of the Kyle.&nbsp; The night
+was dirty, and as the sea was high and the ferry-boat small,
+Soutar and Mr. Stevenson were left on the far side, while the
+rest of the party embarked and were received into the
+darkness.&nbsp; They made, in fact, a safe though an alarming
+passage; but the ferryman refused to repeat the adventure; and my
+grand-father and the captain long paced the beach, impatient for
+their turn to pass, and tormented with rising anxiety as to the
+fate of their companions.&nbsp; At length they sought the shelter
+of a shepherd&rsquo;s house.&nbsp; &lsquo;We had miserable
+up-putting,&rsquo; the diary continues, &lsquo;and on both sides
+of the ferry much anxiety of mind.&nbsp; Our beds were clean
+straw, and but for the circumstance of the boat, I should have
+slept as soundly as ever I did after a walk through moss and mire
+of sixteen hours.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>To go round the lights, even to-day, is to visit past
+centuries.&nbsp; The tide of tourists that flows yearly in
+Scotland, vulgarising all where it approaches, is still defined
+by certain barriers.&nbsp; It will be long ere there is a hotel
+at Sumburgh or a hydropathic at Cape Wrath; it will be long ere
+any <i>char-&agrave;-banc</i>, laden with tourists, shall drive
+up to Barra Head or Monach, the Island of the Monks.&nbsp; They
+are farther from London than St. Petersburg, and except for the
+towers, sounding and shining all night with fog-bells and the
+radiance of the light-room, glittering by day with the trivial
+brightness of white paint, these island and moorland stations
+seem inaccessible to the civilisation of to-day, and even to the
+end of my grandfather&rsquo;s career the isolation was far
+greater.&nbsp; There ran no post at all in the Long Island; from
+the light-house on Barra Head a boat must be sent for letters as
+far as Tobermory, between sixty and seventy miles of open sea;
+and the posts of Shetland, which had surprised Sir Walter Scott
+in 1814, were still unimproved in 1833, when my grandfather
+reported on the subject.&nbsp; The group contained at the time a
+population of 30,000 souls, and enjoyed a trade which had
+increased in twenty years seven-fold, to between three and four
+thousand tons.&nbsp; Yet the mails were despatched and received
+by chance coasting vessels at the rate of a penny a letter; six
+and eight weeks often elapsed between opportunities, and when a
+mail was to be made up, sometimes at a moment&rsquo;s notice, the
+bellman was sent hastily through the streets of Lerwick.&nbsp;
+Between Shetland and Orkney, only seventy miles apart, there was
+&lsquo;no trade communication whatever.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Such was the state of affairs, only sixty years ago, with the
+three largest clusters of the Scottish Archipelago; and
+forty-seven years earlier, when Thomas Smith began his rounds, or
+forty-two, when Robert Stevenson became conjoined with him in
+these excursions, the barbarism was deep, the people sunk in
+superstition, the circumstances of their life perhaps unique in
+history.&nbsp; Lerwick and Kirkwall, like Guam or the Bay of
+Islands, were but barbarous ports where whalers called to take up
+and to return experienced seamen.&nbsp; On the outlying islands
+the clergy lived isolated, thinking other thoughts, dwelling in a
+different country from their parishioners, like missionaries in
+the South Seas.&nbsp; My grandfather&rsquo;s unrivalled treasury
+of anecdote was never written down; it embellished his talk while
+he yet was, and died with him when he died; and such as have been
+preserved relate principally to the islands of Ronaldsay and
+Sanday, two of the Orkney group.&nbsp; These bordered on one of
+the water-highways of civilisation; a great fleet passed annually
+in their view, and of the shipwrecks of the world they were the
+scene and cause of a proportion wholly incommensurable to their
+size.&nbsp; In one year, 1798, my grandfather found the remains
+of no fewer than five vessels on the isle of Sanday, which is
+scarcely twelve miles long.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Hardly a year passed,&rsquo; he writes,
+&lsquo;without instances of this kind; for, owing to the
+projecting points of this strangely formed island, the lowness
+and whiteness of its eastern shores, and the wonderful manner in
+which the scanty patches of land are intersected with lakes and
+pools of water, it becomes, even in daylight, a deception, and
+has often been fatally mistaken for an open sea.&nbsp; It had
+even become proverbial with some of the inhabitants to observe
+that &ldquo;if wrecks were to happen, they might as well be sent
+to the poor isle of Sanday as anywhere else.&rdquo;&nbsp; On this
+and the neighbouring islands the inhabitants had certainly had
+their share of wrecked goods, for the eye is presented with these
+melancholy remains in almost every form.&nbsp; For example,
+although quarries are to be met with generally in these islands,
+and the stones are very suitable for building dykes
+(<i>Anglic&eacute;</i>, walls), yet instances occur of the land
+being enclosed, even to a considerable extent, with
+ship-timbers.&nbsp; The author has actually seen a park
+(<i>Anglic&eacute;</i>, meadow) paled round chiefly with
+cedar-wood and mahogany from the wreck of a Honduras-built ship;
+and in one island, after the wreck of a ship laden with wine, the
+inhabitants have been known to take claret to their barley-meal
+porridge.&nbsp; On complaining to one of the pilots of the
+badness of his boat&rsquo;s sails, he replied to the author with
+some degree of pleasantry, &ldquo;Had it been His will that you
+came na&rsquo; here wi&rsquo; your lights, we might
+&lsquo;a&rsquo; had better sails to our boats, and more o&rsquo;
+other things.&rdquo;&nbsp; It may further be mentioned that when
+some of Lord Dundas&rsquo;s farms are to be let in these islands
+a competition takes place for the lease, and it is <i>bona
+fide</i> understood that a much higher rent is paid than the
+lands would otherwise give were it not for the chance of making
+considerably by the agency and advantages attending shipwrecks on
+the shores of the respective farms.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The people of North Ronaldsay still spoke Norse, or, rather,
+mixed it with their English.&nbsp; The walls of their huts were
+built to a great thickness of rounded stones from the sea-beach;
+the roof flagged, loaded with earth, and perforated by a single
+hole for the escape of smoke.&nbsp; The grass grew beautifully
+green on the flat house-top, where the family would assemble with
+their dogs and cats, as on a pastoral lawn; there were no
+windows, and in my grandfather&rsquo;s expression, &lsquo;there
+was really no demonstration of a house unless it were the
+diminutive door.&rsquo;&nbsp; He once landed on Ronaldsay with
+two friends.&nbsp; The inhabitants crowded and pressed so much
+upon the strangers that the bailiff, or resident factor of the
+island, blew with his ox-horn, calling out to the natives to
+stand off and let the gentlemen come forward to the laird; upon
+which one of the islanders, as spokesman, called out, &ldquo;God
+ha&rsquo;e us, man! thou needsna mak&rsquo; sic a noise.&nbsp;
+It&rsquo;s no&rsquo; every day we ha&rsquo;e <i>three hatted
+men</i> on our isle.&rdquo;&rsquo;&nbsp; When the Surveyor of
+Taxes came (for the first time, perhaps) to Sanday, and began in
+the King&rsquo;s name to complain of the unconscionable swarms of
+dogs, and to menace the inhabitants with taxation, it chanced
+that my grandfather and his friend, Dr. Patrick Neill, were
+received by an old lady in a Ronaldsay hut.&nbsp; Her hut, which
+was similar to the model described, stood on a Ness, or point of
+land jutting into the sea.&nbsp; They were made welcome in the
+firelit cellar, placed &lsquo;in <i>casey</i> or straw-worked
+chairs, after the Norwegian fashion, with arms, and a canopy
+overhead,&rsquo; and given milk in a wooden dish.&nbsp; These
+hospitalities attended to, the old lady turned at once to Dr.
+Neill, whom she took for the Surveyor of Taxes.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Sir,&rsquo; said she, &lsquo;gin ye&rsquo;ll tell the King
+that I canna keep the Ness free o&rsquo; the Bangers (sheep)
+without twa hun&rsquo;s, and twa guid hun&rsquo;s too,
+he&rsquo;ll pass me threa the tax on dugs.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>This familiar confidence, these traits of engaging simplicity,
+are characters of a secluded people.&nbsp; Mankind&mdash;and,
+above all, islanders&mdash;come very swiftly to a bearing, and
+find very readily, upon one convention or another, a tolerable
+corporate life.&nbsp; The danger is to those from without, who
+have not grown up from childhood in the islands, but appear
+suddenly in that narrow horizon, life-sized apparitions.&nbsp;
+For these no bond of humanity exists, no feeling of kinship is
+awakened by their peril; they will assist at a shipwreck, like
+the fisher-folk of Lunga, as spectators, and when the fatal scene
+is over, and the beach strewn with dead bodies, they will fence
+their fields with mahogany, and, after a decent grace, sup claret
+to their porridge.&nbsp; It is not wickedness: it is scarce evil;
+it is only, in its highest power, the sense of isolation and the
+wise disinterestedness of feeble and poor races.&nbsp; Think how
+many viking ships had sailed by these islands in the past, how
+many vikings had landed, and raised turmoil, and broken up the
+barrows of the dead, and carried off the wines of the living; and
+blame them, if you are able, for that belief (which may be called
+one of the parables of the devil&rsquo;s gospel) that a man
+rescued from the sea will prove the bane of his deliverer.&nbsp;
+It might be thought that my grandfather, coming there unknown,
+and upon an employment so hateful to the inhabitants, must have
+run the hazard of his life.&nbsp; But this were to
+misunderstand.&nbsp; He came franked by the laird and the
+clergyman; he was the King&rsquo;s officer; the work was
+&lsquo;opened with prayer by the Rev. Walter Trail, minister of
+the parish&rsquo;; God and the King had decided it, and the
+people of these pious islands bowed their heads.&nbsp; There
+landed, indeed, in North Ronaldsay, during the last decade of the
+eighteenth century, a traveller whose life seems really to have
+been imperilled.&nbsp; A very little man of a swarthy complexion,
+he came ashore, exhausted and unshaved, from a long boat passage,
+and lay down to sleep in the home of the parish
+schoolmaster.&nbsp; But he had been seen landing.&nbsp; The
+inhabitants had identified him for a Pict, as, by some singular
+confusion of name, they called the dark and dwarfish aboriginal
+people of the land.&nbsp; Immediately the obscure ferment of a
+race-hatred, grown into a superstition, began to work in their
+bosoms, and they crowded about the house and the room-door with
+fearful whisperings.&nbsp; For some time the schoolmaster held
+them at bay, and at last despatched a messenger to call my
+grand-father.&nbsp; He came: he found the islanders beside
+themselves at this unwelcome resurrection of the dead and the
+detested; he was shown, as adminicular of testimony, the
+traveller&rsquo;s uncouth and thick-soled boots; he argued, and
+finding argument unavailing, consented to enter the room and
+examine with his own eyes the sleeping Pict.&nbsp; One glance was
+sufficient: the man was now a missionary, but he had been before
+that an Edinburgh shopkeeper with whom my grandfather had
+dealt.&nbsp; He came forth again with this report, and the folk
+of the island, wholly relieved, dispersed to their own
+houses.&nbsp; They were timid as sheep and ignorant as limpets;
+that was all.&nbsp; But the Lord deliver us from the tender
+mercies of a frightened flock!</p>
+<p>I will give two more instances of their superstition.&nbsp;
+When Sir Walter Scott visited the Stones of Stennis, my
+grandfather put in his pocket a hundred-foot line, which he
+unfortunately lost.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Some years afterwards,&rsquo; he writes,
+&lsquo;one of my assistants on a visit to the Stones of Stennis
+took shelter from a storm in a cottage close by the lake; and
+seeing a box-measuring-line in the bole or sole of the cottage
+window, he asked the woman where she got this well-known
+professional appendage.&nbsp; She said: &ldquo;O sir, ane of the
+bairns fand it lang syne at the Stanes; and when drawing it out
+we took fright, and thinking it had belanged to the fairies, we
+threw it into the bole, and it has layen there ever
+since.&rdquo;&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>This is for the one; the last shall be a sketch by the master
+hand of Scott himself:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;At the village of Stromness, on the Orkney
+main island, called Pomona, lived, in 1814, an aged dame called
+Bessie Millie, who helped out her subsistence by selling
+favourable winds to mariners.&nbsp; He was a venturous master of
+a vessel who left the roadstead of Stromness without paying his
+offering to propitiate Bessie Millie!&nbsp; Her fee was extremely
+moderate, being exactly sixpence, for which she boiled her kettle
+and gave the bark the advantage of her prayers, for she
+disclaimed all unlawful acts.&nbsp; The wind thus petitioned for
+was sure, she said, to arrive, though occasionally the mariners
+had to wait some time for it.&nbsp; The woman&rsquo;s dwelling
+and appearance were not unbecoming her pretensions.&nbsp; Her
+house, which was on the brow of the steep hill on which Stromness
+is founded, was only accessible by a series of dirty and
+precipitous lanes, and for exposure might have been the abode of
+Eolus himself, in whose commodities the inhabitant dealt.&nbsp;
+She herself was, as she told us, nearly one hundred years old,
+withered and dried up like a mummy.&nbsp; A clay-coloured
+kerchief, folded round her neck, corresponded in colour to her
+corpse-like complexion.&nbsp; Two light blue eyes that gleamed
+with a lustre like that of insanity, an utterance of astonishing
+rapidity, a nose and chin that almost met together, and a ghastly
+expression of cunning, gave her the effect of Hecate.&nbsp; Such
+was Bessie Millie, to whom the mariners paid a sort of tribute
+with a feeling between jest and earnest.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h3>II</h3>
+<p>From about the beginning of the century up to 1807 Robert
+Stevenson was in partnership with Thomas Smith.&nbsp; In the
+last-named year the partnership was dissolved; Thomas Smith
+returning to his business, and my grandfather becoming sole
+engineer to the Board of Northern Lights.</p>
+<p>I must try, by excerpts from his diary and correspondence, to
+convey to the reader some idea of the ardency and thoroughness
+with which he threw himself into the largest and least of his
+multifarious engagements in this service.&nbsp; But first I must
+say a word or two upon the life of lightkeepers, and the
+temptations to which they are more particularly exposed.&nbsp;
+The lightkeeper occupies a position apart among men.&nbsp; In
+sea-towers the complement has always been three since the
+deplorable business in the Eddystone, when one keeper died, and
+the survivor, signalling in vain for relief, was compelled to
+live for days with the dead body.&nbsp; These usually pass their
+time by the pleasant human expedient of quarrelling; and
+sometimes, I am assured, not one of the three is on speaking
+terms with any other.&nbsp; On shore stations, which on the
+Scottish coast are sometimes hardly less isolated, the usual
+number is two, a principal and an assistant.&nbsp; The principal
+is dissatisfied with the assistant, or perhaps the assistant
+keeps pigeons, and the principal wants the water from the
+roof.&nbsp; Their wives and families are with them, living cheek
+by jowl.&nbsp; The children quarrel; Jockie hits Jimsie in the
+eye, and the mothers make haste to mingle in the
+dissension.&nbsp; Perhaps there is trouble about a broken dish;
+perhaps Mrs. Assistant is more highly born than Mrs. Principal
+and gives herself airs; and the men are drawn in and the servants
+presently follow.&nbsp; &lsquo;Church privileges have been denied
+the keeper&rsquo;s and the assistant&rsquo;s servants,&rsquo; I
+read in one case, and the eminently Scots periphrasis means
+neither more nor less than excommunication, &lsquo;on account of
+the discordant and quarrelsome state of the families.&nbsp; The
+cause, when inquired into, proves to be
+<i>tittle</i>-<i>tattle</i> on both sides.&rsquo;&nbsp; The
+tender comes round; the foremen and artificers go from station to
+station; the gossip flies through the whole system of the
+service, and the stories, disfigured and exaggerated, return to
+their own birthplace with the returning tender.&nbsp; The English
+Board was apparently shocked by the picture of these
+dissensions.&nbsp; &lsquo;When the Trinity House can,&rsquo; I
+find my grandfather writing at Beachy Head, in 1834, &lsquo;they
+do not appoint two keepers, they disagree so ill.&nbsp; A man who
+has a family is assisted by his family; and in this way, to my
+experience and present observation, the business is very much
+neglected.&nbsp; One keeper is, in my view, a bad system.&nbsp;
+This day&rsquo;s visit to an English lighthouse convinces me of
+this, as the lightkeeper was walking on a staff with the gout,
+and the business performed by one of his daughters, a girl of
+thirteen or fourteen years of age.&rsquo;&nbsp; This man received
+a hundred a year!&nbsp; It shows a different reading of human
+nature, perhaps typical of Scotland and England, that I find in
+my grandfather&rsquo;s diary the following pregnant entry:
+&lsquo;<i>The lightkeepers</i>, <i>agreeing ill</i>, <i>keep one
+another to their duty</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp; But the Scottish system
+was not alone founded on this cynical opinion.&nbsp; The dignity
+and the comfort of the northern lightkeeper were both attended
+to.&nbsp; He had a uniform to &lsquo;raise him in his own
+estimation, and in that of his neighbour, which is of consequence
+to a person of trust.&nbsp; The keepers,&rsquo; my grandfather
+goes on, in another place, &lsquo;are attended to in all the
+detail of accommodation in the best style as shipmasters; and
+this is believed to have a sensible effect upon their conduct,
+and to regulate their general habits as members of
+society.&rsquo;&nbsp; He notes, with the same dip of ink, that
+&lsquo;the brasses were not clean, and the persons of the keepers
+not <i>trig&rsquo;</i>; and thus we find him writing to a
+culprit: &lsquo;I have to complain that you are not cleanly in
+your person, and that your manner of speech is ungentle, and
+rather inclines to rudeness.&nbsp; You must therefore take a
+different view of your duties as a lightkeeper.&rsquo;&nbsp; A
+high ideal for the service appears in these expressions, and will
+be more amply illustrated further on.&nbsp; But even the Scottish
+lightkeeper was frail.&nbsp; During the unbroken solitude of the
+winter months, when inspection is scarce possible, it must seem a
+vain toil to polish the brass hand-rail of the stair, or to keep
+an unrewarded vigil in the light-room; and the keepers are
+habitually tempted to the beginnings of sloth, and must
+unremittingly resist.&nbsp; He who temporises with his conscience
+is already lost.&nbsp; I must tell here an anecdote that
+illustrates the difficulties of inspection.&nbsp; In the days of
+my uncle David and my father there was a station which they
+regarded with jealousy.&nbsp; The two engineers compared notes
+and were agreed.&nbsp; The tower was always clean, but seemed
+always to bear traces of a hasty cleansing, as though the keepers
+had been suddenly forewarned.&nbsp; On inquiry, it proved that
+such was the case, and that a wandering fiddler was the unfailing
+harbinger of the engineer.&nbsp; At last my father was
+storm-stayed one Sunday in a port at the other side of the
+island.&nbsp; The visit was quite overdue, and as he walked
+across upon the Monday morning he promised himself that he should
+at last take the keepers unprepared.&nbsp; They were both waiting
+for him in uniform at the gate; the fiddler had been there on
+Saturday!</p>
+<p>My grandfather, as will appear from the following extracts,
+was much a martinet, and had a habit of expressing himself on
+paper with an almost startling emphasis.&nbsp; Personally, with
+his powerful voice, sanguine countenance, and eccentric and
+original locutions, he was well qualified to inspire a salutary
+terror in the service.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;I find that the keepers have, by some means
+or another, got into the way of cleaning too much with
+rotten-stone and oil.&nbsp; I take the principal keeper to
+<i>task</i> on this subject, and make him bring a clean towel and
+clean one of the brazen frames, which leaves the towel in an
+odious state.&nbsp; This towel I put up in a sheet of paper,
+seal, and take with me to confront Mr. Murdoch, who has just left
+the station.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;This letter&rsquo;&mdash;a stern
+enumeration of complaints&mdash;&lsquo;to lie a week on the
+light-room book-place, and to be put in the Inspector&rsquo;s
+hands when he comes round.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;It is the most
+painful thing that can occur for me to have a correspondence of
+this kind with any of the keepers; and when I come to the
+Lighthouse, instead of having the satisfaction to meet them with
+approbation, it is distressing when one is obliged to put on a
+most angry countenance and demeanour; but from such culpable
+negligence as you have shown there is no avoiding it.&nbsp; I
+hold it as a fixed maxim that, when a man or a family put on a
+slovenly appearance in their houses, stairs, and lanterns, I
+always find their reflectors, burners, windows, and light in
+general, ill attended to; and, therefore, I must insist on
+cleanliness throughout.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;I find you very
+deficient in the duty of the high tower.&nbsp; You thus place
+your appointment as Principal Keeper in jeopardy; and I think it
+necessary, as an old servant of the Board, to put you upon your
+guard once for all at this time.&nbsp; I call upon you to
+recollect what was formerly and is now said to you.&nbsp; The
+state of the backs of the reflectors at the high tower was
+disgraceful, as I pointed out to you on the spot.&nbsp; They were
+as if spitten upon, and greasy finger-marks upon the back
+straps.&nbsp; I demand an explanation of this state of
+things.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;The cause of the Commissioners
+dismissing you is expressed in the minute; and it must be a
+matter of regret to you that you have been so much engaged in
+smuggling, and also that the Reports relative to the cleanliness
+of the Lighthouse, upon being referred to, rather added to their
+unfavourable opinion.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;I do not go into the
+dwelling-house, but severely chide the lightkeepers for the
+disagreement that seems to subsist among them.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;The families of the two lightkeepers here agree very
+ill.&nbsp; I have effected a reconciliation for the
+present.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Things are in a very <i>humdrum</i>
+state here.&nbsp; There is no painting, and in and out of doors
+no taste or tidiness displayed.&nbsp; Robert&rsquo;s wife
+<i>greets</i> and M&rsquo;Gregor&rsquo;s scolds; and Robert is so
+down-hearted that he says he is unfit for duty.&nbsp; I told him
+that if he was to mind wives&rsquo; quarrels, and to take them
+up, the only way was for him and M&rsquo;Gregor to go down to the
+point like Sir G. Grant and Lord Somerset.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;I
+cannot say that I have experienced a more unpleasant meeting than
+that of the lighthouse folks this morning, or ever saw a stronger
+example of unfeeling barbarity than the conduct which the ---s
+exhibited.&nbsp; These two cold-hearted persons, not contented
+with having driven the daughter of the poor nervous woman from
+her father&rsquo;s house, <i>both</i> kept <i>pouncing</i> at
+her, lest she should forget her great misfortune.&nbsp; Write me
+of their conduct.&nbsp; Do not make any communication of the
+state of these families at Kinnaird Head, as this would be like
+<i>Tale-bearing</i>.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>There is the great word out.&nbsp; Tales and Tale-bearing,
+always with the emphatic capitals, run continually in his
+correspondence.&nbsp; I will give but two instances:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Write to David [one of the lightkeepers]
+and caution him to be more prudent how he expresses
+himself.&nbsp; Let him attend his duty to the Lighthouse and his
+family concerns, and give less heed to Tale-bearers.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I have not your last letter at hand to quote its date;
+but, if I recollect, it contains some kind of tales, which
+nonsense I wish you would lay aside, and notice only the concerns
+of your family and the important charge committed to
+you.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Apparently, however, my grandfather was not himself
+inaccessible to the Tale-bearer, as the following indicates:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;In walking along with Mr. --- , I explain
+to him that I should be under the necessity of looking more
+closely into the business here from his conduct at Buddonness,
+which had given an instance of weakness in the Moral principle
+which had staggered my opinion of him.&nbsp; His answer was,
+&ldquo;That will be with regard to the lass?&rdquo;&nbsp; I told
+him I was to enter no farther with him upon the
+subject.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Mr. Miller appears to be master and
+man.&nbsp; I am sorry about this foolish fellow.&nbsp; Had I
+known his train, I should not, as I did, have rather forced him
+into the service.&nbsp; Upon finding the windows in the state
+they were, I turned upon Mr. Watt, and especially upon Mr.
+Stewart.&nbsp; The latter did not appear for a length of time to
+have visited the light-room.&nbsp; On asking the cause&mdash;did
+Mr. Watt and him (<i>sic</i>) disagree; he said no; but he had
+got very bad usage from the assistant, &ldquo;who was a very
+obstreperous man.&rdquo;&nbsp; I could not bring Mr. Watt to put
+in language his objections to Miller; all I could get was that,
+he being your friend, and saying he was unwell, he did not like
+to complain or to push the man; that the man seemed to have no
+liking to anything like work; that he was unruly; that, being an
+educated man, he despised them.&nbsp; I was, however, determined
+to have out of these <i>unwilling</i> witnesses the language
+alluded to.&nbsp; I fixed upon Mr. Stewart as chief; he
+hedged.&nbsp; My curiosity increased, and I urged.&nbsp; Then he
+said, &ldquo;What would I think, just exactly, of Mr. Watt being
+called an Old B-?&rdquo;&nbsp; You may judge of my
+surprise.&nbsp; There was not another word uttered.&nbsp; This
+was quite enough, as coming from a person I should have
+calculated upon quite different behaviour from.&nbsp; It spoke a
+volume of the man&rsquo;s mind and want of
+principle.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Object to the keeper keeping a
+Bull-Terrier dog of ferocious appearance.&nbsp; It is dangerous,
+as we land at all times of the night.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Have
+only to complain of the storehouse floor being spotted with
+oil.&nbsp; Give orders for this being instantly rectified, so
+that on my return to-morrow I may see things in good
+order.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;The furniture of both houses wants
+much rubbing.&nbsp; Mrs. ---&rsquo;s carpets are absurd beyond
+anything I have seen.&nbsp; I want her to turn the fenders up
+with the bottom to the fireplace: the carpets, when not likely to
+be in use, folded up and laid as a hearthrug partly under the
+fender.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>My grandfather was king in the service to his
+finger-tips.&nbsp; All should go in his way, from the principal
+lightkeeper&rsquo;s coat to the assistant&rsquo;s fender, from
+the gravel in the garden-walks to the bad smell in the kitchen,
+or the oil-spots on the store-room floor.&nbsp; It might be
+thought there was nothing more calculated to awake men&rsquo;s
+resentment, and yet his rule was not more thorough than it was
+beneficent.&nbsp; His thought for the keepers was continual, and
+it did not end with their lives.&nbsp; He tried to manage their
+successions; he thought no pains too great to arrange between a
+widow and a son who had succeeded his father; he was often
+harassed and perplexed by tales of hardship; and I find him
+writing, almost in despair, of their improvident habits and the
+destitution that awaited their families upon a death.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;The house being completely furnished, they come into
+possession without necessaries, and they go out <span
+class="smcap">naked</span>.&nbsp; The insurance seems to have
+failed, and what next is to be tried?&rsquo;&nbsp; While they
+lived he wrote behind their backs to arrange for the education of
+their children, or to get them other situations if they seemed
+unsuitable for the Northern Lights.&nbsp; When he was at a
+lighthouse on a Sunday he held prayers and heard the children
+read.&nbsp; When a keeper was sick, he lent him his horse and
+sent him mutton and brandy from the ship.&nbsp; &lsquo;The
+assistant&rsquo;s wife having been this morning confined, there
+was sent ashore a bottle of sherry and a few rusks&mdash;a
+practice which I have always observed in this service,&rsquo; he
+writes.&nbsp; They dwelt, many of them, in uninhabited isles or
+desert forelands, totally cut off from shops.&nbsp; Many of them
+were, besides, fallen into a rustic dishabitude of life, so that
+even when they visited a city they could scarce be trusted with
+their own affairs, as (for example) he who carried home to his
+children, thinking they were oranges, a bag of lemons.&nbsp; And
+my grandfather seems to have acted, at least in his early years,
+as a kind of gratuitous agent for the service.&nbsp; Thus I find
+him writing to a keeper in 1806, when his mind was already
+preoccupied with arrangements for the Bell Rock: &lsquo;I am much
+afraid I stand very unfavourably with you as a man of promise, as
+I was to send several things of which I believe I have more than
+once got the memorandum.&nbsp; All I can say is that in this
+respect you are not singular.&nbsp; This makes me no better; but
+really I have been driven about beyond all example in my past
+experience, and have been essentially obliged to neglect my own
+urgent affairs.&rsquo;&nbsp; No servant of the Northern Lights
+came to Edinburgh but he was entertained at Baxter&rsquo;s Place
+to breakfast.&nbsp; There, at his own table, my grandfather sat
+down delightedly with his broad-spoken, homespun officers.&nbsp;
+His whole relation to the service was, in fact, patriarchal; and
+I believe I may say that throughout its ranks he was
+adored.&nbsp; I have spoken with many who knew him; I was his
+grandson, and their words may have very well been words of
+flattery; but there was one thing that could not be affected, and
+that was the look and light that came into their faces at the
+name of Robert Stevenson.</p>
+<p>In the early part of the century the foreman builder was a
+young man of the name of George Peebles, a native of
+Anstruther.&nbsp; My grandfather had placed in him a very high
+degree of confidence, and he was already designated to be foreman
+at the Bell Rock, when, on Christmas-day 1806, on his way home
+from Orkney, he was lost in the schooner <i>Traveller</i>.&nbsp;
+The tale of the loss of the <i>Traveller</i> is almost a replica
+of that of the <i>Elizabeth</i> of Stromness; like the
+<i>Elizabeth</i> she came as far as Kinnaird Head, was then
+surprised by a storm, driven back to Orkney, and bilged and sank
+on the island of Flotta.&nbsp; It seems it was about the dusk of
+the day when the ship struck, and many of the crew and passengers
+were drowned.&nbsp; About the same hour, my grandfather was in
+his office at the writing-table; and the room beginning to
+darken, he laid down his pen and fell asleep.&nbsp; In a dream he
+saw the door open and George Peebles come in, &lsquo;reeling to
+and fro, and staggering like a drunken man,&rsquo; with water
+streaming from his head and body to the floor.&nbsp; There it
+gathered into a wave which, sweeping forward, submerged my
+grandfather.&nbsp; Well, no matter how deep; versions vary; and
+at last he awoke, and behold it was a dream!&nbsp; But it may be
+conceived how profoundly the impression was written even on the
+mind of a man averse from such ideas, when the news came of the
+wreck on Flotta and the death of George.</p>
+<p>George&rsquo;s vouchers and accounts had perished with
+himself; and it appeared he was in debt to the
+Commissioners.&nbsp; But my grandfather wrote to Orkney twice,
+collected evidence of his disbursements, and proved him to be
+seventy pounds ahead.&nbsp; With this sum, he applied to
+George&rsquo;s brothers, and had it apportioned between their
+mother and themselves.&nbsp; He approached the Board and got an
+annuity of &pound;5 bestowed on the widow Peebles; and we find
+him writing her a long letter of explanation and advice, and
+pressing on her the duty of making a will.&nbsp; That he should
+thus act executor was no singular instance.&nbsp; But besides
+this we are able to assist at some of the stages of a rather
+touching experiment; no less than an attempt to secure Charles
+Peebles heir to George&rsquo;s favour.&nbsp; He is despatched,
+under the character of &lsquo;a fine young man&rsquo;;
+recommended to gentlemen for &lsquo;advice, as he&rsquo;s a
+stranger in your place, and indeed to this kind of charge, this
+being his first outset as Foreman&rsquo;; and for a long while
+after, the letter-book, in the midst of that thrilling first year
+of the Bell Rock, is encumbered with pages of instruction and
+encouragement.&nbsp; The nature of a bill, and the precautions
+that are to be observed about discounting it, are expounded at
+length and with clearness.&nbsp; &lsquo;You are not, I hope,
+neglecting, Charles, to work the harbour at spring-tides; and see
+that you pay the greatest attention to get the well so as to
+supply the keeper with water, for he is a very helpless fellow,
+and so unfond of hard work that I fear he could do ill to keep
+himself in water by going to the other side for
+it.&rsquo;&mdash;&lsquo;With regard to spirits, Charles, I see
+very little occasion for it.&rsquo;&nbsp; These abrupt
+apostrophes sound to me like the voice of an awakened conscience;
+but they would seem to have reverberated in vain in the ears of
+Charles.&nbsp; There was trouble in Pladda, his scene of
+operations; his men ran away from him, there was at least a talk
+of calling in the Sheriff.&nbsp; &lsquo;I fear,&rsquo; writes my
+grandfather, &lsquo;you have been too indulgent, and I am sorry
+to add that men do not answer to be too well treated, a
+circumstance which I have experienced, and which you will learn
+as you go on in business.&rsquo;&nbsp; I wonder, was not Charles
+Peebles himself a case in point?&nbsp; Either death, at least, or
+disappointment and discharge, must have ended his service in the
+Northern Lights; and in later correspondence I look in vain for
+any mention of his name&mdash;Charles, I mean, not Peebles: for
+as late as 1839 my grandfather is patiently writing to another of
+the family: &lsquo;I am sorry you took the trouble of applying to
+me about your son, as it lies quite out of my way to forward his
+views in the line of his profession as a Draper.&rsquo;</p>
+<h3>III</h3>
+<p>A professional life of Robert Stevenson has been already given
+to the world by his son David, and to that I would refer those
+interested in such matters.&nbsp; But my own design, which is to
+represent the man, would be very ill carried out if I suffered
+myself or my reader to forget that he was, first of all and last
+of all, an engineer.&nbsp; His chief claim to the style of a
+mechanical inventor is on account of the Jib or Balance Crane of
+the Bell Rock, which are beautiful contrivances.&nbsp; But the
+great merit of this engineer was not in the field of
+engines.&nbsp; He was above all things a projector of works in
+the face of nature, and a modifier of nature itself.&nbsp; A road
+to be made, a tower to be built, a harbour to be constructed, a
+river to be trained and guided in its channel&mdash;these were
+the problems with which his mind was continually occupied; and
+for these and similar ends he travelled the world for more than
+half a century, like an artist, note-book in hand.</p>
+<p>He once stood and looked on at the emptying of a certain
+oil-tube; he did so watch in hand, and accurately timed the
+operation; and in so doing offered the perfect type of his
+profession.&nbsp; The fact acquired might never be of use: it was
+acquired: another link in the world&rsquo;s huge chain of
+processes was brought down to figures and placed at the service
+of the engineer.&nbsp; &lsquo;The very term mensuration sounds
+<i>engineer-like</i>,&rsquo; I find him writing; and in truth
+what the engineer most properly deals with is that which can be
+measured, weighed, and numbered.&nbsp; The time of any operation
+in hours and minutes, its cost in pounds, shillings, and pence,
+the strain upon a given point in foot-pounds&mdash;these are his
+conquests, with which he must continually furnish his mind, and
+which, after he has acquired them, he must continually apply and
+exercise.&nbsp; They must be not only entries in note-books, to
+be hurriedly consulted; in the actor&rsquo;s phrase, he must be
+<i>stale</i> in them; in a word of my grandfather&rsquo;s, they
+must be &lsquo;fixed in the mind like the ten fingers and ten
+toes.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>These are the certainties of the engineer; so far he finds a
+solid footing and clear views.&nbsp; But the province of formulas
+and constants is restricted.&nbsp; Even the mechanical engineer
+comes at last to an end of his figures, and must stand up, a
+practical man, face to face with the discrepancies of nature and
+the hiatuses of theory.&nbsp; After the machine is finished, and
+the steam turned on, the next is to drive it; and experience and
+an exquisite sympathy must teach him where a weight should be
+applied or a nut loosened.&nbsp; With the civil engineer, more
+properly so called (if anything can be proper with this awkward
+coinage), the obligation starts with the beginning.&nbsp; He is
+always the practical man.&nbsp; The rains, the winds and the
+waves, the complexity and the fitfulness of nature, are always
+before him.&nbsp; He has to deal with the unpredictable, with
+those forces (in Smeaton&rsquo;s phrase) that &lsquo;are subject
+to no calculation&rsquo;; and still he must predict, still
+calculate them, at his peril.&nbsp; His work is not yet in being,
+and he must foresee its influence: how it shall deflect the tide,
+exaggerate the waves, dam back the rain-water, or attract the
+thunderbolt.&nbsp; He visits a piece of sea-board; and from the
+inclination and soil of the beach, from the weeds and shell-fish,
+from the configuration of the coast and the depth of soundings
+outside, he must deduce what magnitude of waves is to be looked
+for.&nbsp; He visits a river, its summer water babbling on
+shallows; and he must not only read, in a thousand indications,
+the measure of winter freshets, but be able to predict the
+violence of occasional great floods.&nbsp; Nay, and more; he must
+not only consider that which is, but that which may be.&nbsp;
+Thus I find my grandfather writing, in a report on the North Esk
+Bridge: &lsquo;A less waterway might have sufficed, but the
+<i>valleys may come to be meliorated by
+drainage</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp; One field drained after another
+through all that confluence of vales, and we come to a time when
+they shall precipitate by so much a more copious and transient
+flood, as the gush of the flowing drain-pipe is superior to the
+leakage of a peat.</p>
+<p>It is plain there is here but a restricted use for
+formulas.&nbsp; In this sort of practice, the engineer has need
+of some transcendental sense.&nbsp; Smeaton, the pioneer, bade
+him obey his &lsquo;feelings&rsquo;; my father, that &lsquo;power
+of estimating obscure forces which supplies a coefficient of its
+own to every rule.&rsquo;&nbsp; The rules must be everywhere
+indeed; but they must everywhere be modified by this
+transcendental coefficient, everywhere bent to the impression of
+the trained eye and the <i>feelings</i> of the engineer.&nbsp; A
+sentiment of physical laws and of the scale of nature, which
+shall have been strong in the beginning and progressively
+fortified by observation, must be his guide in the last
+recourse.&nbsp; I had the most opportunity to observe my
+father.&nbsp; He would pass hours on the beach, brooding over the
+waves, counting them, noting their least deflection, noting when
+they broke.&nbsp; On Tweedside, or by Lyne or Manor, we have
+spent together whole afternoons; to me, at the time, extremely
+wearisome; to him, as I am now sorry to think, bitterly
+mortifying.&nbsp; The river was to me a pretty and various
+spectacle; I could not see&mdash;I could not be made to
+see&mdash;it otherwise.&nbsp; To my father it was a chequer-board
+of lively forces, which he traced from pool to shallow with
+minute appreciation and enduring interest.&nbsp; &lsquo;That bank
+was being under-cut,&rsquo; he might say.&nbsp; &lsquo;Why?&nbsp;
+Suppose you were to put a groin out here, would not the <i>filum
+fluminis</i> be cast abruptly off across the channel? and where
+would it impinge upon the other shore? and what would be the
+result?&nbsp; Or suppose you were to blast that boulder, what
+would happen?&nbsp; Follow it&mdash;use the eyes God has given
+you&mdash;can you not see that a great deal of land would be
+reclaimed upon this side?&rsquo;&nbsp; It was to me like school
+in holidays; but to him, until I had worn him out with my
+invincible triviality, a delight.&nbsp; Thus he pored over the
+engineer&rsquo;s voluminous handy-book of nature; thus must, too,
+have pored my grand-father and uncles.</p>
+<p>But it is of the essence of this knowledge, or this knack of
+mind, to be largely incommunicable.&nbsp; &lsquo;It cannot be
+imparted to another,&rsquo; says my father.&nbsp; The verbal
+casting-net is thrown in vain over these evanescent, inferential
+relations. Hence the insignificance of much engineering
+literature.&nbsp; So far as the science can be reduced to
+formulas or diagrams, the book is to the point; so far as the art
+depends on intimate study of the ways of nature, the
+author&rsquo;s words will too often be found vapid.&nbsp; This
+fact&mdash;that engineering looks one way, and literature
+another&mdash;was what my grand-father overlooked.&nbsp; All his
+life long, his pen was in his hand, piling up a treasury of
+knowledge, preparing himself against all possible
+contingencies.&nbsp; Scarce anything fell under his notice but he
+perceived in it some relation to his work, and chronicled it in
+the pages of his journal in his always lucid, but sometimes
+inexact and wordy, style.&nbsp; The Travelling Diary (so he
+called it) was kept in fascicles of ruled paper, which were at
+last bound up, rudely indexed, and put by for future
+reference.&nbsp; Such volumes as have reached me contain a
+surprising medley: the whole details of his employment in the
+Northern Lights and his general practice; the whole biography of
+an enthusiastic engineer.&nbsp; Much of it is useful and curious;
+much merely otiose; and much can only be described as an attempt
+to impart that which cannot be imparted in words.&nbsp; Of such
+are his repeated and heroic descriptions of reefs; monuments of
+misdirected literary energy, which leave upon the mind of the
+reader no effect but that of a multiplicity of words and the
+suggested vignette of a lusty old gentleman scrambling among
+tangle.&nbsp; It is to be remembered that he came to engineering
+while yet it was in the egg and without a library, and that he
+saw the bounds of that profession widen daily.&nbsp; He saw iron
+ships, steamers, and the locomotive engine, introduced.&nbsp; He
+lived to travel from Glasgow to Edinburgh in the inside of a
+forenoon, and to remember that he himself had &lsquo;often been
+twelve hours upon the journey, and his grand-father (Lillie) two
+days&rsquo;!&nbsp; The profession was still but in its second
+generation, and had already broken down the barriers of time and
+space.&nbsp; Who should set a limit to its future
+encroachments?&nbsp; And hence, with a kind of sanguine pedantry,
+he pursued his design of &lsquo;keeping up with the day&rsquo;
+and posting himself and his family on every mortal subject.&nbsp;
+Of this unpractical idealism we shall meet with many instances;
+there was not a trade, and scarce an accomplishment, but he
+thought it should form part of the outfit of an engineer; and not
+content with keeping an encyclopaedic diary himself, he would
+fain have set all his sons to work continuing and extending
+it.&nbsp; They were more happily inspired.&nbsp; My
+father&rsquo;s engineering pocket-book was not a bulky volume;
+with its store of pregnant notes and vital formulas, it served
+him through life, and was not yet filled when he came to
+die.&nbsp; As for Robert Stevenson and the Travelling Diary, I
+should be ungrateful to complain, for it has supplied me with
+many lively traits for this and subsequent chapters; but I must
+still remember much of the period of my study there as a sojourn
+in the Valley of the Shadow.</p>
+<p>The duty of the engineer is twofold&mdash;to design the work,
+and to see the work done.&nbsp; We have seen already something of
+the vociferous thoroughness of the man, upon the cleaning of
+lamps and the polishing of reflectors.&nbsp; In building, in
+road-making, in the construction of bridges, in every detail and
+byway of his employments, he pursued the same ideal.&nbsp;
+Perfection (with a capital P and violently under-scored) was his
+design.&nbsp; A crack for a penknife, the waste of
+&lsquo;six-and-thirty shillings,&rsquo; &lsquo;the loss of a day
+or a tide,&rsquo; in each of these he saw and was revolted by the
+finger of the sloven; and to spirits intense as his, and immersed
+in vital undertakings, the slovenly is the dishonest, and wasted
+time is instantly translated into lives endangered.&nbsp; On this
+consistent idealism there is but one thing that now and then
+trenches with a touch of incongruity, and that is his love of the
+picturesque.&nbsp; As when he laid out a road on Hogarth&rsquo;s
+line of beauty; bade a foreman be careful, in quarrying, not
+&lsquo;to disfigure the island&rsquo;; or regretted in a report
+that &lsquo;the great stone, called the <i>Devil in the Hole</i>,
+was blasted or broken down to make road-metal, and for other
+purposes of the work.&rsquo;</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER III: THE BUILDING OF THE BELL ROCK</h2>
+<p>Off the mouths of the Tay and the Forth, thirteen miles from
+Fifeness, eleven from Arbroath, and fourteen from the Red Head of
+Angus, lies the Inchcape or Bell Rock.&nbsp; It extends to a
+length of about fourteen hundred feet, but the part of it
+discovered at low water to not more than four hundred and
+twenty-seven.&nbsp; At a little more than half-flood in fine
+weather the seamless ocean joins over the reef, and at high-water
+springs it is buried sixteen feet.&nbsp; As the tide goes down,
+the higher reaches of the rock are seen to be clothed by
+<i>Conferva rupestris</i> as by a sward of grass; upon the more
+exposed edges, where the currents are most swift and the breach
+of the sea heaviest, Baderlock or Henware flourishes; and the
+great Tangle grows at the depth of several fathoms with
+luxuriance.&nbsp; Before man arrived, and introduced into the
+silence of the sea the smoke and clangour of a blacksmith&rsquo;s
+shop, it was a favourite resting-place of seals.&nbsp; The crab
+and lobster haunt in the crevices; and limpets, mussels, and the
+white buckie abound.</p>
+<p>According to a tradition, a bell had been once hung upon this
+rock by an abbot of Arbroath, <a name="citation91a"></a><a
+href="#footnote91a" class="citation">[91a]</a> &lsquo;and being
+taken down by a sea-pirate, a year thereafter he perished upon
+the same rock, with ship and goods, in the righteous judgment of
+God.&rsquo;&nbsp; From the days of the abbot and the sea-pirate
+no man had set foot upon the Inchcape, save fishers from the
+neighbouring coast, or perhaps&mdash;for a moment, before the
+surges swallowed them&mdash;the unfortunate victims of
+shipwreck.&nbsp; The fishers approached the rock with an extreme
+timidity; but their harvest appears to have been great, and the
+adventure no more perilous than lucrative.&nbsp; In 1800, on the
+occasion of my grandfather&rsquo;s first landing, and during the
+two or three hours which the ebb-tide and the smooth water
+allowed them to pass upon its shelves, his crew collected upwards
+of two hundredweight of old metal: pieces of a kedge anchor and a
+cabin stove, crowbars, a hinge and lock of a door, a ship&rsquo;s
+marking-iron, a piece of a ship&rsquo;s caboose, a
+soldier&rsquo;s bayonet, a cannon ball, several pieces of money,
+a shoe-buckle, and the like.&nbsp; Such were the spoils of the
+Bell Rock.</p>
+<p>From 1794 onward, the mind of my grandfather had been
+exercised with the idea of a light upon this formidable
+danger.&nbsp; To build a tower on a sea rock, eleven miles from
+shore, and barely uncovered at low water of neaps, appeared a
+fascinating enterprise.&nbsp; It was something yet unattempted,
+unessayed; and even now, after it has been lighted for more than
+eighty years, it is still an exploit that has never been
+repeated. <a name="citation92a"></a><a href="#footnote92a"
+class="citation">[92a]</a>&nbsp; My grandfather was, besides, but
+a young man, of an experience comparatively restricted, and a
+reputation confined to Scotland; and when he prepared his first
+models, and exhibited them in Merchants&rsquo; Hall, he can
+hardly be acquitted of audacity.&nbsp; John Clerk of Eldin stood
+his friend from the beginning, kept the key of the model room, to
+which he carried &lsquo;eminent strangers,&rsquo; and found words
+of counsel and encouragement beyond price.&nbsp; &lsquo;Mr. Clerk
+had been personally known to Smeaton, and used occasionally to
+speak of him to me,&rsquo; says my grandfather; and again:
+&lsquo;I felt regret that I had not the opportunity of a greater
+range of practice to fit me for such an undertaking; but I was
+fortified by an expression of my friend Mr. Clerk in one of our
+conversations. &ldquo;This work,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;is
+unique, and can be little forwarded by experience of ordinary
+masonic operations.&nbsp; In this case Smeaton&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Narrative&rsquo; must be the text-book, and energy and
+perseverance the pratique.&rdquo;&rsquo;</p>
+<p>A Bill for the work was introduced into Parliament and lost in
+the Lords in 1802&ndash;3.&nbsp; John Rennie was afterwards, at
+my grandfather&rsquo;s suggestion, called in council, with the
+style of chief engineer.&nbsp; The precise meaning attached to
+these words by any of the parties appears irrecoverable.&nbsp;
+Chief engineer should have full authority, full responsibility,
+and a proper share of the emoluments; and there were none of
+these for Rennie.&nbsp; I find in an appendix a paper which
+resumes the controversy on this subject; and it will be enough to
+say here that Rennie did not design the Bell Rock, that he did
+not execute it, and that he was not paid for it. <a
+name="citation94a"></a><a href="#footnote94a"
+class="citation">[94a]</a>&nbsp; From so much of the
+correspondence as has come down to me, the acquaintance of this
+man, eleven years his senior, and already famous, appears to have
+been both useful and agreeable to Robert Stevenson.&nbsp; It is
+amusing to find my grandfather seeking high and low for a brace
+of pistols which his colleague had lost by the way between
+Aberdeen and Edinburgh; and writing to Messrs. Dollond, &lsquo;I
+have not thought it necessary to trouble Mr. Rennie with this
+order, but <i>I beg you will see to get two minutes of him as he
+passes your door</i>&rsquo;&mdash;a proposal calculated rather
+from the latitude of Edinburgh than from London, even in
+1807.&nbsp; It is pretty, too, to observe with what affectionate
+regard Smeaton was held in mind by his immediate
+successors.&nbsp; &lsquo;Poor old fellow,&rsquo; writes Rennie to
+Stevenson, &lsquo;I hope he will now and then take a peep at us,
+and inspire you with fortitude and courage to brave all
+difficulties and dangers to accomplish a work which will, if
+successful, immortalise you in the annals of fame.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+The style might be bettered, but the sentiment is charming.</p>
+<p>Smeaton was, indeed, the patron saint of the Bell Rock.&nbsp;
+Undeterred by the sinister fate of Winstanley, he had tackled and
+solved the problem of the Eddystone; but his solution had not
+been in all respects perfect.&nbsp; It remained for my
+grand-father to outdo him in daring, by applying to a tidal rock
+those principles which had been already justified by the success
+of the Eddystone, and to perfect the model by more than one
+exemplary departure.&nbsp; Smeaton had adopted in his floors the
+principle of the arch; each therefore exercised an outward thrust
+upon the walls, which must be met and combated by embedded
+chains.&nbsp; My grandfather&rsquo;s flooring-stones, on the
+other hand, were flat, made part of the outer wall, and were
+keyed and dovetailed into a central stone, so as to bind the work
+together and be positive elements of strength.&nbsp; In 1703
+Winstanley still thought it possible to erect his strange pagoda,
+with its open gallery, its florid scrolls and candlesticks: like
+a rich man&rsquo;s folly for an ornamental water in a park.&nbsp;
+Smeaton followed; then Stevenson in his turn corrected such flaws
+as were left in Smeaton&rsquo;s design; and with his
+improvements, it is not too much to say the model was made
+perfect.&nbsp; Smeaton and Stevenson had between them evolved and
+finished the sea-tower.&nbsp; No subsequent builder has departed
+in anything essential from the principles of their design.&nbsp;
+It remains, and it seems to us as though it must remain for ever,
+an ideal attained.&nbsp; Every stone in the building, it may
+interest the reader to know, my grandfather had himself cut out
+in the model; and the manner in which the courses were fitted,
+joggled, trenailed, wedged, and the bond broken, is intricate as
+a puzzle and beautiful by ingenuity.</p>
+<p>In 1806 a second Bill passed both Houses, and the preliminary
+works were at once begun.&nbsp; The same year the Navy had taken
+a great harvest of prizes in the North Sea, one of which, a
+Prussian fishing dogger, flat-bottomed and rounded at the stem
+and stern, was purchased to be a floating lightship, and re-named
+the <i>Pharos</i>.&nbsp; By July 1807 she was overhauled, rigged
+for her new purpose, and turned into the lee of the Isle of
+May.&nbsp; &lsquo;It was proposed that the whole party should
+meet in her and pass the night; but she rolled from side to side
+in so extraordinary a manner, that even the most seahardy
+fled.&nbsp; It was humorously observed of this vessel that she
+was in danger of making a round turn and appearing with her keel
+uppermost; and that she would even turn a half-penny if laid upon
+deck.&rsquo;&nbsp; By two o&rsquo;clock on the morning of the
+15th July this purgatorial vessel was moored by the Bell
+Rock.</p>
+<p>A sloop of forty tons had been in the meantime built at Leith,
+and named the <i>Smeaton</i>; by the 7th of August my grandfather
+set sail in her&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;carrying with him Mr. Peter Logan, foreman
+builder, and five artificers selected from their having been
+somewhat accustomed to the sea, the writer being aware of the
+distressing trial which the floating light would necessarily
+inflict upon landsmen from her rolling motion.&nbsp; Here he
+remained till the 10th, and, as the weather was favourable, a
+landing was effected daily, when the workmen were employed in
+cutting the large seaweed from the sites of the lighthouse and
+beacon, which were respectively traced with pickaxes upon the
+rock.&nbsp; In the meantime the crew of the <i>Smeaton</i> was
+employed in laying down the several sets of moorings within about
+half a mile of the rock for the convenience of vessels.&nbsp; The
+artificers, having, fortunately, experienced moderate weather,
+returned to the workyard of Arbroath with a good report of their
+treatment afloat; when their comrades ashore began to feel some
+anxiety to see a place of which they had heard so much, and to
+change the constant operations with the iron and mallet in the
+process of hewing for an occasional tide&rsquo;s work on the
+rock, which they figured to themselves as a state of comparative
+ease and comfort.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>I am now for many pages to let my grandfather speak for
+himself, and tell in his own words the story of his capital
+achievement.&nbsp; The tall quarto of 533 pages from which the
+following narrative has been dug out is practically unknown to
+the general reader, yet good judges have perceived its merit, and
+it has been named (with flattering wit) &lsquo;The Romance of
+Stone and Lime&rsquo; and &lsquo;The Robinson Crusoe of Civil
+Engineering.&rsquo;&nbsp; The tower was but four years in the
+building; it took Robert Stevenson, in the midst of his many
+avocations, no less than fourteen to prepare the
+<i>Account</i>.&nbsp; The title-page is a solid piece of
+literature of upwards of a hundred words; the table of contents
+runs to thirteen pages; and the dedication (to that revered
+monarch, George <span class="smcap">iv</span>) must have cost him
+no little study and correspondence.&nbsp; Walter Scott was called
+in council, and offered one miscorrection which still blots the
+page.&nbsp; In spite of all this pondering and filing, there
+remain pages not easy to construe, and inconsistencies not easy
+to explain away.&nbsp; I have sought to make these disappear, and
+to lighten a little the baggage with which my grandfather
+marches; here and there I have rejointed and rearranged a
+sentence, always with his own words, and all with a reverent and
+faithful hand; and I offer here to the reader the true Monument
+of Robert Stevenson with a little of the moss removed from the
+inscription, and the Portrait of the artist with some superfluous
+canvas cut away.</p>
+<h3>I&mdash;OPERATIONS OF 1807</h3>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 16th Aug.]</p>
+<p>Everything being arranged for sailing to the rock on Saturday
+the 15th, the vessel might have proceeded on the Sunday; but
+understanding that this would not be so agreeable to the
+artificers it was deferred until Monday.&nbsp; Here we cannot
+help observing that the men allotted for the operations at the
+rock seemed to enter upon the undertaking with a degree of
+consideration which fully marked their opinion as to the
+hazardous nature of the undertaking on which they were about to
+enter.&nbsp; They went in a body to church on Sunday, and whether
+it was in the ordinary course, or designed for the occasion, the
+writer is not certain, but the service was, in many respects,
+suitable to their circumstances.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Monday, 17th Aug.]</p>
+<p>The tide happening to fall late in the evening of Monday the
+17th, the party, counting twenty-four in number, embarked on
+board of the <i>Smeaton</i> about ten o&rsquo;clock p.m., and
+sailed from Arbroath with a gentle breeze at west.&nbsp; Our
+ship&rsquo;s colours having been flying all day in compliment to
+the commencement of the work, the other vessels in the harbour
+also saluted, which made a very gay appearance.&nbsp; A number of
+the friends and acquaintances of those on board having been thus
+collected, the piers, though at a late hour, were perfectly
+crowded, and just as the <i>Smeaton</i> cleared the harbour, all
+on board united in giving three hearty cheers, which were
+returned by those on shore in such good earnest, that, in the
+still of the evening, the sound must have been heard in all parts
+of the town, re-echoing from the walls and lofty turrets of the
+venerable Abbey of Aberbrothwick.&nbsp; The writer felt much
+satisfaction at the manner of this parting scene, though he must
+own that the present rejoicing was, on his part, mingled with
+occasional reflections upon the responsibility of his situation,
+which extended to the safety of all who should be engaged in this
+perilous work.&nbsp; With such sensations he retired to his
+cabin; but as the artificers were rather inclined to move about
+the deck than to remain in their confined berths below, his
+repose was transient, and the vessel being small every motion was
+necessarily heard.&nbsp; Some who were musically inclined
+occasionally sung; but he listened with peculiar pleasure to the
+sailor at the helm, who hummed over Dibdin&rsquo;s characteristic
+air:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;They say there&rsquo;s a Providence sits up
+aloft,<br />
+To keep watch for the life of poor Jack.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 18th Aug.]</p>
+<p>The weather had been very gentle all night, and, about four in
+the morning of the 18th, the <i>Smeaton</i> anchored.&nbsp;
+Agreeably to an arranged plan of operations, all hands were
+called at five o&rsquo;clock a.m., just as the highest part of
+the Bell Rock began to show its sable head among the light
+breakers, which occasionally whitened with the foaming sea.&nbsp;
+The two boats belonging to the floating light attended the
+<i>Smeaton</i>, to carry the artificers to the rock, as her boat
+could only accommodate about six or eight sitters.&nbsp; Every
+one was more eager than his neighbour to leap into the boats and
+it required a good deal of management on the part of the
+coxswains to get men unaccustomed to a boat to take their places
+for rowing and at the same time trimming her properly.&nbsp; The
+landing-master and foreman went into one boat, while the writer
+took charge of another, and steered it to and from the
+rock.&nbsp; This became the more necessary in the early stages of
+the work, as places could not be spared for more than two, or at
+most three seamen to each boat, who were always stationed, one at
+the bow, to use the boat-hook in fending or pushing off, and the
+other at the aftermost oar, to give the proper time in rowing,
+while the middle oars were double-banked, and rowed by the
+artificers.</p>
+<p>As the weather was extremely fine, with light airs of wind
+from the east, we landed without difficulty upon the central part
+of the rock at half-past five, but the water had not yet
+sufficiently left it for commencing the work.&nbsp; This
+interval, however, did not pass unoccupied.&nbsp; The first and
+last of all the principal operations at the Bell Rock were
+accompanied by three hearty cheers from all hands, and, on
+occasions like the present, the steward of the ship attended,
+when each man was regaled with a glass of rum.&nbsp; As the water
+left the rock about six, some began to bore the holes for the
+great bats or holdfasts, for fixing the beams of the
+Beacon-house, while the smith was fully attended in laying out
+the site of his forge, upon a somewhat sheltered spot of the
+rock, which also recommended itself from the vicinity of a pool
+of water for tempering his irons.&nbsp; These preliminary steps
+occupied about an hour, and as nothing further could be done
+during this tide towards fixing the forge, the workmen gratified
+their curiosity by roaming about the rock, which they
+investigated with great eagerness till the tide overflowed
+it.&nbsp; Those who had been sick picked dulse (<i>Fucus
+palmatus</i>), which they ate with much seeming appetite; others
+were more intent upon collecting limpets for bait, to enjoy the
+amusement of fishing when they returned on board of the
+vessel.&nbsp; Indeed, none came away empty-handed, as everything
+found upon the Bell Rock was considered valuable, being connected
+with some interesting association.&nbsp; Several coins, and
+numerous bits of shipwrecked iron, were picked up, of almost
+every description; and, in particular, a marking-iron lettered
+<span class="smcap">James</span>&mdash;a circumstance of which it
+was thought proper to give notice to the public, as it might lead
+to the knowledge of some unfortunate shipwreck, perhaps unheard
+of till this simple occurrence led to the discovery.&nbsp; When
+the rock began to be overflowed, the landing-master arranged the
+crews of the respective boats, appointing twelve persons to
+each.&nbsp; According to a rule which the writer had laid down to
+himself, he was always the last person who left the rock.</p>
+<p>In a short time the Bell Rock was laid completely under water,
+and the weather being extremely fine, the sea was so smooth that
+its place could not be pointed out from the appearance of the
+surface&mdash;a circumstance which sufficiently demonstrates the
+dangerous nature of this rock, even during the day, and in the
+smoothest and calmest state of the sea.&nbsp; During the interval
+between the morning and the evening tides, the artificers were
+variously employed in fishing and reading; others were busy in
+drying and adjusting their wet clothes, and one or two amused
+their companions with the violin and German flute.</p>
+<p>About seven in the evening the signal bell for landing on the
+rock was again rung, when every man was at his quarters.&nbsp; In
+this service it was thought more appropriate to use the bell than
+to <i>pipe</i> to quarters, as the use of this instrument is less
+known to the mechanic than the sound of the bell.&nbsp; The
+landing, as in the morning, was at the eastern harbour.&nbsp;
+During this tide the seaweed was pretty well cleared from the
+site of the operations, and also from the tracks leading to the
+different landing-places; for walking upon the rugged surface of
+the Bell Rock, when covered with seaweed, was found to be
+extremely difficult and even dangerous.&nbsp; Every hand that
+could possibly be occupied now employed in assisting the smith to
+fit up the apparatus for his forge.&nbsp; At 9 p.m. the boats
+returned to the tender, after other two hours&rsquo; work, in the
+same order as formerly&mdash;perhaps as much gratified with the
+success that attended the work of this day as with any other in
+the whole course of the operations.&nbsp; Although it could not
+he said that the fatigues of this day had been great, yet all on
+board retired early to rest.&nbsp; The sea being calm, and no
+movement on deck, it was pretty generally remarked in the morning
+that the bell awakened the greater number on board from their
+first sleep; and though this observation was not altogether
+applicable to the writer himself, yet he was not a little pleased
+to find that thirty people could all at once become so reconciled
+to a night&rsquo;s quarters within a few hundred paces of the
+Bell Rock.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Wednesday, 19th Aug.]</p>
+<p>Being extremely anxious at this time to get forward with
+fixing the smith&rsquo;s forge, on which the progress of the work
+at present depended, the writer requested that he might be called
+at daybreak to learn the landing-master&rsquo;s opinion of the
+weather from the appearance of the rising sun, a criterion by
+which experienced seamen can generally judge pretty accurately of
+the state of the weather for the following day.&nbsp; About five
+o&rsquo;clock, on coming upon deck, the sun&rsquo;s upper limb or
+disc had just begun to appear as if rising from the ocean, and in
+less than a minute he was seen in the fullest splendour; but
+after a short interval he was enveloped in a soft cloudy sky,
+which was considered emblematical of fine weather.&nbsp; His rays
+had not yet sufficiently dispelled the clouds which hid the land
+from view, and the Bell Rock being still overflowed, the whole
+was one expanse of water.&nbsp; This scene in itself was highly
+gratifying; and, when the morning bell was tolled, we were
+gratified with the happy forebodings of good weather and the
+expectation of having both a morning and an evening tide&rsquo;s
+work on the rock.</p>
+<p>The boat which the writer steered happened to be the last
+which approached the rock at this tide; and, in standing up in
+the stern, while at some distance, to see how the leading boat
+entered the creek, he was astonished to observe something in the
+form of a human figure, in a reclining posture, upon one of the
+ledges of the rock.&nbsp; He immediately steered the boat through
+a narrow entrance to the eastern harbour, with a thousand
+unpleasant sensations in his mind.&nbsp; He thought a vessel or
+boat must have been wrecked upon the rock during the night; and
+it seemed probable that the rock might be strewed with dead
+bodies, a spectacle which could not fail to deter the artificers
+from returning so freely to their work.&nbsp; In the midst of
+these reveries the boat took the ground at an improper
+landing-place; but, without waiting to push her off, he leapt
+upon the rock, and making his way hastily to the spot which had
+privately given him alarm, he had the satisfaction to ascertain
+that he had only been deceived by the peculiar situation and
+aspect of the smith&rsquo;s anvil and block, which very
+completely represented the appearance of a lifeless body upon the
+rock.&nbsp; The writer carefully suppressed his feelings, the
+simple mention of which might have had a bad effect upon the
+artificers, and his haste passed for an anxiety to examine the
+apparatus of the smith&rsquo;s forge, left in an unfinished state
+at evening tide.</p>
+<p>In the course of this morning&rsquo;s work two or three
+apparently distant peals of thunder were heard, and the
+atmosphere suddenly became thick and foggy.&nbsp; But as the
+<i>Smeaton</i>, our present tender, was moored at no great
+distance from the rock, the crew on board continued blowing with
+a horn, and occasionally fired a musket, so that the boats got to
+the ship without difficulty.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Thursday, 20th Aug.]</p>
+<p>The wind this morning inclined from the north-east, and the
+sky had a heavy and cloudy appearance, but the sea was smooth,
+though there was an undulating motion on, the surface, which
+indicated easterly winds, and occasioned a slight surf upon the
+rock.&nbsp; But the boats found no difficulty in landing at the
+western creek at half-past seven, and, after a good tide&rsquo;s
+work, left it again about a quarter from eleven.&nbsp; In the
+evening the artificers landed at half-past seven, and continued
+till half-past eight, having completed the fixing of the
+smith&rsquo;s forge, his vice, and a wooden board or bench, which
+were also batted to a ledge of the rock, to the great joy of all,
+under a salute of three hearty cheers.&nbsp; From an oversight on
+the part of the smith, who had neglected to bring his tinder-box
+and matches from the vessel, the work was prevented from being
+continued for at least an hour longer.</p>
+<p>The smith&rsquo;s shop was, of course, in <i>open space</i>:
+the large bellows were carried to and from the rock every tide,
+for the serviceable condition of which, together with the
+tinder-box, fuel, and embers of the former fire, the smith was
+held responsible.&nbsp; Those who have been placed in situations
+to feel the inconveniency and want of this useful artisan, will
+be able to appreciate his value in a case like the present.&nbsp;
+It often happened, to our annoyance and disappointment, in the
+early state of the work, when the smith was in the middle of a
+<i>favourite heat</i> in making some useful article, or in
+sharpening the tools, after the flood-tide had obliged the
+pickmen to strike work, a sea would come rolling over the rocks,
+dash out the fire, and endanger his indispensable implement, the
+bellows.&nbsp; If the sea was smooth, while the smith often stood
+at work knee-deep in water, the tide rose by imperceptible
+degrees, first cooling the exterior of the fireplace, or hearth,
+and then quietly blackening and extinguishing the fire from
+below.&nbsp; The writer has frequently been amused at the
+perplexing anxiety of the blacksmith when coaxing his fire and
+endeavouring to avert the effects of the rising tide.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 21st Aug.]</p>
+<p>Everything connected with the forge being now completed, the
+artificers found no want of sharp tools, and the work went
+forward with great alacrity and spirit.&nbsp; It was also alleged
+that the rock had a more habitable appearance from the volumes of
+smoke which ascended from the smith&rsquo;s shop and the busy
+noise of his anvil, the operations of the masons, the movements
+of the boats, and shipping at a distance&mdash;all contributed to
+give life and activity to the scene.&nbsp; This noise and traffic
+had, however, the effect of almost completely banishing the herd
+of seals which had hitherto frequented the rock as a
+resting-place during the period of low water.&nbsp; The rock
+seemed to be peculiarly adapted to their habits, for, excepting
+two or three days at neap-tides, a part of it always dries at low
+water&mdash;at least, during the summer season&mdash;and as there
+was good fishing-ground in the neighbourhood, without a human
+being to disturb or molest them, it had become a very favourite
+residence of these amphibious animals, the writer having
+occasionally counted from fifty to sixty playing about the rock
+at a time.&nbsp; But when they came to be disturbed every tide,
+and their seclusion was broken in upon by the kindling of great
+fires, together with the beating of hammers and picks during low
+water, after hovering about for a time, they changed their place,
+and seldom more than one or two were to be seen about the rock
+upon the more detached outlayers which dry partially, whence they
+seemed to look with that sort of curiosity which is observable in
+these animals when following a boat.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Saturday, 22nd Aug.]</p>
+<p>Hitherto the artificers had remained on board the
+<i>Smeaton</i>, which was made fast to one of the mooring buoys
+at a distance only of about a quarter of a mile from the rock,
+and, of course, a very great conveniency to the work.&nbsp; Being
+so near, the seamen could never be mistaken as to the progress of
+the tide, or state of the sea upon the rock, nor could the boats
+be much at a loss to pull on board of the vessel during fog, or
+even in very rough weather; as she could be cast loose from her
+moorings at pleasure, and brought to the lee side of the
+rock.&nbsp; But the <i>Smeaton</i> being only about forty
+register tons, her accommodations were extremely limited.&nbsp;
+It may, therefore, be easily imagined that an addition of
+twenty-four persons to her own crew must have rendered the
+situation of those on board rather uncomfortable.&nbsp; The only
+place for the men&rsquo;s hammocks on board being in the hold,
+they were unavoidably much crowded: and if the weather had
+required the hatches to be fastened down, so great a number of
+men could not possibly have been accommodated.&nbsp; To add to
+this evil, the <i>co-boose</i> or cooking-place being upon deck,
+it would not have been possible to have cooked for so large a
+company in the event of bad weather.</p>
+<p>The stock of water was now getting short, and some necessaries
+being also wanted for the floating light, the <i>Smeaton</i> was
+despatched for Arbroath; and the writer, with the artificers at
+the same time shifted their quarters from her to the floating
+light.</p>
+<p>Although the rock barely made its appearance at this period of
+the tides till eight o&rsquo;clock, yet, having now a full mile
+to row from the floating light to the rock, instead of about a
+quarter of a mile from the moorings of the <i>Smeaton</i>, it was
+necessary to be earlier astir, and to form different
+arrangements; breakfast was accordingly served up at seven
+o&rsquo;clock this morning.&nbsp; From the excessive motion of
+the floating light, the writer had looked forward rather with
+anxiety to the removal of the workmen to this ship.&nbsp; Some
+among them, who had been congratulating themselves upon having
+become sea-hardy while on board the <i>Smeaton</i>, had a
+complete relapse upon returning to the floating light.&nbsp; This
+was the case with the writer.&nbsp; From the spacious and
+convenient berthage of the floating light, the exchange to the
+artificers was, in this respect, much for the better.&nbsp; The
+boats were also commodious, measuring sixteen feet in length on
+the keel, so that, in fine weather, their complement of sitters
+was sixteen persons for each, with which, however, they were
+rather crowded, but she could not stow two boats of larger
+dimensions.&nbsp; When there was what is called a breeze of wind,
+and a swell in the sea, the proper number for each boat could
+not, with propriety, be rated at more than twelve persons.</p>
+<p>When the tide-bell rung the boats were hoisted out, and two
+active seamen were employed to keep them from receiving damage
+alongside.&nbsp; The floating light being very buoyant, was so
+quick in her motions that when those who were about to step from
+her gunwale into a boat, placed themselves upon a cleat or step
+on the ship&rsquo;s side, with the man or rail ropes in their
+hands, they had often to wait for some time till a favourable
+opportunity occurred for stepping into the boat.&nbsp; While in
+this situation, with the vessel rolling from side to side,
+watching the proper time for letting go the man-ropes, it
+required the greatest dexterity and presence of mind to leap into
+the boats.&nbsp; One who was rather awkward would often wait a
+considerable period in this position: at one time his side of the
+ship would be so depressed that he would touch the boat to which
+he belonged, while the next sea would elevate him so much that he
+would see his comrades in the boat on the opposite side of the
+ship, his friends in the one boat calling to him to
+&lsquo;Jump,&rsquo; while those in the boat on the other side, as
+he came again and again into their view, would jocosely say,
+&lsquo;Are you there yet?&nbsp; You seem to enjoy a
+swing.&rsquo;&nbsp; In this situation it was common to see a
+person upon each side of the ship for a length of time, waiting
+to quit his hold.</p>
+<p>On leaving the rock to-day a trial of seamanship was proposed
+amongst the rowers, for by this time the artificers had become
+tolerably expert in this exercise.&nbsp; By inadvertency some of
+the oars provided had been made of fir instead of ash, and
+although a considerable stock had been laid in, the workmen,
+being at first awkward in the art, were constantly breaking their
+oars; indeed it was no uncommon thing to see the broken blades of
+a pair of oars floating astern, in the course of a passage from
+the rock to the vessel.&nbsp; The men, upon the whole, had but
+little work to perform in the course of a day; for though they
+exerted themselves extremely hard while on the rock, yet, in the
+early state of the operations, this could not be continued for
+more than three or four hours at a time, and as their rations
+were large&mdash;consisting of one pound and a half of beef, one
+pound of ship biscuit, eight ounces oatmeal, two ounces barley,
+two ounces butter, three quarts of small beer, with vegetables
+and salt&mdash;they got into excellent spirits when free of
+sea-sickness.&nbsp; The rowing of the boats against each other
+became a favourite amusement, which was rather a fortunate
+circumstance, as it must have been attended with much
+inconvenience had it been found necessary to employ a sufficient
+number of sailors for this purpose.&nbsp; The writer, therefore,
+encouraged the spirit of emulation, and the speed of their
+respective boats became a favourite topic.&nbsp; Premiums for
+boat-races were instituted, which were contended for with great
+eagerness, and the respective crews kept their stations in the
+boats with as much precision as they kept their beds on board of
+the ship.&nbsp; With these and other pastimes, when the weather
+was favourable, the time passed away among the inmates of the
+forecastle and waist of the ship.&nbsp; The writer looks back
+with interest upon the hours of solitude which he spent in this
+lonely ship with his small library.</p>
+<p>This being the first Saturday that the artificers were afloat,
+all hands were served with a glass of rum and water at night, to
+drink the sailors&rsquo; favourite toast of &lsquo;Wives and
+Sweethearts.&rsquo;&nbsp; It was customary, upon these occasions,
+for the seamen and artificers to collect in the galley, when the
+musical instruments were put in requisition: for, according to
+invariable practice, every man must play a tune, sing a song, or
+tell a story.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 23rd Aug.]</p>
+<p>Having, on the previous evening, arranged matters with the
+landing-master as to the business of the day, the signal was rung
+for all hands at half-past seven this morning.&nbsp; In the early
+state of the spring-tides the artificers went to the rock before
+breakfast, but as the tides fell later in the day, it became
+necessary to take this meal before leaving the ship.&nbsp; At
+eight o&rsquo;clock all hands were assembled on the quarter-deck
+for prayers, a solemnity which was gone through in as orderly a
+manner as circumstances would admit.&nbsp; When the weather
+permitted, the flags of the ship were hung up as an awning or
+screen, forming the quarter-deck into a distinct compartment; the
+pendant was also hoisted at the mainmast, and a large ensign flag
+was displayed over the stern; and lastly, the ship&rsquo;s
+companion, or top of the staircase, was covered with the <i>flag
+proper</i> of the Lighthouse Service, on which the Bible was
+laid.&nbsp; A particular toll of the bell called all hands to the
+quarter-deck, when the writer read a chapter of the Bible, and,
+the whole ship&rsquo;s company being uncovered, he also read the
+impressive prayer composed by the Reverend Dr. Brunton, one of
+the ministers of Edinburgh.</p>
+<p>Upon concluding this service, which was attended with becoming
+reverence and attention, all on board retired to their respective
+berths to breakfast, and, at half-past nine, the bell again rung
+for the artificers to take their stations in their respective
+boats.&nbsp; Some demur having been evinced on board about the
+propriety of working on Sunday, which had hitherto been touched
+upon as delicately as possible, all hands being called aft, the
+writer, from the quarter-deck, stated generally the nature of the
+service, expressing his hopes that every man would feel himself
+called upon to consider the erection of a lighthouse on the Bell
+Rock, in every point of view, as a work of necessity and
+mercy.&nbsp; He knew that scruples had existed with some, and
+these had, indeed, been fairly and candidly urged before leaving
+the shore; but it was expected that, after having seen the
+critical nature of the rock, and the necessity of the measure,
+every man would now be satisfied of the propriety of embracing
+all opportunities of landing on the rock when the state of the
+weather would permit.&nbsp; The writer further took them to
+witness that it did not proceed from want of respect for the
+appointments and established forms of religion that he had
+himself adopted the resolution of attending the Bell Rock works
+on the Sunday; but, as he hoped, from a conviction that it was
+his bounden duty, on the strictest principles of morality.&nbsp;
+At the same time it was intimated that, if any were of a
+different opinion, they should be perfectly at liberty to hold
+their sentiments without the imputation of contumacy or
+disobedience; the only difference would be in regard to the
+pay.</p>
+<p>Upon stating this much, he stepped into his boat, requesting
+all who were so disposed to follow him.&nbsp; The sailors, from
+their habits, found no scruple on this subject, and all of the
+artificers, though a little tardy, also embarked, excepting four
+of the masons, who, from the beginning, mentioned that they would
+decline working on Sundays.&nbsp; It may here be noticed that
+throughout the whole of the operations it was observable that the
+men wrought, if possible, with more keenness upon the Sundays
+than at other times from an impression that they were engaged in
+a work of imperious necessity, which required every possible
+exertion.&nbsp; On returning to the floating light, after
+finishing the tide&rsquo;s work, the boats were received by the
+part of the ship&rsquo;s crew left on board with the usual
+attention of handing ropes to the boats and helping the
+artificers on board; but the four masons who had absented
+themselves from the work did not appear upon deck.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Monday, 24th Aug.]</p>
+<p>The boats left the floating light at a quarter-past nine
+o&rsquo;clock this morning, and the work began at three-quarters
+past nine; but as the neap-tides were approaching the working
+time at the rock became gradually shorter, and it was now with
+difficulty that two and a half hours&rsquo; work could be
+got.&nbsp; But so keenly had the workmen entered into the spirit
+of the beacon-house operations, that they continued to bore the
+holes in the rock till some of them were knee-deep in water.</p>
+<p>The operations at this time were entirely directed to the
+erection of the beacon, in which every man felt an equal
+interest, as at this critical period the slightest casualty to
+any of the boats at the rock might have been fatal to himself
+individually, while it was perhaps peculiar to the writer more
+immediately to feel for the safety of the whole.&nbsp; Each log
+or upright beam of the beacon was to be fixed to the rock by two
+strong and massive bats or stanchions of iron.&nbsp; These bats,
+for the fixture of the principal and diagonal beams and bracing
+chains, required fifty-four holes, each measuring two inches in
+diameter and eighteen inches in depth.&nbsp; There had already
+been so considerable a progress made in boring and excavating the
+holes that the writer&rsquo;s hopes of getting the beacon erected
+this year began to be more and more confirmed, although it was
+now advancing towards what was considered the latter end of the
+proper working season at the Bell Rock.&nbsp; The foreman joiner,
+Mr. Francis Watt, was accordingly appointed to attend at the rock
+to-day, when the necessary levels were taken for the step or seat
+of each particular beam of the beacon, that they might be cut to
+their respective lengths, to suit the inequalities of the rock;
+several of the stanchions were also tried into their places, and
+other necessary observations made, to prevent mistakes on the
+application of the apparatus, and to facilitate the operations
+when the beams came to be set up, which would require to be done
+in the course of a single tide.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 25th Aug.]</p>
+<p>We had now experienced an almost unvaried tract of light airs
+of easterly wind, with clear weather in the fore-part of the day
+and fog in the evenings.&nbsp; To-day, however, it sensibly
+changed; when the wind came to the south-west, and blew a fresh
+breeze.&nbsp; At nine a.m. the bell rung, and the boats were
+hoisted out, and though the artificers were now pretty well
+accustomed to tripping up and down the sides of the floating
+light, yet it required more seamanship this morning than
+usual.&nbsp; It therefore afforded some merriment to those who
+had got fairly seated in their respective boats to see the
+difficulties which attended their companions, and the hesitating
+manner in which they quitted hold of the man-ropes in leaving the
+ship.&nbsp; The passage to the rock was tedious, and the boats
+did not reach it till half-past ten.</p>
+<p>It being now the period of neap-tides, the water only
+partially left the rock, and some of the men who were boring on
+the lower ledges of the site of the beacon stood knee-deep in
+water.&nbsp; The situation of the smith to-day was particularly
+disagreeable, but his services were at all times
+indispensable.&nbsp; As the tide did not leave the site of the
+forge, he stood in the water, and as there was some roughness on
+the surface it was with considerable difficulty that, with the
+assistance of the sailors, he was enabled to preserve alive his
+fire; and, while his feet were immersed in water, his face was
+not only scorched but continually exposed to volumes of smoke,
+accompanied with sparks from the fire, which were occasionally
+set up owing to the strength and direction of the wind.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Wednesday, 26th Aug.]</p>
+<p>The wind had shifted this morning to N.N.W., with rain, and
+was blowing what sailors call a fresh breeze.&nbsp; To speak,
+perhaps, somewhat more intelligibly to the general reader, the
+wind was such that a fishing-boat could just carry full
+sail.&nbsp; But as it was of importance, specially in the outset
+of the business, to keep up the spirit of enterprise for landing
+on all practicable occasions, the writer, after consulting with
+the landing-master, ordered the bell to be rung for embarking,
+and at half-past eleven the boats reached the rock, and left it
+again at a quarter-past twelve, without, however, being able to
+do much work, as the smith could not be set to work from the
+smallness of the ebb and the strong breach of sea, which lashed
+with great force among the bars of the forge.</p>
+<p>Just as we were about to leave the rock the wind shifted to
+the S.W., and, from a fresh gale, it became what seamen term a
+hard gale, or such as would have required the fisherman to take
+in two or three reefs in his sail.&nbsp; It is a curious fact
+that the respective tides of ebb and flood are apparent upon the
+shore about an hour and a half sooner than at the distance of
+three or four miles in the offing.&nbsp; But what seems chiefly
+interesting here is that the tides around this small sunken rock
+should follow exactly the same laws as on the extensive shores of
+the mainland.&nbsp; When the boats left the Bell Rock to-day it
+was overflowed by the flood-tide, but the floating light did not
+swing round to the flood-tide for more than an hour
+afterwards.&nbsp; Under this disadvantage the boats had to
+struggle with the ebb-tide and a hard gale of wind, so that it
+was with the greatest difficulty that they reached the floating
+light.&nbsp; Had this gale happened in spring-tides when the
+current was strong we must have been driven to sea in a very
+helpless condition.</p>
+<p>The boat which the writer steered was considerably behind the
+other, one of the masons having unluckily broken his oar.&nbsp;
+Our prospect of getting on board, of course, became doubtful, and
+our situation was rather perilous, as the boat shipped so much
+sea that it occupied two of the artificers to bale and clear her
+of water.&nbsp; When the oar gave way we were about half a mile
+from the ship, but, being fortunately to windward, we got into
+the wake of the floating light, at about 250 fathoms astern, just
+as the landing-master&rsquo;s boat reached the vessel.&nbsp; He
+immediately streamed or floated a life-buoy astern, with a line
+which was always in readiness, and by means of this useful
+implement the boat was towed alongside of the floating light,
+where, from her rolling motion, it required no small management
+to get safely on board, as the men were much worn out with their
+exertions in pulling from the rock.&nbsp; On the present occasion
+the crews of both boats were completely drenched with spray, and
+those who sat upon the bottom of the boats to bale them were
+sometimes pretty deep in the water before it could be cleared
+out.&nbsp; After getting on board, all hands were allowed an
+extra dram, and, having shifted and got a warm and comfortable
+dinner, the affair, it is believed, was little more thought
+of.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Thursday, 27th Aug.]</p>
+<p>The tides were now in that state which sailors term the dead
+of the neap, and it was not expected that any part of the rock
+would be seen above water to-day; at any rate, it was obvious,
+from the experience of yesterday, that no work could be done upon
+it, and therefore the artificers were not required to land.&nbsp;
+The wind was at west, with light breezes, and fine clear weather;
+and as it was an object with the writer to know the actual state
+of the Bell Rock at neap-tides, he got one of the boats manned,
+and, being accompanied by the landing-master, went to it at a
+quarter-past twelve.&nbsp; The parts of the rock that appeared
+above water being very trifling, were covered by every wave, so
+that no landing was made.&nbsp; Upon trying the depth of water
+with a boathook, particularly on the sites of the lighthouse and
+beacon, on the former, at low water, the depth was found to be
+three feet, and on the central parts of the latter it was
+ascertained to be two feet eight inches.&nbsp; Having made these
+remarks, the boat returned to the ship at two p.m., and the
+weather being good, the artificers were found amusing themselves
+with fishing.&nbsp; The <i>Smeaton</i> came from Arbroath this
+afternoon, and made fast to her moorings, having brought letters
+and newspapers, with parcels of clean linen, etc., for the
+workmen, who were also made happy by the arrival of three of
+their comrades from the workyard ashore.&nbsp; From these men
+they not only received all the news of the workyard, but seemed
+themselves to enjoy great pleasure in communicating whatever they
+considered to be interesting with regard to the rock.&nbsp; Some
+also got letters from their friends at a distance, the postage of
+which for the men afloat was always free, so that they
+corresponded the more readily.</p>
+<p>The site of the building having already been carefully traced
+out with the pick-axe, the artificers this day commenced the
+excavation of the rock for the foundation or first course of the
+lighthouse.&nbsp; Four men only were employed at this work, while
+twelve continued at the site of the beacon-house, at which every
+possible opportunity was embraced, till this essential art of the
+operations should be completed.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Wednesday, 2nd Sept.]</p>
+<p>The floating light&rsquo;s bell rung this morning at half-past
+four o&rsquo;clock, as a signal for the boats to be got ready,
+and the landing took place at half-past five.&nbsp; In passing
+the <i>Smeaton</i> at her moorings near the rock, her boat
+followed with eight additional artificers who had come from
+Arbroath with her at last trip, but there being no room for them
+in the floating light&rsquo;s boats, they had continued on
+board.&nbsp; The weather did not look very promising in the
+morning, the wind blowing pretty fresh from W.S.W.: and had it
+not been that the writer calculated upon having a vessel so much
+at command, in all probability he would not have ventured to
+land.&nbsp; The <i>Smeaton</i> rode at what sailors call a
+<i>salvagee</i>, with a cross-head made fast to the floating
+buoy.&nbsp; This kind of attachment was found to be more
+convenient than the mode of passing the hawser through the ring
+of the buoy when the vessel was to be made fast.&nbsp; She had
+then only to be steered very close to the buoy, when the salvagee
+was laid hold of with a boat-hook, and the <i>bite</i> of the
+hawser thrown over the cross-head.&nbsp; But the salvagee, by
+this method, was always left at the buoy, and was, of course,
+more liable to chafe and wear than a hawser passed through the
+ring, which could be wattled with canvas, and shifted at
+pleasure.&nbsp; The salvagee and cross method is, however, much
+practised; but the experience of this morning showed it to be
+very unsuitable for vessels riding in an exposed situation for
+any length of time.</p>
+<p>Soon after the artificers landed they commenced work; but the
+wind coming to blow hard, the <i>Smeaton&rsquo;s</i> boat and
+crew, who had brought their complement of eight men to the rock,
+went off to examine her riding ropes, and see that they were in
+proper order.&nbsp; The boat had no sooner reached the vessel
+than she went adrift, carrying the boat along with her.&nbsp; By
+the time that she was got round to make a tack towards the rock,
+she had drifted at least three miles to leeward, with the
+praam-boat astern; and, having both the wind and a tide against
+her, the writer perceived, with no little anxiety, that she could
+not possibly return to the rock till long after its being
+overflowed; for, owing to the anomaly of the tides formerly
+noticed, the Bell Rock is completely under water when the ebb
+abates to the offing.</p>
+<p>In this perilous predicament, indeed, he found himself placed
+between hope and despair&mdash;but certainly the latter was by
+much the most predominant feeling of his mind&mdash;situate upon
+a sunken rock in the middle of the ocean, which, in the progress
+of the flood-tide, was to be laid under water to the depth of at
+least twelve feet in a stormy sea.&nbsp; There were this morning
+thirty-two persons in all upon the rock, with only two boats,
+whose complement, even in good weather, did not exceed
+twenty-four sitters; but to row to the floating light with so
+much wind, and in so heavy a sea, a complement of eight men for
+each boat was as much as could, with propriety, be attempted, so
+that, in this way, about one-half of our number was unprovided
+for.&nbsp; Under these circumstances, had the writer ventured to
+despatch one of the boats in expectation of either working the
+<i>Smeaton</i> sooner up towards the rock, or in hopes of getting
+her boat brought to our assistance, this must have given an
+immediate alarm to the artificers, each of whom would have
+insisted upon taking to his own boat, and leaving the eight
+artificers belonging to the <i>Smeaton</i> to their chance.&nbsp;
+Of course a scuffle might have ensued, and it is hard to say, in
+the ardour of men contending for life, where it might have
+ended.&nbsp; It has even been hinted to the writer that a party
+of the <i>pickmen</i> were determined to keep exclusively to
+their own boat against all hazards.</p>
+<p>The unfortunate circumstance of the <i>Smeaton</i> and her
+boat having drifted was, for a considerable time, only known to
+the writer and to the landing-master, who removed to the farther
+point of the rock, where he kept his eye steadily upon the
+progress of the vessel.&nbsp; While the artificers were at work,
+chiefly in sitting or kneeling postures, excavating the rock, or
+boring with the jumpers, and while their numerous hammers, with
+the sound of the smith&rsquo;s anvil, continued, the situation of
+things did not appear so awful.&nbsp; In this state of suspense,
+with almost certain destruction at hand, the water began to rise
+upon those who were at work on the lower parts of the sites of
+the beacon and lighthouse.&nbsp; From the run of sea upon the
+rock, the forge fire was also sooner extinguished this morning
+than usual, and the volumes of smoke having ceased, objects in
+every direction became visible from all parts of the rock.&nbsp;
+After having had about three &lsquo;hours&rsquo; work, the men
+began, pretty generally, to make towards their respective boats
+for their jackets and stockings, when, to their astonishment,
+instead of three, they found only two boats, the third being
+adrift with the <i>Smeaton</i>.&nbsp; Not a word was uttered by
+any one, but all appeared to be silently calculating their
+numbers, and looking to each other with evident marks of
+perplexity depicted in their countenances.&nbsp; The
+landing-master, conceiving that blame might be attached to him
+for allowing the boat to leave the rock, still kept at a
+distance.&nbsp; At this critical moment the author was standing
+upon an elevated part of Smith&rsquo;s Ledge, where he
+endeavoured to mark the progress of the <i>Smeaton</i>, not a
+little surprised that her crew did not cut the praam adrift,
+which greatly retarded her way, and amazed that some effort was
+not making to bring at least the boat, and attempt our
+relief.&nbsp; The workmen looked steadfastly upon the writer, and
+turned occasionally towards the vessel, still far to leeward. <a
+name="citation122a"></a><a href="#footnote122a"
+class="citation">[122a]</a>&nbsp; All this passed in the most
+perfect silence, and the melancholy solemnity of the group made
+an impression never to be effaced from his mind.</p>
+<p>The writer had all along been considering of various
+schemes&mdash;providing the men could be kept under
+command&mdash;which might be put in practice for the general
+safety, in hopes that the <i>Smeaton</i> might be able to pick up
+the boats to leeward, when they were obliged to leave the
+rock.&nbsp; He was, accordingly, about to address the artificers
+on the perilous nature of their circumstances, and to propose
+that all hands should unstrip their upper clothing when the
+higher parts of the rock were laid under water; that the seamen
+should remove every unnecessary weight and encumbrance from the
+boats; that a specified number of men should go into each boat,
+and that the remainder should hang by the gunwales, while the
+boats were to be rowed gently towards the <i>Smeaton</i>, as the
+course to the <i>Pharos</i>, or floating light, lay rather to
+windward of the rock.&nbsp; But when he attempted to speak his
+mouth was so parched that his tongue refused utterance, and he
+now learned by experience that the saliva is as necessary as the
+tongue itself for speech.&nbsp; He turned to one of the pools on
+the rock and lapped a little water, which produced immediate
+relief.&nbsp; But what was his happiness, when on rising from
+this unpleasant beverage, some one called out, &lsquo;A boat! a
+boat!&rsquo; and, on looking around, at no great distance, a
+large boat was seen through the haze making towards the
+rock.&nbsp; This at once enlivened and rejoiced every
+heart.&nbsp; The timeous visitor proved to be James Spink, the
+Bell Rock pilot, who had come express from Arbroath with
+letters.&nbsp; Spink had for some time seen the <i>Smeaton</i>,
+and had even supposed, from the state of the weather, that all
+hands were on board of her till he approached more nearly and
+observed people upon the rock; but not supposing that the
+assistance of his boat was necessary to carry the artificers off
+the rock, he anchored on the lee-side and began to fish, waiting,
+as usual, till the letters were sent for, as the pilot-boat was
+too large and unwieldy for approaching the rock when there was
+any roughness or run of the sea at the entrance of the landing
+creeks.</p>
+<p>Upon this fortunate change of circumstances, sixteen of the
+artificers were sent, at two trips, in one of the boats, with
+instructions for Spink to proceed with them to the floating
+light.&nbsp; This being accomplished, the remaining sixteen
+followed in the two boats belonging to the service of the
+rock.&nbsp; Every one felt the most perfect happiness at leaving
+the Bell Rock this morning, though a very hard and even dangerous
+passage to the floating light still awaited us, as the wind by
+this time had increased to a pretty hard gale, accompanied with a
+considerable swell of sea.&nbsp; Every one was as completely
+drenched in water as if he had been dragged astern of the
+boats.&nbsp; The writer, in particular, being at the helm, found,
+on getting on board, that his face and ears were completely
+coated with a thin film of salt from the sea spray, which broke
+constantly over the bows of the boat.&nbsp; After much baling of
+water and severe work at the oars, the three boats reached the
+floating light, where some new difficulties occurred in getting
+on board in safety, owing partly to the exhausted state of the
+men, and partly to the violent rolling of the vessel.</p>
+<p>As the tide flowed, it was expected that the <i>Smeaton</i>
+would have got to windward; but, seeing that all was safe, after
+tacking for several hours and making little progress, she bore
+away for Arbroath, with the praam-boat.&nbsp; As there was now
+too much wind for the pilot-boat to return to Arbroath, she was
+made fast astern of the floating light, and the crew remained on
+board till next day, when the weather moderated.&nbsp; There can
+be very little doubt that the appearance of James Spink with his
+boat on this critical occasion was the means of preventing the
+loss of lives at the rock this morning.&nbsp; When these
+circumstances, some years afterwards, came to the knowledge of
+the Board, a small pension was ordered to our faithful pilot,
+then in his seventieth year; and he still continues to wear the
+uniform clothes and badge of the Lighthouse service.&nbsp; Spink
+is a remarkably strong man, whose <i>tout ensemble</i> is highly
+characteristic of a North-country fisherman.&nbsp; He usually
+dresses in a <i>p&eacute;-jacket</i>, cut after a particular
+fashion, and wears a large, flat, blue bonnet.&nbsp; A striking
+likeness of Spink in his pilot-dress, with the badge or insignia
+on his left arm which is characteristic of the boatmen in the
+service of the Northern Lights, has been taken by Howe, and is in
+the writer&rsquo;s possession.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Thursday, 3rd Sept.]</p>
+<p>The bell rung this morning at five o&rsquo;clock, but the
+writer must acknowledge, from the circumstances of yesterday,
+that its sound was extremely unwelcome.&nbsp; This appears also
+to have been the feelings of the artificers, for when they came
+to be mustered, out of twenty-six, only eight, besides the
+foreman and seamen, appeared upon deck to accompany the writer to
+the rock.&nbsp; Such are the baneful effects of anything like
+misfortune or accident connected with a work of this
+description.&nbsp; The use of argument to persuade the men to
+embark in cases of this kind would have been out of place, as it
+is not only discomfort, or even the risk of the loss of a limb,
+but life itself that becomes the question.&nbsp; The boats,
+notwithstanding the thinness of our ranks, left the vessel at
+half-past five.&nbsp; The rough weather of yesterday having
+proved but a summer&rsquo;s gale, the wind came to-day in gentle
+breezes; yet, the atmosphere being cloudy, it a not a very
+favourable appearance.&nbsp; The boats reached the rock at six
+a.m., and the eight artificers who landed were employed in
+clearing out the bat-holes for the beacon-house, and had a very
+prosperous tide of four hours&rsquo; work, being the longest yet
+experienced by half an hour.</p>
+<p>The boats left the rock again at ten o&rsquo;clock, and the
+weather having cleared up as we drew near the vessel, the
+eighteen artificers who had remained on board were observed upon
+deck, but as the boats approached they sought their way below,
+being quite ashamed of their conduct.&nbsp; This was the only
+instance of refusal to go to the rock which occurred during the
+whole progress of the work, excepting that of the four men who
+declined working upon Sunday, a case which the writer did not
+conceive to be at all analogous to the present.&nbsp; It may here
+be mentioned, much to the credit of these four men, that they
+stood foremost in embarking for the rock this morning.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Saturday, 5th Sept.]</p>
+<p>It was fortunate that a landing was not attempted this
+evening, for at eight o&rsquo;clock the wind shifted to E.S.E.,
+and at ten it had become a hard gale, when fifty fathoms of the
+floating light&rsquo;s hempen cable were veered out.&nbsp; The
+gale still increasing, the ship rolled and laboured excessively,
+and at midnight eighty fathoms of cable were veered out; while
+the sea continued to strike the vessel with a degree of force
+which had not before been experienced.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 6th Sept.]</p>
+<p>During the last night there was little rest on board of the
+<i>Pharos</i>, and daylight, though anxiously wished for, brought
+no relief, as the gale continued with unabated violence.&nbsp;
+The sea struck so hard upon the vessel&rsquo;s bows that it rose
+in great quantities, or in &lsquo;green seas,&rsquo; as the
+sailors termed it, which were carried by the wind as far aft as
+the quarter-deck, and not infrequently over the stern of the ship
+altogether.&nbsp; It fell occasionally so heavily on the skylight
+of the writer&rsquo;s cabin, though so far aft as to be within
+five feet of the helm, that the glass was broken to pieces before
+the dead-light could be got into its place, so that the water
+poured down in great quantities.&nbsp; In shutting out the water,
+the admission of light was prevented, and in the morning all
+continued in the most comfortless state of darkness.&nbsp; About
+ten o&rsquo;clock a.m. the wind shifted to N.E., and blew, if
+possible, harder than before, and it was accompanied by a much
+heavier swell of sea.&nbsp; In the course of the gale, the part
+of the cable in the hause-hole had been so often shifted that
+nearly the whole length of one of her hempen cables, of 120
+fathoms, had been veered out, besides the chain-moorings.&nbsp;
+The cable, for its preservation, was also carefully served or
+wattled with pieces of canvas round the windlass, and with
+leather well greased in the hause-hole.&nbsp; In this state
+things remained during the whole day, every sea which struck the
+vessel&mdash;and the seas followed each other in close
+succession&mdash;causing her to shake, and all on board
+occasionally to tremble.&nbsp; At each of these strokes of the
+sea the rolling and pitching of the vessel ceased for a time, and
+her motion was felt as if she had either broke adrift before the
+wind or were in the act of sinking; but, when another sea came,
+she ranged up against it with great force, and this became the
+regular intimation of our being still riding at anchor.</p>
+<p>About eleven o&rsquo;clock, the writer with some difficulty
+got out of bed, but, in attempting to dress, he was thrown twice
+upon the floor at the opposite end of the cabin.&nbsp; In an
+undressed state he made shift to get about half-way up the
+companion-stairs, with an intention to observe the state of the
+sea and of the ship upon deck; but he no sooner looked over the
+companion than a heavy sea struck the vessel, which fell on the
+quarter-deck, and rushed downstairs in the officers&rsquo; cabin
+in so considerable a quantity that it was found necessary to lift
+one of the scuttles in the floor, to let the water into the
+limbers of the ship, as it dashed from side to side in such a
+manner as to run into the lower tier of beds.&nbsp; Having been
+foiled in this attempt, and being completely wetted, he again got
+below and went to bed.&nbsp; In this state of the weather the
+seamen had to move about the necessary or indispensable duties of
+the ship with the most cautious use both of hands and feet, while
+it required all the art of the landsman to keep within the
+precincts of his bed.&nbsp; The writer even found himself so much
+tossed about that it became necessary, in some measure, to shut
+himself in bed, in order to avoid being thrown upon the
+floor.&nbsp; Indeed, such was the motion of the ship that it
+seemed wholly impracticable to remain in any other than a lying
+posture.&nbsp; On deck the most stormy aspect presented itself,
+while below all was wet and comfortless.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;About two o&rsquo;clock p.m. a great alarm was given
+throughout the ship from the effects of a very heavy sea which
+struck her, and almost filled the waist, pouring down into the
+berths below, through every chink and crevice of the hatches and
+skylights.&nbsp; From the motion of the vessel being thus
+suddenly deadened or checked, and from the flowing in of the
+water above, it is believed there was not an individual on board
+who did not think, at the moment, that the vessel had foundered,
+and was in the act of sinking.&nbsp; The writer could withstand
+this no longer, and as soon as she again began to range to the
+sea he determined to make another effort to get upon deck.&nbsp;
+In the first instance, however, he groped his way in darkness
+from his own cabin through the berths of the officers, where all
+was quietness.&nbsp; He next entered the galley and other
+compartments occupied by the artificers.&nbsp; Here also all was
+shut up in darkness, the fire having been drowned out in the
+early part of the gale.&nbsp; Several of the artificers were
+employed in prayer, repeating psalms and other devotional
+exercises in a full tone of voice; others protesting that, if
+they should fortunately get once more on shore, no one should
+ever see them afloat again.&nbsp; With the assistance of the
+landing-master, the writer made his way, holding on step by step,
+among the numerous impediments which lay in the way.&nbsp; Such
+was the creaking noise of the bulk-heads or partitions, the
+dashing of the water, and the whistling noise of the winds, that
+it was hardly possible to break in upon such a confusion of
+sounds.&nbsp; In one or two instances, anxious and repeated
+inquiries were made by the artificers as to the state of things
+upon deck, to which the captain made the usual answer, that it
+could not blow long in this way, and that we must soon have
+better weather.&nbsp; The next berth in succession, moving
+forward in the ship, was that allotted for the seamen.&nbsp; Here
+the scene was considerably different.&nbsp; Having reached the
+middle of this darksome berth without its inmates being aware of
+any intrusion, the writer had the consolation of remarking that,
+although they talked of bad weather and the cross accidents of
+the sea, yet the conversation was carried on in that sort of tone
+and manner which bespoke an ease and composure of mind highly
+creditable to them and pleasing to him.&nbsp; The writer
+immediately accosted the seamen about the state of the
+ship.&nbsp; To these inquiries they replied that the vessel being
+light, and having but little hold of the water, no top-rigging,
+with excellent ground-tackle, and everything being fresh and new,
+they felt perfect confidence in their situation.</p>
+<p>It being impossible to open any of the hatches in the fore
+part of the ship in communicating with the deck, the watch was
+changed by passing through the several berths to the
+companion-stair leading to the quarter-deck.&nbsp; The writer,
+therefore, made the best of his way aft, and, on a second attempt
+to look out, he succeeded, and saw indeed an astonishing
+sight.&nbsp; The sea or waves appeared to be ten or fifteen feet
+in height of unbroken water, and every approaching billow seemed
+as if it would overwhelm our vessel, but she continued to rise
+upon the waves and to fall between the seas in a very wonderful
+manner.&nbsp; It seemed to be only those seas which caught her in
+the act of rising which struck her with so much violence and
+threw such quantities of water aft.&nbsp; On deck there was only
+one solitary individual looking out, to give the alarm in the
+event of the ship breaking from her moorings.&nbsp; The seaman on
+watch continued only two hours; he who kept watch at this time
+was a tall, slender man of a black complexion; he had no
+greatcoat nor over-all of any kind, but was simply dressed in his
+ordinary jacket and trousers; his hat was tied under his chin
+with a napkin, and he stood aft the foremast, to which he had
+lashed himself with a gasket or small rope round his waist, to
+prevent his falling upon deck or being washed overboard.&nbsp;
+When the writer looked up, he appeared to smile, which afforded a
+further symptom of the confidence of the crew in their
+ship.&nbsp; This person on watch was as completely wetted as if
+he had been drawn through the sea, which was given as a reason
+for his not putting on a greatcoat, that he might wet as few of
+his clothes as possible, and have a dry shift when he went
+below.&nbsp; Upon deck everything that was movable was out of
+sight, having either been stowed below, previous to the gale, or
+been washed overboard.&nbsp; Some trifling parts of the quarter
+boards were damaged by the breach of the sea; and one of the
+boats upon deck was about one-third full of water, the oyle-hole
+or drain having been accidently stopped up, and part of her
+gunwale had received considerable injury.&nbsp; These
+observations were hastily made, and not without occasionally
+shutting the companion, to avoid being wetted by the successive
+seas which broke over the bows and fell upon different parts of
+the deck according to the impetus with which the waves struck the
+vessel.&nbsp; By this time it was about three o&rsquo;clock in
+the afternoon, and the gale, which had now continued with
+unabated force for twenty-seven hours, had not the least
+appearance of going off.</p>
+<p>In the dismal prospect of undergoing another night like the
+last, and being in imminent hazard of parting from our cable, the
+writer thought it necessary to advise with the master and
+officers of the ship as to the probable event of the
+vessel&rsquo;s drifting from her moorings.&nbsp; They severally
+gave it as their opinion that we had now every chance of riding
+out the gale, which, in all probability, could not continue with
+the same fury many hours longer; and that even if she should part
+from her anchor, the storm-sails had been laid to hand, and could
+be bent in a very short time.&nbsp; They further stated that from
+the direction of the wind being N.E., she would sail up the Firth
+of Forth to Leith Roads.&nbsp; But if this should appear
+doubtful, after passing the Island and Light of May, it might be
+advisable at once to steer for Tyningham Sands, on the western
+side of Dunbar, and there run the vessel ashore.&nbsp; If this
+should happen at the time of high-water, or during the ebbing of
+the tide, they were of opinion, from the flatness and strength of
+the floating light, that no danger would attend her taking the
+ground, even with a very heavy sea.&nbsp; The writer, seeing the
+confidence which these gentlemen possessed with regard to the
+situation of things, found himself as much relieved with this
+conversation as he had previously been with the seeming
+indifference of the forecastle men, and the smile of the watch
+upon deck, though literally lashed to the foremast.&nbsp; From
+this time he felt himself almost perfectly at ease; at any rate,
+he was entirely resigned to the ultimate result.</p>
+<p>About six o&rsquo;clock in the evening the ship&rsquo;s
+company was heard moving upon deck, which on the present occasion
+was rather the cause of alarm.&nbsp; The writer accordingly rang
+his bell to know what was the matter, when he was informed by the
+steward that the weather looked considerably better, and that the
+men upon deck were endeavouring to ship the smoke-funnel of the
+galley that the people might get some meat.&nbsp; This was a more
+favourable account than had been anticipated.&nbsp; During the
+last twenty-one hours he himself had not only had nothing to eat,
+but he had almost never passed a thought on the subject.&nbsp;
+Upon the mention of a change of weather, he sent the steward to
+learn how the artificers felt, and on his return he stated that
+they now seemed to be all very happy, since the cook had begun to
+light the galley-fire and make preparations for the suet-pudding
+of Sunday, which was the only dish to be attempted for the mess,
+from the ease with which it could both be cooked and served
+up.</p>
+<p>The principal change felt upon the ship as the wind abated was
+her increased rolling motion, but the pitching was much
+diminished, and now hardly any sea came farther aft than the
+foremast: but she rolled so extremely hard as frequently to dip
+and take in water over the gunwales and rails in the waist.&nbsp;
+By nine o&rsquo;clock all hands had been refreshed by the
+exertions of the cook and steward, and were happy in the prospect
+of the worst of the gale being over.&nbsp; The usual complement
+of men was also now set on watch, and more quietness was
+experienced throughout the ship.&nbsp; Although the previous
+night had been a very restless one, it had not the effect of
+inducing repose in the writer&rsquo;s berth on the succeeding
+night; for having been so much tossed about in bed during the
+last thirty hours, he found no easy spot to turn to, and his body
+was all sore to the touch, which ill accorded with the unyielding
+materials with which his bed-place was surrounded.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Monday, 7th Sept.]</p>
+<p>This morning, about eight o&rsquo;clock, the writer was
+agreeably surprised to see the scuttle of his cabin sky-light
+removed, and the bright rays of the sun admitted.&nbsp; Although
+the ship continued to roll excessively, and the sea was still
+running very high, yet the ordinary business on board seemed to
+be going forward on deck.&nbsp; It was impossible to steady a
+telescope, so as to look minutely at the progress of the waves
+and trace their breach upon the Bell Rock; but the height to
+which the cross-running waves rose in sprays when they met each
+other was truly grand, and the continued roar and noise of the
+sea was very perceptible to the ear.&nbsp; To estimate the height
+of the sprays at forty or fifty feet would surely be within the
+mark.&nbsp; Those of the workmen who were not much afflicted with
+sea-sickness, came upon deck, and the wetness below being dried
+up, the cabins were again brought into a habitable state.&nbsp;
+Every one seemed to meet as if after a long absence,
+congratulating his neighbour upon the return of good
+weather.&nbsp; Little could be said as to the comfort of the
+vessel, but after riding out such a gale, no one felt the least
+doubt or hesitation as to the safety and good condition of her
+moorings.&nbsp; The master and mate were extremely anxious,
+however, to heave in the hempen cable, and see the state of the
+clinch or iron ring of the chain-cable.&nbsp; But the vessel
+rolled at such a rate that the seamen could not possibly keep
+their feet at the windlass nor work the hand-spikes, though it
+had been several times attempted since the gale took off.</p>
+<p>About twelve noon, however, the vessel&rsquo;s motion was
+observed to be considerably less, and the sailors were enabled to
+walk upon deck with some degree of freedom.&nbsp; But, to the
+astonishment of every one, it was soon discovered that the
+floating light was adrift!&nbsp; The windlass was instantly
+manned, and the men soon gave out that there was no strain upon
+the cable.&nbsp; The mizzen sail, which was bent for the
+occasional purpose of making the vessel ride more easily to the
+tide, was immediately set, and the other sails were also hoisted
+in a short time, when, in no small consternation, we bore away
+about one mile to the south-westward of the former station, and
+there let go the best bower anchor and cable in twenty fathoms
+water, to ride until the swell of the sea should fall, when it
+might be practicable to grapple for the moorings, and find a
+better anchorage for the ship.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 15th Sept.]</p>
+<p>This morning, at five a.m., the bell rung as a signal for
+landing upon the rock, a sound which, after a lapse of ten days,
+it is believed was welcomed by every one on board.&nbsp; There
+being a heavy breach of sea at the eastern creek, we landed,
+though not without difficulty, on the western side, every one
+seeming more eager than another to get upon the rock; and never
+did hungry men sit down to a hearty meal with more appetite than
+the artificers began to pick the dulse from the rocks.&nbsp; This
+marine plant had the effect of reviving the sickly, and seemed to
+be no less relished by those who were more hardy.</p>
+<p>While the water was ebbing, and the men were roaming in quest
+of their favourite morsel, the writer was examining the effects
+of the storm upon the forge and loose apparatus left upon the
+rock.&nbsp; Six large blocks of granite which had been landed, by
+way of experiment, on the 1st instant, were now removed from
+their places and, by the force of the sea, thrown over a rising
+ledge into a hole at the distance of twelve or fifteen paces from
+the place on which they had been landed.&nbsp; This was a pretty
+good evidence both of the violence of the storm and the agitation
+of the sea upon the rock.&nbsp; The safety of the smith&rsquo;s
+forge was always an object of essential regard.&nbsp; The ash-pan
+of the hearth or fireplace, with its weighty cast-iron back, had
+been washed from their places of supposed security; the chains of
+attachment had been broken, and these ponderous articles were
+found at a very considerable distance in a hole on the western
+side of the rock; while the tools and picks of the Aberdeen
+masons were scattered about in every direction.&nbsp; It is,
+however, remarkable that not a single article was ultimately
+lost.</p>
+<p>This being the night on which the floating light was
+advertised to be lighted, it was accordingly exhibited, to the
+great joy of every one.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Wednesday, 16th Sept.]</p>
+<p>The writer was made happy to-day by the return of the
+Lighthouse yacht from a voyage to the Northern Lighthouses.&nbsp;
+Having immediately removed on board of this fine vessel of
+eighty-one tons register, the artificers gladly followed; for,
+though they found themselves more pinched for accommodation on
+board of the yacht, and still more so in the <i>Smeaton</i>, yet
+they greatly preferred either of these to the <i>Pharos</i>, or
+floating light, on account of her rolling motion, though in all
+respects fitted up for their conveniency.</p>
+<p>The writer called them to the quarter-deck and informed them
+that, having been one mouth afloat, in terms of their agreement
+they were now at liberty to return to the workyard at Arbroath if
+they preferred this to continuing at the Bell Rock.&nbsp; But
+they replied that, in the prospect of soon getting the beacon
+erected upon the rock, and having made a change from the floating
+light, they were now perfectly reconciled to their situation, and
+would remain afloat till the end of the working season.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Thursday, 17th Sept.]</p>
+<p>The wind was at N.E. this morning, and though they were only
+light airs, yet there was a pretty heavy swell coming ashore upon
+the rock.&nbsp; The boats landed at half-past seven o&rsquo;clock
+a.m., at the creek on the southern side of the rock, marked Port
+Hamilton.&nbsp; But as one of the boats was in the act of
+entering this creek, the seaman at the bow-oar, who had just
+entered the service, having inadvertently expressed some fear
+from a heavy sea which came rolling towards the boat, and one of
+the artificers having at the same time looked round and missed a
+stroke with his oar, such a preponderance was thus given to the
+rowers upon the opposite side that when the wave struck the boat
+it threw her upon a ledge of shelving rocks, where the water left
+her, and she having <i>kanted</i> to seaward, the next wave
+completely filled her with water.&nbsp; After making considerable
+efforts the boat was again got afloat in the proper track of the
+creek, so that we landed without any other accident than a
+complete ducking.&nbsp; There being no possibility of getting a
+shift of clothes, the artificers began with all speed to work, so
+as to bring themselves into heat, while the writer and his
+assistants kept as much as possible in motion.&nbsp; Having
+remained more than an hour upon the rock, the boats left it at
+half-past nine; and, after getting on board, the writer
+recommended to the artificers, as the best mode of getting into a
+state of comfort, to strip off their wet clothes and go to bed
+for an hour or two.&nbsp; No further inconveniency was felt, and
+no one seemed to complain of the affection called &lsquo;catching
+cold.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 18th Sept.]</p>
+<p>An important occurrence connected with the operations of this
+season was the arrival of the <i>Smeaton</i> at four p.m., having
+in tow the six principal beams of the beacon-house, together with
+all the stanchions and other work on board for fixing it on the
+rock.&nbsp; The mooring of the floating light was a great point
+gained, but in the erection of the beacon at this late period of
+the season new difficulties presented themselves.&nbsp; The
+success of such an undertaking at any season was precarious,
+because a single day of bad weather occurring before the
+necessary fixtures could be made might sweep the whole apparatus
+from the rock.&nbsp; Notwithstanding these difficulties, the
+writer had determined to make the trial, although he could almost
+have wished, upon looking at the state of the clouds and the
+direction of the wind, that the apparatus for the beacon had been
+still in the workyard.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Saturday, 19th Sept.]</p>
+<p>The main beams of the beacon were made up in two separate
+rafts, fixed with bars and bolts of iron.&nbsp; One of these
+rafts, not being immediately wanted, was left astern of the
+floating light, and the other was kept in tow by the
+<i>Smeaton</i>, at the buoy nearest to the rock.&nbsp; The
+Lighthouse yacht rode at another buoy with all hands on board
+that could possibly be spared out of the floating light.&nbsp;
+The party of artificers and seamen which landed on the rock
+counted altogether forty in number.&nbsp; At half-past eight
+o&rsquo;clock a derrick, or mast of thirty feet in height, was
+erected and properly supported with guy-ropes, for suspending the
+block for raising the first principal beam of the beacon; and a
+winch machine was also bolted down to the rock for working the
+purchase-tackle.</p>
+<p>Upon raising the derrick, all hands on the rock spontaneously
+gave three hearty cheers, as a favourable omen of our future
+exertions in pointing out more permanently the position of the
+rock.&nbsp; Even to this single spar of timber, could it be
+preserved, a drowning man might lay hold.&nbsp; When the
+<i>Smeaton</i> drifted on the 2nd of this month such a spar would
+have been sufficient to save us till she could have come to our
+relief.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 20th Sept.]</p>
+<p>The wind this morning was variable, but the weather continued
+extremely favourable for the operations throughout the whole
+day.&nbsp; At six a.m. the boats were in motion, and the raft,
+consisting of four of the six principal beams of the
+beacon-house, each measuring about sixteen inches square, and
+fifty feet in length, was towed to the rock, where it was
+anchored, that it might ground upon it as the water ebbed.&nbsp;
+The sailors and artificers, including all hands, to-day counted
+no fewer than fifty-two, being perhaps the greatest number of
+persons ever collected upon the Bell Rock.&nbsp; It was early in
+the tide when the boats reached the rock, and the men worked a
+considerable time up to their middle in water, every one being
+more eager than his neighbour to be useful.&nbsp; Even the four
+artificers who had hitherto declined working on Sunday were
+to-day most zealous in their exertions.&nbsp; They had indeed
+become so convinced of the precarious nature and necessity of the
+work that they never afterwards absented themselves from the rock
+on Sunday when a landing was practicable.</p>
+<p>Having made fast a piece of very good new line, at about
+two-thirds from the lower end of one of the beams, the
+purchase-tackle of the derrick was hooked into the turns of the
+line, and it was speedily raised by the number of men on the rock
+and the power of the winch tackle.&nbsp; When this log was lifted
+to a sufficient height, its foot, or lower end, was
+<i>stepped</i> into the spot which had been previously prepared
+for it.&nbsp; Two of the great iron stanchions were then set in
+their respective holes on each side of the beam, when a rope was
+passed round them and the beam, to prevent it from slipping till
+it could be more permanently fixed.&nbsp; The derrick, or upright
+spar used for carrying the tackle to raise the first beam, was
+placed in such a position as to become useful for supporting the
+upper end of it, which now became, in its turn, the prop of the
+tackle for raising the second beam.&nbsp; The whole difficulty of
+this operation was in the raising and propping of the first beam,
+which became a convenient derrick for raising the second, these
+again a pair of shears for lifting the third, and the shears a
+triangle for raising the fourth.&nbsp; Having thus got four of
+the six principal beams set on end, it required a considerable
+degree of trouble to get their upper ends to fit.&nbsp; Here they
+formed the apex of a cone, and were all together mortised into a
+large piece of beechwood, and secured, for the present, with
+ropes, in a temporary manner.&nbsp; During the short period of
+one tide all that could further be done for their security was to
+put a single screw-bolt through the great kneed bats or
+stanchions on each side of the beams, and screw the nut home.</p>
+<p>In this manner these four principal beams were erected, and
+left in a pretty secure state.&nbsp; The men had commenced while
+there was about two or three feet of water upon the side of the
+beacon, and as the sea was smooth they continued the work equally
+long during flood-tide.&nbsp; Two of the boats being left at the
+rock to take off the joiners, who were busily employed on the
+upper parts till two o&rsquo;clock p.m., this tide&rsquo;s work
+may be said to have continued for about seven hours, which was
+the longest that had hitherto been got upon the rock by at least
+three hours.</p>
+<p>When the first boats left the rock with the artificers
+employed on the lower part of the work during the flood-tide, the
+beacon had quite a novel appearance.&nbsp; The beams erected
+formed a common base of about thirty-three feet, meeting at the
+top, which was about forty-five feet above the rock, and here
+half a dozen of the artificers were still at work.&nbsp; After
+clearing the rock the boats made a stop, when three hearty cheers
+were given, which were returned with equal goodwill by those upon
+the beacon, from the personal interest which every one felt in
+the prosperity of this work, so intimately connected with his
+safety.</p>
+<p>All hands having returned to their respective ships, they got
+a shift of dry clothes and some refreshment.&nbsp; Being Sunday,
+they were afterwards convened by signal on board of the
+Lighthouse yacht, when prayers were read; for every heart upon
+this occasion felt gladness, and every mind was disposed to be
+thankful for the happy and successful termination of the
+operations of this day.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Monday, 21st Sept.]</p>
+<p>The remaining two principal beams were erected in the course
+of this tide, which, with the assistance of those set up
+yesterday, was found to be a very simple operation.</p>
+<p>The six principal beams of the beacon were thus secured, at
+least in a temporary manner, in the course of two tides, or in
+the short space of about eleven hours and a half.&nbsp; Such is
+the progress that may be made when active hands and willing minds
+set properly to work in operations of this kind.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday 22nd, Sept.]</p>
+<p>Having now got the weighty part of this work over, and being
+thereby relieved of the difficulty both of landing and
+victualling such a number of men, the <i>Smeaton</i> could now be
+spared, and she was accordingly despatched to Arbroath for a
+supply of water and provisions, and carried with her six of the
+artificers who could best be spared.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Wednesday, 23rd Sept.]</p>
+<p>In going out of the eastern harbour, the boat which the writer
+steered shipped a sea, that filled her about one-third with
+water.&nbsp; She had also been hid for a short time, by the waves
+breaking upon the rock, from the sight of the crew of the
+preceding boat, who were much alarmed for our safety, imagining
+for a time that she had gone down.</p>
+<p>The <i>Smeaton</i> returned from Arbroath this afternoon, but
+there was so much sea that she could not be made fast to her
+moorings, and the vessel was obliged to return to Arbroath
+without being able either to deliver the provisions or take the
+artificers on board.&nbsp; The Lighthouse yacht was also soon
+obliged to follow her example, as the sea was breaking heavily
+over her bows.&nbsp; After getting two reefs in the mainsail, and
+the third or storm-jib set, the wind being S.W., she bent to
+windward, though blowing a hard gale, and got into St. Andrews
+Bay, where we passed the night under the lee of Fifeness.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Thursday, 24th Sept.]</p>
+<p>At two o&rsquo;clock this morning we were in St. Andrews Bay,
+standing off and on shore, with strong gales of wind at S.W.; at
+seven we were off the entrance of the Tay; at eight stood towards
+the rock, and at ten passed to leeward of it, but could not
+attempt a landing.&nbsp; The beacon, however, appeared to remain
+in good order, and by six p.m. the vessel had again beaten up to
+St. Andrews Bay, and got into somewhat smoother water for the
+night.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 25th Sept.]</p>
+<p>At seven o&rsquo;clock bore away for the Bell Rock, but
+finding a heavy sea running on it were unable to land.&nbsp; The
+writer, however, had the satisfaction to observe, with his
+telescope, that everything about the beacon appeared entire: and
+although the sea had a most frightful appearance, yet it was the
+opinion of every one that, since the erection of the beacon, the
+Bell Rock was divested of many of its terrors, and had it been
+possible to have got the boats hoisted out and manned, it might
+have even been found practicable to land.&nbsp; At six it blew so
+hard that it was found necessary to strike the topmast and take
+in a third reef of the mainsail, and under this low canvas we
+soon reached St. Andrews Bay, and got again under the lee of the
+land for the night.&nbsp; The artificers, being sea-hardy, were
+quite reconciled to their quarters on board of the Lighthouse
+yacht; but it is believed that hardly any consideration would
+have induced them again to take up their abode in the floating
+light.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Saturday, 26th Sept.]</p>
+<p>At daylight the yacht steered towards the Bell Rock, and at
+eight a.m. made fast to her moorings; at ten, all hands, to the
+amount of thirty, landed, when the writer had the happiness to
+find that the beacon had withstood the violence of the gale and
+the heavy breach of sea, everything being found in the same state
+in which it had been left on the 21st.&nbsp; The artificers were
+now enabled to work upon the rock throughout the whole day, both
+at low and high water, but it required the strictest attention to
+the state of the weather, in case of their being overtaken with a
+gale, which might prevent the possibility of getting them off the
+rock.</p>
+<p>Two somewhat memorable circumstances in the annals of the Bell
+Rock attended the operations of this day: one was the removal of
+Mr. James Dove, the foreman smith, with his apparatus, from the
+rock to the upper part of the beacon, where the forge was now
+erected on a temporary platform, laid on the cross beams or upper
+framing.&nbsp; The other was the artificers having dined for the
+first time upon the rock, their dinner being cooked on board of
+the yacht, and sent to them by one of the boats.&nbsp; But what
+afforded the greatest happiness and relief was the removal of the
+large bellows, which had all along been a source of much trouble
+and perplexity, by their hampering and incommoding the boat which
+carried the smiths and their apparatus.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Saturday, 3rd Oct.]</p>
+<p>The wind being west to-day, the weather was very favourable
+for operations at the rock, and during the morning and evening
+tides, with the aid of torchlight, the masons had seven
+hours&rsquo; work upon the site of the building.&nbsp; The smiths
+and joiners, who landed at half-past six a.m., did not leave the
+rock till a quarter-past eleven p.m., having been at work, with
+little intermission, for sixteen hours and three-quarters.&nbsp;
+When the water left the rock, they were employed at the lower
+parts of the beacon, and as the tide rose or fell, they shifted
+the place of their operations.&nbsp; From these exertions, the
+fixing and securing of the beacon made rapid advancement, as the
+men were now landed in the morning and remained throughout the
+day.&nbsp; But, as a sudden change of weather might have
+prevented their being taken off at the proper time of tide, a
+quantity of bread and water was always kept on the beacon.</p>
+<p>During this period of working at the beacon all the day, and
+often a great part of the night, the writer was much on board of
+the tender; but, while the masons could work on the rock, and
+frequently also while it was covered by the tide, he remained on
+the beacon; especially during the night, as he made a point of
+being on the rock to the latest hour, and was generally the last
+person who stepped into the boat.&nbsp; He had laid this down as
+part of his plan of procedure; and in this way had acquired, in
+the course of the first season, a pretty complete knowledge and
+experience of what could actually be done at the Bell Rock, under
+all circumstances of the weather.&nbsp; By this means also his
+assistants, and the artificers and mariners, got into a
+systematic habit of proceeding at the commencement of the work,
+which, it is believed, continued throughout the whole of the
+operations.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 4th Oct.]</p>
+<p>The external part of the beacon was now finished, with its
+supports and bracing-chains, and whatever else was considered
+necessary for its stability in so far as the season would permit;
+and although much was still wanting to complete this fabric, yet
+it was in such a state that it could be left without much fear of
+the consequences of a storm.&nbsp; The painting of the upper part
+was nearly finished this afternoon; and the <i>Smeaton</i> had
+brought off a quantity of brushwood and other articles, for the
+purpose of heating or charring the lower part of the principal
+beams, before being laid over with successive coats of boiling
+pitch, to the height of from eight to twelve feet, or as high as
+the rise of spring-tides.&nbsp; A small flagstaff having also
+been erected to-day, a flag was displayed for the first time from
+the beacon, by which its perspective effect was greatly
+improved.&nbsp; On this, as on all like occasions at the Bell
+Rock, three hearty cheers were given; and the steward served out
+a dram of rum to all hands, while the Lighthouse yacht,
+<i>Smeaton</i>, and floating light, hoisted their colours in
+compliment to the erection.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Monday, 5th Oct.]</p>
+<p>In the afternoon, and just as the tide&rsquo;s work was over,
+Mr. John Rennie, engineer, accompanied by his son Mr. George, on
+their way to the harbour works of Fraserburgh, in Aberdeenshire,
+paid a visit to the Bell Rock, in a boat from Arbroath.&nbsp; It
+being then too late in the tide for landing, they remained on
+board of the Lighthouse yacht all night, when the writer, who had
+now been secluded from society for several weeks, enjoyed much of
+Mr. Rennie&rsquo;s interesting conversation, both on general
+topics, and professionally upon the progress of the Bell Rock
+works, on which he was consulted as chief engineer.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 6th Oct.]</p>
+<p>The artificers landed this morning at nine, after which one of
+the boats returned to the ship for the writer and Messrs. Rennie,
+who, upon landing, were saluted with a display of the colours
+from the beacon and by three cheers from the workmen.&nbsp;
+Everything was now in a prepared state for leaving the rock, and
+giving up the works afloat for this season, excepting some small
+articles, which would still occupy the smiths and joiners for a
+few days longer.&nbsp; They accordingly shifted on board of the
+<i>Smeaton</i>, while the yacht left the rock for Arbroath, with
+Messrs. Rennie, the writer, and the remainder of the
+artificers.&nbsp; But, before taking leave, the steward served
+out a farewell glass, when three hearty cheers were given, and an
+earnest wish expressed that everything, in the spring of 1808,
+might be found in the same state of good order as it was now
+about to be left.</p>
+<h3>II&mdash;OPERATIONS OF 1808</h3>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Monday, 29th Feb.]</p>
+<p>The writer sailed from Arbroath at one a.m. in the Lighthouse
+yacht.&nbsp; At seven the floating light was hailed, and all on
+board found to be well.&nbsp; The crew were observed to have a
+very healthy-like appearance, and looked better than at the close
+of the works upon the rock.&nbsp; They seemed only to regret one
+thing, which was the secession of their cook, Thomas
+Elliot&mdash;not on account of his professional skill, but for
+his facetious and curious manner.&nbsp; Elliot had something
+peculiar in his history, and was reported by his comrades to have
+seen better days.&nbsp; He was, however, happy with his situation
+on board of the floating light, and, having a taste for music,
+dancing, and acting plays, he contributed much to the amusement
+of the ship&rsquo;s company in their dreary abode during the
+winter months.&nbsp; He had also recommended himself to their
+notice as a good shipkeeper, for as it did not answer Elliot to
+go often ashore, he had always given up his turn of leave to his
+neighbours.&nbsp; At his own desire he was at length paid off,
+when he had a considerable balance of wages to receive, which he
+said would be sufficient to carry him to the West Indies, and he
+accordingly took leave of the Lighthouse service.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 1st March]</p>
+<p>At daybreak the Lighthouse yacht, attended by a boat from the
+floating light, again stood towards the Bell Rock.&nbsp; The
+weather felt extremely cold this morning, the thermometer being
+at 34 degrees, with the wind at east, accompanied by occasional
+showers of snow, and the marine barometer indicated 29.80.&nbsp;
+At half-past seven the sea ran with such force upon the rock that
+it seemed doubtful if a landing could be effected.&nbsp; At
+half-past eight, when it was fairly above water, the writer took
+his place in the floating light&rsquo;s boat with the artificers,
+while the yacht&rsquo;s boat followed, according to the general
+rule of having two boats afloat in landing expeditions of this
+kind, that, in case of accident to one boat, the other might
+assist.&nbsp; In several unsuccessful attempts the boats were
+beat back by the breach of the sea upon the rock.&nbsp; On the
+eastern side it separated into two distinct waves, which came
+with a sweep round to the western side, where they met; and at
+the instance of their confluence the water rose in spray to a
+considerable height.&nbsp; Watching what the sailors term a
+<i>smooth</i>, we caught a favourable opportunity, and in a very
+dexterous manner the boats were rowed between the two seas, and
+made a favourable landing at the western creek.</p>
+<p>At the latter end of last season, as was formerly noticed, the
+beacon was painted white, and from the bleaching of the weather
+and the sprays of the sea the upper parts were kept clean; but
+within the range of the tide the principal beams were observed to
+be thickly coated with a green stuff, the <i>conferva</i> of
+botanists.&nbsp; Notwithstanding the intrusion of these works,
+which had formerly banished the numerous seals that played about
+the rock, they were now seen in great numbers, having been in an
+almost undisturbed state for six months.&nbsp; It had now also,
+for the first time, got some inhabitants of the feathered tribe:
+in particular the scarth or cormorant, and the large
+herring-gull, had made the beacon a resting-place, from its
+vicinity to their fishing-grounds.&nbsp; About a dozen of these
+birds had rested upon the cross-beams, which, in some places,
+were coated with their dung; and their flight, as the boats
+approached, was a very unlooked-for indication of life and
+habitation on the Bell Rock, conveying the momentary idea of the
+conversion of this fatal rock, from being a terror to the
+mariner, into a residence of man and a safeguard to shipping.</p>
+<p>Upon narrowly examining the great iron stanchions with which
+the beams were fixed to the rock, the writer had the satisfaction
+of finding that there was not the least appearance of working or
+shifting at any of the joints or places of connection; and,
+excepting the loosening of the bracing-chains, everything was
+found in the same entire state in which it had been left in the
+month of October.&nbsp; This, in the estimation of the writer,
+was a matter of no small importance to the future success of the
+work.&nbsp; He from that moment saw the practicability and
+propriety of fitting up the beacon, not only as a place of refuge
+in case of accident to the boats in landing, but as a residence
+for the artificers during the working months.</p>
+<p>While upon the top of the beacon the writer was reminded by
+the landing-master that the sea was running high, and that it
+would be necessary to set off while the rock afforded anything
+like shelter to the boats, which by this time had been made fast
+by a long line to the beacon, and rode with much agitation, each
+requiring two men with boat-hooks to keep them from striking each
+other, or from ranging up against the beacon.&nbsp; But even
+under these circumstances the greatest confidence was felt by
+every one, from the security afforded by this temporary
+erection.&nbsp; For, supposing the wind had suddenly increased to
+a gale, and that it had been found unadvisable to go into the
+boats; or, supposing they had drifted or sprung a leak from
+striking upon the rocks; in any of these possible and not at all
+improbable cases, those who might thus have been left upon the
+rock had now something to lay hold of, and, though occupying this
+dreary habitation of the sea-gull and the cormorant, affording
+only bread and water, yet <i>life</i>, would be preserved, and
+the mind would still be supported by the hope of being ultimately
+relieved.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Wednesday, 25th May]</p>
+<p>On the 25th of May the writer embarked at Arbroath, on board
+of the <i>Sir Joseph Banks</i>, for the Bell Rock, accompanied by
+Mr. Logan senior, foreman builder, with twelve masons and two
+smiths, together with thirteen seamen, including the master,
+mate, and steward.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Thursday, 26th May]</p>
+<p>Mr. James Wilson, now commander of the <i>Pharos</i>, floating
+light, and landing-master, in the room of Mr. Sinclair, who had
+left the service, came into the writer&rsquo;s cabin this morning
+at six o&rsquo;clock, and intimated that there was a good
+appearance of landing on the rock.&nbsp; Everything being
+arranged, both boats proceeded in company, and at eight a.m. they
+reached the rock.&nbsp; The lighthouse colours were immediately
+hoisted upon the flagstaff of the beacon, a compliment which was
+duly returned by the tender and floating light, when three hearty
+cheers were given, and a glass of rum was served out to all hands
+to drink success to the operations of 1808.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 27th May]</p>
+<p>This morning the wind was at east, blowing a fresh gale, the
+weather being hazy, with a considerable breach of sea setting in
+upon the rock.&nbsp; The morning bell was therefore rung, in some
+doubt as to the practicability of making a landing.&nbsp; After
+allowing the rock to get fully up, or to be sufficiently left by
+the tide, that the boats might have some shelter from the range
+of the sea, they proceeded at 8 a.m., and upon the whole made a
+pretty good landing; and after two hours and
+three-quarters&rsquo; work returned to the ship in safety.</p>
+<p>In the afternoon the wind considerably increased, and, as a
+pretty heavy sea was still running, the tender rode very hard,
+when Mr. Taylor, the commander, found it necessary to take in the
+bowsprit, and strike the fore and main topmasts, that she might
+ride more easily.&nbsp; After consulting about the state of the
+weather, it was resolved to leave the artificers on board this
+evening, and carry only the smiths to the rock, as the sharpening
+of the irons was rather behind, from their being so much broken
+and blunted by the hard and tough nature of the rock, which
+became much more compact and hard as the depth of excavation was
+increased.&nbsp; Besides avoiding the risk of encumbering the
+boats with a number of men who had not yet got the full command
+of the oar in a breach of sea, the writer had another motive for
+leaving them behind.&nbsp; He wanted to examine the site of the
+building without interruption, and to take the comparative levels
+of the different inequalities of its area; and as it would have
+been painful to have seen men standing idle upon the Bell Rock,
+where all moved with activity, it was judged better to leave them
+on board.&nbsp; The boats landed at half-past seven p.m., and the
+landing-master, with the seamen, was employed during this tide in
+cutting the seaweeds from the several paths leading to the
+landing-places, to render walking more safe, for, from the
+slippery state of the surface of the rock, many severe tumbles
+had taken place.&nbsp; In the meantime the writer took the
+necessary levels, and having carefully examined the site of the
+building and considered all its parts, it still appeared to be
+necessary to excavate to the average depth of fourteen inches
+over the whole area of the foundation.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Saturday, 28th May]</p>
+<p>The wind still continued from the eastward with a heavy swell;
+and to-day it was accompanied with foggy weather and occasional
+showers of rain.&nbsp; Notwithstanding this, such was the
+confidence which the erection of the beacon had inspired that the
+boats landed the artificers on the rock under very unpromising
+circumstances, at half-past eight, and they continued at work
+till half-past eleven, being a period of three hours, which was
+considered a great tide&rsquo;s work in the present low state of
+the foundation.&nbsp; Three of the masons on board were so
+afflicted with sea-sickness that they had not been able to take
+any food for almost three days, and they were literally assisted
+into the boats this morning by their companions.&nbsp; It was,
+however, not a little surprising to see how speedily these men
+revived upon landing on the rock and eating a little dulse.&nbsp;
+Two of them afterwards assisted the sailors in collecting the
+chips of stone and carrying them out of the way of the pickmen;
+but the third complained of a pain in his head, and was still
+unable to do anything.&nbsp; Instead of returning to the tender
+with the boats, these three men remained on the beacon all day,
+and had their victuals sent to them along with the
+smiths&rsquo;.&nbsp; From Mr. Dove, the foreman smith, they had
+much sympathy, for he preferred remaining on the beacon at all
+hazards, to be himself relieved from the malady of
+sea-sickness.&nbsp; The wind continuing high, with a heavy sea,
+and the tide falling late, it was not judged proper to land the
+artificers this evening, but in the twilight the boats were sent
+to fetch the people on board who had been left on the rock.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 29th May]</p>
+<p>The wind was from the S.W. to-day, and the signal-bell rung,
+as usual, about an hour before the period for landing on the
+rock.&nbsp; The writer was rather surprised, however, to hear the
+landing-master repeatedly call, &lsquo;All hands for the
+rock!&rsquo; and, coming on deck, he was disappointed to find the
+seamen only in the boats.&nbsp; Upon inquiry, it appeared that
+some misunderstanding had taken place about the wages of the
+artificers for Sundays.&nbsp; They had preferred wages for seven
+days statedly to the former mode of allowing a day for each
+tide&rsquo;s work on Sunday, as they did not like the appearance
+of working for double or even treble wages on Sunday, and would
+rather have it understood that their work on that day arose more
+from the urgency of the case than with a view to emolument.&nbsp;
+This having been judged creditable to their religious feelings,
+and readily adjusted to their wish, the boats proceeded to the
+rock, and the work commenced at nine a.m.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Monday, 30th May]</p>
+<p>Mr. Francis Watt commenced, with five joiners, to fit up a
+temporary platform upon the beacon, about twenty-five feet above
+the highest part of the rock.&nbsp; This platform was to be used
+as the site of the smith&rsquo;s forge, after the beacon should
+be fitted up as a barrack; and here also the mortar was to be
+mixed and prepared for the building, and it was accordingly
+termed the Mortar Gallery.</p>
+<p>The landing-master&rsquo;s crew completed the discharging from
+the <i>Smeaton</i> of her cargo of the cast-iron rails and
+timber.&nbsp; It must not here be omitted to notice that the
+<i>Smeaton</i> took in ballast from the Bell Rock, consisting of
+the shivers or chips of stone produced by the workmen in
+preparing the site of the building, which were now accumulating
+in great quantities on the rock.&nbsp; These the boats loaded,
+after discharging the iron.&nbsp; The object in carrying off
+these chips, besides ballasting the vessel, was to get them
+permanently out of the way, as they were apt to shift about from
+place to place with every gale of wind; and it often required a
+considerable time to clear the foundation a second time of this
+rubbish.&nbsp; The circumstance of ballasting a ship at the Bell
+Rock afforded great entertainment, especially to the sailors; and
+it was perhaps with truth remarked that the <i>Smeaton</i> was
+the first vessel that had ever taken on board ballast at the Bell
+Rock.&nbsp; Mr. Pool, the commander of this vessel, afterwards
+acquainted the writer that, when the ballast was landed upon the
+quay at Leith, many persons carried away specimens of it, as part
+of a cargo from the Bell Rock; when he added, that such was the
+interest excited, from the number of specimens carried away, that
+some of his friends suggested that he should have sent the whole
+to the Cross of Edinburgh, where each piece might have sold for a
+penny.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 31st May]</p>
+<p>In the evening the boats went to the rock, and brought the
+joiners and smiths, and their sickly companions, on board of the
+tender.&nbsp; These also brought with them two baskets full of
+fish, which they had caught at high-water from the beacon,
+reporting, at the same time, to their comrades, that the fish
+were swimming in such numbers over the rock at high-water that it
+was completely hid from their sight, and nothing seen but the
+movement of thousands of fish.&nbsp; They were almost exclusively
+of the species called the podlie, or young coal-fish.&nbsp; This
+discovery, made for the first time to-day by the workmen, was
+considered fortunate, as an additional circumstance likely to
+produce an inclination among the artificers to take up their
+residence in the beacon, when it came to be fitted up as a
+barrack.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 7th June]</p>
+<p>At three o&rsquo;clock in the morning the ship&rsquo;s bell
+was rung as the signal for landing at the rock.&nbsp; When the
+landing was to be made before breakfast, it was customary to give
+each of the artificers and seamen a dram and a biscuit, and
+coffee was prepared by the steward for the cabins.&nbsp; Exactly
+at four o&rsquo;clock the whole party landed from three boats,
+including one of those belonging to the floating light, with a
+part of that ship&rsquo;s crew, which always attended the works
+in moderate weather.&nbsp; The landing-master&rsquo;s boat,
+called the <i>Seaman</i>, but more commonly called the
+<i>Lifeboat</i>, took the lead.&nbsp; The next boat, called the
+<i>Mason</i>, was generally steered by the writer; while the
+floating light&rsquo;s boat, <i>Pharos</i>, was under the
+management of the boatswain of that ship.</p>
+<p>Having now so considerable a party of workmen and sailors on
+the rock, it may be proper here to notice how their labours were
+directed.&nbsp; Preparations having been made last month for the
+erection of a second forge upon the beacon, the smiths commenced
+their operations both upon the lower and higher platforms.&nbsp;
+They were employed in sharpening the picks and irons for the
+masons, and in making bats and other apparatus of various
+descriptions connected with the fitting of the railways.&nbsp;
+The landing-master&rsquo;s crew were occupied in assisting the
+millwrights in laying the railways to hand.&nbsp; Sailors, of all
+other descriptions of men, are the most accommodating in the use
+of their hands.&nbsp; They worked freely with the boring-irons,
+and assisted in all the operations of the railways, acting by
+turns as boatmen, seamen, and artificers.&nbsp; We had no such
+character on the Bell Rock as the common labourer.&nbsp; All the
+operations of this department were cheerfully undertaken by the
+seamen, who, both on the rock and on shipboard, were the
+inseparable companions of every work connected with the erection
+of the Bell Rock Lighthouse.&nbsp; It will naturally be supposed
+that about twenty-five masons, occupied with their picks in
+executing and preparing the foundation of the lighthouse, in the
+course of a tide of about three hours, would make a considerable
+impression upon an area even of forty-two feet in diameter.&nbsp;
+But in proportion as the foundation was deepened, the rock was
+found to be much more hard and difficult to work, while the
+baling and pumping of water became much more troublesome.&nbsp; A
+joiner was kept almost constantly employed in fitting the picks
+to their handles, which, as well as the points to the irons, were
+very frequently broken.</p>
+<p>The Bell Rock this morning presented by far the most busy and
+active appearance it had exhibited since the erection of the
+principal beams of the beacon.&nbsp; The surface of the rock was
+crowded with men, the two forges flaming, the one above the
+other, upon the beacon, while the anvils thundered with the
+rebounding noise of their wooden supports, and formed a curious
+contrast with the occasional clamour of the surges.&nbsp; The
+wind was westerly, and the weather being extremely agreeable, as
+soon after breakfast as the tide had sufficiently overflowed the
+rock to float the boats over it, the smiths, with a number of the
+artificers, returned to the beacon, carrying their fishing-tackle
+along with them.&nbsp; In the course of the forenoon, the beacon
+exhibited a still more extraordinary appearance than the rock had
+done in the morning.&nbsp; The sea being smooth, it seemed to be
+afloat upon the water, with a number of men supporting themselves
+in all the variety of attitude and position: while, from the
+upper part of this wooden house, the volumes of smoke which
+ascended from the forges gave the whole a very curious and
+fanciful appearance.</p>
+<p>In the course of this tide it was observed that a heavy swell
+was setting in from the eastward, and the appearance of the sky
+indicated a change of weather, while the wind was shifting
+about.&nbsp; The barometer also had fallen from 30 in. to
+29.6.&nbsp; It was, therefore, judged prudent to shift the vessel
+to the S.W. or more distant buoy.&nbsp; Her bowsprit was also
+soon afterwards taken in, the topmasts struck, and everything
+made <i>snug</i>, as seamen term it, for a gale.&nbsp; During the
+course of the night the wind increased and shifted to the
+eastward, when the vessel rolled very hard, and the sea often
+broke over her bows with great force.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Wednesday, 8th June]</p>
+<p>Although the motion of the tender was much less than that of
+the floating light&mdash;at least, in regard to the rolling
+motion&mdash;yet she <i>sended</i>, or pitched, much.&nbsp; Being
+also of a very handsome build, and what seamen term very <i>clean
+aft</i>, the sea often struck the counter with such force that
+the writer, who possessed the aftermost cabin, being unaccustomed
+to this new vessel, could not divest himself of uneasiness; for
+when her stern fell into the sea, it struck with so much violence
+as to be more like the resistance of a rock than the sea.&nbsp;
+The water, at the same time, often rushed with great force up the
+rudder-case, and, forcing up the valve of the water-closet, the
+floor of his cabin was at times laid under water.&nbsp; The gale
+continued to increase, and the vessel rolled and pitched in such
+a manner that the hawser by which the tender was made fast to the
+buoy snapped, and she went adrift.&nbsp; In the act of swinging
+round to the wind she shipped a very heavy sea, which greatly
+alarmed the artificers, who imagined that we had got upon the
+rock; but this, from the direction of the wind, was
+impossible.&nbsp; The writer, however, sprung upon deck, where he
+found the sailors busily employed in rigging out the bowsprit and
+in setting sail.&nbsp; From the easterly direction of the wind,
+it was considered most advisable to steer for the Firth of Forth,
+and there wait a change of weather.&nbsp; At two p.m. we
+accordingly passed the Isle of May, at six anchored in Leith
+Roads, and at eight the writer landed, when he came in upon his
+friends, who were not a little surprised at his unexpected
+appearance, which gave an instantaneous alarm for the safety of
+things at the Bell Rock.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Thursday, 9th June]</p>
+<p>The wind still continued to blow very hard at E. by N., and
+the <i>Sir Joseph Banks</i> rode heavily, and even drifted with
+both anchors ahead, in Leith Roads.&nbsp; The artificers did not
+attempt to leave the ship last night; but there being upwards of
+fifty people on board, and the decks greatly lumbered with the
+two large boats, they were in a very crowded and impatient state
+on board.&nbsp; But to-day they got ashore, and amused themselves
+by walking about the streets of Edinburgh, some in very humble
+apparel, from having only the worst of their jackets with them,
+which, though quite suitable for their work, were hardly fit for
+public inspection, being not only tattered, but greatly stained
+with the red colour of the rock.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 10th June]</p>
+<p>To-day the wind was at S.E., with light breezes and foggy
+weather.&nbsp; At six a.m. the writer again embarked for the Bell
+Rock, when the vessel immediately sailed.&nbsp; At eleven p.m.,
+there being no wind, the kedge-anchor was <i>let go</i> off
+Anstruther, one of the numerous towns on the coast of Fife, where
+we waited the return of the tide.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Saturday, 11th June]</p>
+<p>At six a.m. the <i>Sir Joseph</i> got under weigh, and at
+eleven was again made fast to the southern buoy at the Bell
+Rock.&nbsp; Though it was now late in the tide, the writer, being
+anxious to ascertain the state of things after the gale, landed
+with the artificers to the number of forty-four.&nbsp; Everything
+was found in an entire state; but, as the tide was nearly gone,
+only half an hour&rsquo;s work had been got when the site of the
+building was overflowed.&nbsp; In the evening the boats again
+landed at nine, and after a good tide&rsquo;s work of three hours
+with torchlight, the work was left off at midnight.&nbsp; To the
+distant shipping the appearance of things under night on the Bell
+Rock, when the work was going forward, must have been very
+remarkable, especially to those who were strangers to the
+operations.&nbsp; Mr. John Reid, principal lightkeeper, who also
+acted as master of the floating light during the working months
+at the rock, described the appearance of numerous lights situated
+so low in the water, when seen at the distance of two or three
+miles, as putting him in mind of Milton&rsquo;s description of
+the fiends in the lower regions, adding, &lsquo;for it seems
+greatly to surpass Will-o&rsquo;-the-Wisp, or any of those
+earthly spectres of which we have so often heard.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Monday, 13th June]</p>
+<p>From the difficulties attending the landing on the rock, owing
+to the breach of sea which had for days past been around it, the
+artificers showed some backwardness at getting into the boats
+this morning; but after a little explanation this was got
+over.&nbsp; It was always observable that for some time after
+anything like danger had occurred at the rock, the workmen became
+much more cautious, and on some occasions their timidity was
+rather troublesome.&nbsp; It fortunately happened, however, that
+along with the writer&rsquo;s assistants and the sailors there
+were also some of the artificers themselves who felt no such
+scruples, and in this way these difficulties were the more easily
+surmounted.&nbsp; In matters where life is in danger it becomes
+necessary to treat even unfounded prejudices with tenderness, as
+an accident, under certain circumstances, would not only have
+been particularly painful to those giving directions, but have
+proved highly detrimental to the work, especially in the early
+stages of its advancement.</p>
+<p>At four o&rsquo;clock fifty-eight persons landed; but the
+tides being extremely languid, the water only left the higher
+parts of the rock, and no work could be done at the site of the
+building.&nbsp; A third forge was, however, put in operation
+during a short time, for the greater conveniency of sharpening
+the picks and irons, and for purposes connected with the
+preparations for fixing the railways on the rock.&nbsp; The
+weather towards the evening became thick and foggy, and there was
+hardly a breath of wind to ruffle the surface of the water.&nbsp;
+Had it not, therefore, been for the noise from the anvils of the
+smiths who had been left on the beacon throughout the day, which
+afforded a guide for the boats, a landing could not have been
+attempted this evening, especially with such a company of
+artificers.&nbsp; This circumstance confirmed the writer&rsquo;s
+opinion with regard to the propriety of connecting large bells to
+be rung with machinery in the lighthouse, to be tolled day and
+night during the continuance of foggy weather.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Thursday, 23rd June]</p>
+<p>The boats landed this evening, when the artificers had again
+two hours&rsquo; work.&nbsp; The weather still continuing very
+thick and foggy, more difficulty was experienced in getting on
+board of the vessels to-night than had occurred on any previous
+occasion, owing to a light breeze of wind which carried the sound
+of the bell, and the other signals made on board of the vessels,
+away from the rock.&nbsp; Having fortunately made out the
+position of the sloop <i>Smeaton</i> at the N.E. buoy&mdash;to
+which we were much assisted by the barking of the ship&rsquo;s
+dog,&mdash;we parted with the <i>Smeaton&rsquo;s</i> boat, when
+the boats of the tender took a fresh departure for that vessel,
+which lay about half a mile to the south-westward.&nbsp; Yet such
+is the very deceiving state of the tides, that, although there
+was a small binnacle and compass in the landing-master&rsquo;s
+boat, we had, nevertheless, passed the <i>Sir Joseph</i> a good
+way, when, fortunately, one of the sailors catched the sound of a
+blowing-horn.&nbsp; The only fire-arms on board were a pair of
+swivels of one-inch calibre; but it is quite surprising how much
+the sound is lost in foggy weather, as the report was heard but
+at a very short distance.&nbsp; The sound from the explosion of
+gunpowder is so instantaneous that the effect of the small guns
+was not so good as either the blowing of a horn or the tolling of
+a bell, which afforded a more constant and steady direction for
+the pilot.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Wednesday, 6th July]</p>
+<p>Landed on the rock with the three boats belonging to the
+tender at five p.m., and began immediately to bale the water out
+of the foundation-pit with a number of buckets, while the pumps
+were also kept in action with relays of artificers and
+seamen.&nbsp; The work commenced upon the higher parts of the
+foundation as the water left them, but it was now pretty
+generally reduced to a level.&nbsp; About twenty men could be
+conveniently employed at each pump, and it is quite astonishing
+in how short a time so great a body of water could be drawn
+off.&nbsp; The water in the foundation-pit at this time measured
+about two feet in depth, on an area of forty-two feet in
+diameter, and yet it was drawn off in the course of about half an
+hour.&nbsp; After this the artificers commenced with their picks
+and continued at work for two hours and a half, some of the
+sailors being at the same time busily employed in clearing the
+foundation of chips and in conveying the irons to and from the
+smiths on the beacon, where they were sharped.&nbsp; At eight
+o&rsquo;clock the sea broke in upon us and overflowed the
+foundation-pit, when the boats returned to the tender.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Thursday, 7th July]</p>
+<p>The landing-master&rsquo;s bell rung this morning about four
+o&rsquo;clock, and at half-past five, the foundation being
+cleared, the work commenced on the site of the building.&nbsp;
+But from the moment of landing, the squad of joiners and
+millwrights was at work upon the higher parts of the rock in
+laying the railways, while the anvils of the smith resounded on
+the beacon, and such columns of smoke ascended from the forges
+that they were often mistaken by strangers at a distance for a
+ship on fire.&nbsp; After continuing three hours at work the
+foundation of the building was again overflowed, and the boats
+returned to the ship at half-past eight o&rsquo;clock. the masons
+and pickmen had, at this period, a pretty long day on board of
+the tender, but the smiths and joiners were kept constantly at
+work upon the beacon, the stability and great conveniency of
+which had now been so fully shown that no doubt remained as to
+the propriety of fitting it up as a barrack.&nbsp; The workmen
+were accordingly employed, during the period of high-water, in
+making preparations for this purpose.</p>
+<p>The foundation-pit now assumed the appearance of a great
+platform, and the late tides had been so favourable that it
+became apparent that the first course, consisting of a few
+irregular and detached stones for making up certain inequalities
+in the interior parts of the site of the building, might be laid
+in the course of the present spring-tides.&nbsp; Having been
+enabled to-day to get the dimensions of the foundation, or first
+stone, accurately taken, a mould was made of its figure, when the
+writer left the rock, after the tide&rsquo;s work of this
+morning, in a fast rowing-boat for Arbroath; and, upon landing,
+two men were immediately set to work upon one of the blocks from
+Mylnefield quarry, which was prepared in the course of the
+following day, as the stone-cutters relieved each other, and
+worked both night and day, so that it was sent off in one of the
+stone-lighters without delay.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Saturday, 9th July]</p>
+<p>The site of the foundation-stone was very difficult to work,
+from its depth in the rock; but being now nearly prepared, it
+formed a very agreeable kind of pastime at high-water for all
+hands to land the stone itself upon the rock.&nbsp; The
+landing-master&rsquo;s crew and artificers accordingly entered
+with great spirit into this operation.&nbsp; The stone was placed
+upon the deck of the <i>Hedderwick</i> praam-boat, which had just
+been brought from Leith, and was decorated with colours for the
+occasion.&nbsp; Flags were also displayed from the shipping in
+the offing, and upon the beacon.&nbsp; Here the writer took his
+station with the greater part of the artificers, who supported
+themselves in every possible position while the boats towed the
+praam from her moorings and brought her immediately over the site
+of the building, where her grappling anchors were let go.&nbsp;
+The stone was then lifted off the deck by a tackle hooked into a
+Lewis bat inserted into it, when it was gently lowered into the
+water and grounded on the site of the building, amidst the
+cheering acclamations of about sixty persons.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 10th July]</p>
+<p>At eleven o&rsquo;clock the foundation-stone was laid to
+hand.&nbsp; It was of a square form, containing about twenty
+cubic feet, and had the figures, or date, of 1808 simply cut upon
+it with a chisel.&nbsp; A derrick, or spar of timber, having been
+erected at the edge of the hole and guyed with ropes, the stone
+was then hooked to the tackle and lowered into its place, when
+the writer, attended by his assistants&mdash;Mr. Peter Logan, Mr.
+Francis Watt, and Mr. James Wilson,&mdash;applied the square, the
+level, and the mallet, and pronounced the following benediction:
+&lsquo;May the great Architect of the Universe complete and bless
+this building,&rsquo; on which three hearty cheers were given,
+and success to the future operations was drunk with the greatest
+enthusiasm.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 26th July]</p>
+<p>The wind being at S.E. this evening, we had a pretty heavy
+swell of sea upon the rock, and some difficulty attended our
+getting off in safety, as the boats got aground in the creek and
+were in danger of being upset.&nbsp; Upon extinguishing the
+torchlights, about twelve in number, the darkness of the night
+seemed quite horrible; the water being also much charged with the
+phosphorescent appearance which is familiar to every one on
+shipboard, the waves, as they dashed upon the rock, were in some
+degree like so much liquid flame.&nbsp; The scene, upon the
+whole, was truly awful!</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Wednesday, 27th July]</p>
+<p>In leaving the rock this evening everything, after the torches
+were extinguished, had the same dismal appearance as last night,
+but so perfectly acquainted were the landing-master and his crew
+with the position of things at the rock, that comparatively
+little inconveniency was experienced on these occasions when the
+weather was moderate; such is the effect of habit, even in the
+most unpleasant situations.&nbsp; If, for example, it had been
+proposed to a person accustomed to a city life, at once to take
+up his quarters off a sunken reef and land upon it in boats at
+all hours of the night, the proposition must have appeared quite
+impracticable and extravagant; but this practice coming
+progressively upon the artificers, it was ultimately undertaken
+with the greatest alacrity.&nbsp; Notwithstanding this, however,
+it must be acknowledged that it was not till after much labour
+and peril, and many an anxious hour, that the writer is enabled
+to state that the site of the Bell Rock Lighthouse is fully
+prepared for the first entire course of the building.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 12th Aug.]</p>
+<p>The artificers landed this morning at half-past ten, and after
+an hour and a half&rsquo;s work eight stones were laid, which
+completed the first entire course of the building, consisting of
+123 blocks, the last of which was laid with three hearty
+cheers.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Saturday, 10th Sept.]</p>
+<p>Landed at nine a.m., and by a quarter-past twelve noon
+twenty-three stones had been laid.&nbsp; The works being now
+somewhat elevated by the lower courses, we got quit of the very
+serious inconvenience of pumping water to clear the
+foundation-pit.&nbsp; This gave much facility to the operations,
+and was noticed with expressions of as much happiness by the
+artificers as the seamen had shown when relieved of the continual
+trouble of carrying the smith&rsquo;s bellows off the rock prior
+to the erection of the beacon.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Wednesday, 21st Sept.]</p>
+<p>Mr. Thomas Macurich, mate of the <i>Smeaton</i>, and James
+Scott, one of the crew, a young man about eighteen years of age,
+immediately went into their boat to make fast a hawser to the
+ring in the top of the floating buoy of the moorings, and were
+forthwith to proceed to land their cargo, so much wanted, at the
+rock.&nbsp; The tides at this period were very strong, and the
+mooring-chain, when sweeping the ground, had caught hold of a
+rock or piece of wreck by which the chain was so shortened that
+when the tide flowed the buoy got almost under water, and little
+more than the ring appeared at the surface.&nbsp; When Macurich
+and Scott were in the act of making the hawser fast to the ring,
+the chain got suddenly disentangled at the bottom, and this large
+buoy, measuring about seven feet in height and three feet in
+diameter at the middle, tapering to both ends, being what seamen
+term a <i>Nun-buoy</i>, vaulted or sprung up with such force that
+it upset the boat, which instantly filled with water.&nbsp; Mr.
+Macurich, with much exertion, succeeded in getting hold of the
+boat&rsquo;s gunwale, still above the surface of the water, and
+by this means was saved; but the young man Scott was
+unfortunately drowned.&nbsp; He had in all probability been
+struck about the head by the ring of the buoy, for although
+surrounded with the oars and the thwarts of the boat which
+floated near him, yet he seemed entirely to want the power of
+availing himself of such assistance, and appeared to be quite
+insensible, while Pool, the master of the <i>Smeaton</i>, called
+loudly to him; and before assistance could be got from the
+tender, he was carried away by the strength of the current and
+disappeared.</p>
+<p>The young man Scott was a great favourite in the service,
+having had something uncommonly mild and complaisant in his
+manner; and his loss was therefore universally regretted.&nbsp;
+The circumstances of his case were also peculiarly distressing to
+his mother, as her husband, who was a seaman, had for three years
+past been confined to a French prison, and the deceased was the
+chief support of the family.&nbsp; In order in some measure to
+make up the loss to the poor woman for the monthly aliment
+regularly allowed her by her late son, it was suggested that a
+younger boy, a brother of the deceased, might be taken into the
+service.&nbsp; This appeared to be rather a delicate proposition,
+but it was left to the landing-master to arrange according to
+circumstances; such was the resignation, and at the same time the
+spirit, of the poor woman, that she readily accepted the
+proposal, and in a few days the younger Scott was actually afloat
+in the place of his brother.&nbsp; On representing this
+distressing case to the Board, the Commissioners were pleased to
+grant an annuity of &pound;5 to Scott&rsquo;s mother.</p>
+<p>The <i>Smeaton</i>, not having been made fast to the buoy,
+had, with the ebb-tide, drifted to leeward a considerable way
+eastward of the rock, and could not, till the return of the
+flood-tide, be worked up to her moorings, so that the present
+tide was lost, notwithstanding all exertions which had been made
+both ashore and afloat with this cargo.&nbsp; The artificers
+landed at six a.m.; but, as no materials could be got upon the
+rock this morning, they were employed in boring trenail holes and
+in various other operations, and after four hours&rsquo; work
+they returned on board the tender.&nbsp; When the <i>Smeaton</i>
+got up to her moorings, the landing-master&rsquo;s crew
+immediately began to unload her.&nbsp; There being too much wind
+for towing the praams in the usual way, they were warped to the
+rock in the most laborious manner by their windlasses, with
+successive grapplings and hawsers laid out for this
+purpose.&nbsp; At six p.m. the artificers landed, and continued
+at work till half-past ten, when the remaining seventeen stones
+were laid which completed the third entire course, or fourth of
+the lighthouse, with which the building operations were closed
+for the season.</p>
+<h3>III&mdash;OPERATIONS OF 1809</h3>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Wednesday, 24th May]</p>
+<p>The last night was the first that the writer, had passed in
+his old quarters on board of the floating light for about twelve
+months, when the weather was so fine and the sea so smooth that
+even here he felt but little or no motion, excepting at the turn
+of the tide, when the vessel gets into what the seamen term the
+<i>trough of the sea</i>.&nbsp; At six a.m. Mr. Watt, who
+conducted the operations of the railways and beacon-house, had
+landed with nine artificers.&nbsp; At half-past one p.m. Mr.
+Peter Logan had also landed with fifteen masons, and immediately
+proceeded to set up the crane.&nbsp; The sheer-crane or apparatus
+for lifting the stones out of the praam-boats at the eastern
+creek had been already erected, and the railways now formed about
+two-thirds of an entire circle round the building: some progress
+had likewise been made with the reach towards the western
+landing-place.&nbsp; The floors being laid, the beacon now
+assumed the appearance of a habitation.&nbsp; The <i>Smeaton</i>
+was at her moorings, with the <i>Fernie</i> praam-boat astern,
+for which she was laying down moorings, and the tender being also
+at her station, the Bell Rock had again put on its former busy
+aspect.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Wednesday, 31st May]</p>
+<p>The landing-master&rsquo;s bell, often no very favourite
+sound, rung at six this morning; but on this occasion, it is
+believed, it was gladly received by all on board, as the welcome
+signal of the return of better weather.&nbsp; The masons laid
+thirteen stones to-day, which the seamen had landed, together
+with other building materials.&nbsp; During these twenty-four
+hours the wind was from the south, blowing fresh breezes,
+accompanied with showers of snow.&nbsp; In the morning the snow
+showers were so thick that it was with difficulty the
+landing-master, who always steered the leading boat, could make
+his way to the rock through the drift.&nbsp; But at the Bell Rock
+neither snow nor rain, nor fog nor wind, retarded the progress of
+the work, if unaccompanied by a heavy swell or breach of the
+sea.</p>
+<p>The weather during the months of April and May had been
+uncommonly boisterous, and so cold that the thermometer seldom
+exceeded 40&deg;, while the barometer was generally about
+29.50.&nbsp; We had not only hail and sleet, but the snow on the
+last day of May lay on the decks and rigging of the ship to the
+depth of about three inches; and, although now entering upon the
+month of June, the length of the day was the chief indication of
+summer.&nbsp; Yet such is the effect of habit, and such was the
+expertness of the landing-master&rsquo;s crew, that, even in this
+description of weather, seldom a tide&rsquo;s work was
+lost.&nbsp; Such was the ardour and zeal of the heads of the
+several departments at the rock, including Mr. Peter Logan,
+foreman builder, Mr. Francis Watt, foreman millwright, and
+Captain Wilson, landing-master, that it was on no occasion
+necessary to address them, excepting in the way of precaution or
+restraint.&nbsp; Under these circumstances, however, the writer
+not unfrequently felt considerable anxiety, of which this
+day&rsquo;s experience will afford an example.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Thursday, 1st June]</p>
+<p>This morning, at a quarter-past eight, the artificers were
+landed as usual, and, after three hours and three-quarters&rsquo;
+work, five stones were laid, the greater part of this tide having
+been taken up in completing the boring and trenailing of the
+stones formerly laid.&nbsp; At noon the writer, with the seamen
+and artificers, proceeded to the tender, leaving on the beacon
+the joiners, and several of those who were troubled with
+sea-sickness&mdash;among whom was Mr. Logan, who remained with
+Mr. Watt&mdash;counting altogether eleven persons.&nbsp; During
+the first and middle parts of these twenty-four hours the wind
+was from the east, blowing what the seamen term &lsquo;fresh
+breezes&rsquo;; but in the afternoon it shifted to E.N.E.,
+accompanied with so heavy a swell of sea that the <i>Smeaton</i>
+and tender struck their topmasts, launched in their bolt-sprits,
+and &lsquo;made all snug&rsquo; for a gale.&nbsp; At four p.m.
+the <i>Smeaton</i> was obliged to slip her moorings, and passed
+the tender, drifting before the wind, with only the foresail
+set.&nbsp; In passing, Mr. Pool hailed that he must run for the
+Firth of Forth to prevent the vessel from &lsquo;riding
+under.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>On board of the tender the writer&rsquo;s chief concern was
+about the eleven men left upon the beacon.&nbsp; Directions were
+accordingly given that everything about the vessel should be put
+in the best possible state, to present as little resistance to
+the wind as possible, that she might have the better chance of
+riding out the gale.&nbsp; Among these preparations the best
+bower cable was bent, so as to have a second anchor in readiness
+in case the mooring-hawser should give way, that every means
+might be used for keeping the vessel within sight of the
+prisoners on the beacon, and thereby keep them in as good spirits
+as possible.&nbsp; From the same motive the boats were kept
+afloat that they might be less in fear of the vessel leaving her
+station.&nbsp; The landing-master had, however, repeatedly
+expressed his anxiety for the safety of the boats, and wished
+much to have them hoisted on board.&nbsp; At seven p.m. one of
+the boats, as he feared, was unluckily filled with sea from a
+wave breaking into her, and it was with great difficulty that she
+could be baled out and got on board, with the loss of her oars,
+rudder, and loose thwarts.&nbsp; Such was the motion of the ship
+that in taking this boat on board her gunwale was stove in, and
+she otherwise received considerable damage.&nbsp; Night
+approached, but it was still found quite impossible to go near
+the rock.&nbsp; Consulting, therefore, the safety of the second
+boat, she also was hoisted on board of the tender.</p>
+<p>At this time the cabins of the beacon were only partially
+covered, and had neither been provided with bedding nor a proper
+fireplace, while the stock of provisions was but slender.&nbsp;
+In these uncomfortable circumstances the people on the beacon
+were left for the night, nor was the situation of those on board
+of the tender much better.&nbsp; The rolling and pitching motion
+of the ship was excessive; and, excepting to those who had been
+accustomed to a residence in the floating light, it seemed quite
+intolerable.&nbsp; Nothing was heard but the hissing of the winds
+and the creaking of the bulkheads or partitions of the ship; the
+night was, therefore, spent in the most unpleasant reflections
+upon the condition of the people on the beacon, especially in the
+prospect of the tender being driven from her moorings.&nbsp; But,
+even in such a case, it afforded some consolation that the
+stability of the fabric was never doubted, and that the boats of
+the floating light were at no great distance, and ready to render
+the people on the rock the earliest assistance which the weather
+would permit.&nbsp; The writer&rsquo;s cabin being in the
+sternmost part of the ship, which had what sailors term a good
+entry, or was sharp built, the sea, as before noticed, struck her
+counter with so much violence that the water, with a rushing
+noise, continually forced its way up the rudder-case, lifted the
+valve of the water-closet, and overran the cabin floor.&nbsp; In
+these circumstances daylight was eagerly looked for, and hailed
+with delight, as well by those afloat as by the artificers upon
+the rock.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 2nd June]</p>
+<p>In the course of the night the writer held repeated
+conversations with the officer on watch, who reported that the
+weather continued much in the same state, and that the barometer
+still indicated 29.20 inches.&nbsp; At six a.m. the
+landing-master considered the weather to have somewhat moderated;
+and, from certain appearances of the sky, he was of opinion that
+a change for the better would soon take place.&nbsp; He
+accordingly proposed to attempt a landing at low-water, and
+either get the people off the rock, or at least ascertain what
+state they were in.&nbsp; At nine a.m. he left the vessel with a
+boat well manned, carrying with him a supply of cooked provisions
+and a tea-kettle full of mulled port wine for the people on the
+beacon, who had not had any regular diet for about thirty hours,
+while they were exposed during that period, in a great measure,
+both to the winds and the sprays of the sea.&nbsp; The boat
+having succeeded in landing, she returned at eleven a.m. with the
+artificers, who had got off with considerable difficulty, and who
+were heartily welcomed by all on board.</p>
+<p>Upon inquiry it appeared that three of the stones last laid
+upon the building had been partially lifted from their beds by
+the force of the sea, and were now held only by the trenails, and
+that the cast-iron sheer-crane had again been thrown down and
+completely broken.&nbsp; With regard to the beacon, the sea at
+high-water had lifted part of the mortar gallery or lowest floor,
+and washed away all the lime-casks and other movable articles
+from it; but the principal parts of this fabric had sustained no
+damage.&nbsp; On pressing Messrs. Logan and Watt on the situation
+of things in the course of the night, Mr. Logan emphatically
+said: &lsquo;That the beacon had an <i>ill-faured</i> <a
+name="citation171a"></a><a href="#footnote171a"
+class="citation">[171a]</a> <i>twist</i> when the sea broke upon
+it at high-water, but that they were not very apprehensive of
+danger.&rsquo;&nbsp; On inquiring as to how they spent the night,
+it appeared that they had made shift to keep a small fire
+burning, and by means of some old sails defended themselves
+pretty well from the sea sprays.</p>
+<p>It was particularly mentioned that by the exertions of James
+Glen, one of the joiners, a number of articles were saved from
+being washed off the mortar gallery.&nbsp; Glen was also very
+useful in keeping up the spirits of the forlorn party.&nbsp; In
+the early part of life he had undergone many curious adventures
+at sea, which he now recounted somewhat after the manner of the
+tales of the <i>Arabian Nights</i>.&nbsp; When one observed that
+the beacon was a most comfortless lodging, Glen would presently
+introduce some of his exploits and hardships, in comparison with
+which the state of things at the beacon bore an aspect of comfort
+and happiness.&nbsp; Looking to their slender stock of
+provisions, and their perilous and uncertain chance of speedy
+relief, he would launch out into an account of one of his
+expeditions in the North Sea, when the vessel, being much
+disabled in a storm, was driven before the wind with the loss of
+almost all their provisions; and the ship being much infested
+with rats, the crew hunted these vermin with great eagerness to
+help their scanty allowance.&nbsp; By such means Glen had the
+address to make his companions, in some measure, satisfied, or at
+least passive, with regard to their miserable prospects upon this
+half-tide rock in the middle of the ocean.&nbsp; This incident is
+noticed, more particularly, to show the effects of such a happy
+turn of mind, even under the most distressing and ill-fated
+circumstances.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Saturday, 17th June]</p>
+<p>At eight a.m. the artificers and sailors, forty-five in
+number, landed on the rock, and after four hours&rsquo; work
+seven stones were laid.&nbsp; The remainder of this tide, from
+the threatening appearance of the weather, was occupied in
+trenailing and making all things as secure as possible.&nbsp; At
+twelve noon the rock and building were again overflowed, when the
+masons and seamen went on board of the tender, but Mr. Watt, with
+his squad of ten men, remained on the beacon throughout the
+day.&nbsp; As it blew fresh from the N.W. in the evening, it was
+found impracticable either to land the building artificers or to
+take the artificers off the beacon, and they were accordingly
+left there all night, but in circumstances very different from
+those of the 1st of this month.&nbsp; The house, being now in a
+more complete state, was provided with bedding, and they spent
+the night pretty well, though they complained of having been much
+disturbed at the time of high-water by the shaking and tremulous
+motion of their house and by the plashing noise of the sea upon
+mortar gallery.&nbsp; Here James Glen&rsquo;s versatile powers
+were again at work in cheering up those who seemed to be alarmed,
+and in securing everything as far as possible.&nbsp; On this
+occasion he had only to recall to the recollections of some of
+them the former night which they had spent on the beacon, the
+wind and sea being then much higher, and their habitation in a
+far less comfortable state.</p>
+<p>The wind still continuing to blow fresh from the N.W., at five
+p.m. the writer caused a signal to be made from the tender for
+the <i>Smeaton and Patriot</i> to slip their moorings, when they
+ran for Lunan Bay, an anchorage on the east side of the
+Redhead.&nbsp; Those on board of the tender spent but a very
+rough night, and perhaps slept less soundly than their companions
+on the beacon, especially as the wind was at N.W., which caused
+the vessel to ride with her stern towards the Bell Rock; so that,
+in the event of anything giving way, she could hardly have
+escaped being stranded upon it.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 18th June]</p>
+<p>The weather having moderated to-day, the wind shifted to the
+westward.&nbsp; At a quarter-past nine a.m. the artificers landed
+from the tender and had the pleasure to find their friends who
+had been left on the rock quite hearty, alleging that the beacon
+was the preferable quarters of the two.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Saturday, 24th June]</p>
+<p>Mr. Peter Logan, the foreman builder, and his squad,
+twenty-one in number, landed this morning at three o&rsquo;clock,
+and continued at work four hours and a quarter, and after laying
+seventeen stones returned to the tender.&nbsp; At six a.m. Mr.
+Francis Watt and his squad of twelve men landed, and proceeded
+with their respective operations at the beacon and railways, and
+were left on the rock during the whole day without the necessity
+of having any communication with the tender, the kitchen of the
+beacon-house being now fitted up.&nbsp; It was to-day, also, that
+Peter Fortune&mdash;a most obliging and well-known character in
+the Lighthouse service&mdash;was removed from the tender to the
+beacon as cook and steward, with a stock of provisions as ample
+as his limited store-room would admit.</p>
+<p>When as many stones were built as comprised this day&rsquo;s
+work, the demand for mortar was proportionally increased, and the
+task of the mortar-makers on these occasions was both laborious
+and severe.&nbsp; This operation was chiefly performed by John
+Watt&mdash;a strong, active quarrier by profession,&mdash;who was
+a perfect character in his way, and extremely zealous in his
+department.&nbsp; While the operations of the mortar-makers
+continued, the forge upon the gallery was not generally in use;
+but, as the working hours of the builders extended with the
+height of the building, the forge could not be so long wanted,
+and then a sad confusion often ensued upon the circumscribed
+floor of the mortar gallery, as the operations of Watt and his
+assistants trenched greatly upon those of the smiths.&nbsp; Under
+these circumstances the boundary of the smiths was much
+circumscribed, and they were personally annoyed, especially in
+blowy weather, with the dust of the lime in its powdered
+state.&nbsp; The mortar-makers, on the other hand, were often not
+a little distressed with the heat of the fire and the sparks
+elicited on the anvil, and not unaptly complained that they were
+placed between the &lsquo;devil and the deep sea.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 25th June]</p>
+<p>The work being now about ten feet in height, admitted of a
+rope-ladder being distended <a name="citation174a"></a><a
+href="#footnote174a" class="citation">[174a]</a> between the
+beacon and the building.&nbsp; By this &lsquo;Jacob&rsquo;s
+Ladder,&rsquo; as the seamen termed it, a communication was kept
+up with the beacon while the rock was considerably under
+water.&nbsp; One end of it being furnished with tackle-blocks,
+was fixed to the beams of the beacon, at the level of the mortar
+gallery, while the further end was connected with the upper
+course of the building by means of two Lewis bats which were
+lifted from course to course as the work advanced.&nbsp; In the
+same manner a rope furnished with a travelling pulley was
+distended for the purpose of transporting the mortar-buckets, and
+other light articles between the beacon and the building, which
+also proved a great conveniency to the work.&nbsp; At this period
+the rope-ladder and tackle for the mortar had a descent from the
+beacon to the building; by and by they were on a level, and
+towards the end of the season, when the solid part had attained
+its full height, the ascent was from the mortar gallery to the
+building.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 30th June]</p>
+<p>The artificers landed on the rock this morning at a
+quarter-past six, and remained at work five hours.&nbsp; The
+cooking apparatus being now in full operation, all hands had
+breakfast on the beacon at the usual hour, and remained there
+throughout the day.&nbsp; The crane upon the building had to be
+raised to-day from the eighth to the ninth course, an operation
+which now required all the strength that could be mustered for
+working the guy-tackles; for as the top of the crane was at this
+time about thirty-five feet above the rock, it became much more
+unmanageable.&nbsp; While the beam was in the act of swinging
+round from one guy to another, a great strain was suddenly
+brought upon the opposite tackle, with the end of which the
+artificers had very improperly neglected to take a turn round
+some stationary object, which would have given them the complete
+command of the tackle.&nbsp; Owing to this simple omission, the
+crane got a preponderancy to one side, and fell upon the building
+with a terrible crash.&nbsp; The surrounding artificers
+immediately flew in every direction to get out of its way; but
+Michael Wishart, the principal builder, having unluckily stumbled
+upon one of the uncut trenails, fell upon his back.&nbsp; His
+body fortunately got between the movable beam and the upright
+shaft of the crane, and was thus saved; but his feet got
+entangled with the wheels of the crane and were severely
+injured.&nbsp; Wishart, being a robust young man, endured his
+misfortune with wonderful firmness; he was laid upon one of the
+narrow framed beds of the beacon and despatched in a boat to the
+tender, where the writer was when this accident happened, not a
+little alarmed on missing the crane from the top of the building,
+and at the same time seeing a boat rowing towards the vessel with
+great speed.&nbsp; When the boat came alongside with poor
+Wishart, stretched upon a bed covered with blankets, a moment of
+great anxiety followed, which was, however, much relieved when,
+on stepping into the boat, he was accosted by Wishart, though in
+a feeble voice, and with an aspect pale as death from excessive
+bleeding.&nbsp; Directions having been immediately given to the
+coxswain to apply to Mr. Kennedy at the workyard to procure the
+best surgical aid, the boat was sent off without delay to
+Arbroath.&nbsp; The writer then landed at the rock, when the
+crane was in a very short time got into its place and again put
+in a working state.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Monday, 3rd July]</p>
+<p>The writer having come to Arbroath with the yacht, had an
+opportunity of visiting Michael Wishart, the artificer who had
+met with so severe an accident at the rock on the 30th ult., and
+had the pleasure to find him in a state of recovery.&nbsp; From
+Dr. Stevenson&rsquo;s account, under whose charge he had been
+placed, hopes were entertained that amputation would not be
+necessary, as his patient still kept free of fever or any
+appearance of mortification; and Wishart expressed a hope that he
+might, at least, be ultimately capable of keeping the light at
+the Bell Rock, as it was not now likely that he would assist
+further in building the house.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Saturday, 8th July]</p>
+<p>It was remarked to-day, with no small demonstration of joy,
+that the tide, being neap, did not, for the first time, overflow
+the building at high-water.&nbsp; Flags were accordingly hoisted
+on the beacon-house, and crane on the top of the building, which
+were repeated from the floating light, Lighthouse yacht, tender,
+<i>Smeaton</i>, <i>Patriot</i>, and the two praams.&nbsp; A
+salute of three guns was also fired from the yacht at high-water,
+when, all the artificers being collected on the top of the
+building, three cheers were given in testimony of this important
+circumstance.&nbsp; A glass of rum was then served out to all
+hands on the rock and on board of the respective ships.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 16th July]</p>
+<p>Besides laying, boring, trenailing, wedging, and grouting
+thirty-two stones, several other operations were proceeded with
+on the rock at low-water, when some of the artificers were
+employed at the railways, and at high-water at the
+beacon-house.&nbsp; The seamen having prepared a quantity of
+tarpaulin, or cloth laid over with successive coats of hot tar,
+the joiners had just completed the covering of the roof with
+it.&nbsp; This sort of covering was lighter and more easily
+managed than sheet-lead in such a situation.&nbsp; As a further
+defence against the weather the whole exterior of this temporary
+residence was painted with three coats of white-lead paint.&nbsp;
+Between the timber framing of the habitable part of the beacon
+the interstices were to be stuffed with moss, as a light
+substance that would resist dampness and check sifting winds; the
+whole interior was then to be lined with green baize cloth, so
+that both without and within the cabins were to have a very
+comfortable appearance.</p>
+<p>Although the building artificers generally remained on the
+rock throughout the day, and the millwrights, joiners, and
+smiths, while their number was considerable, remained also during
+the night, yet the tender had hitherto been considered as their
+night quarters.&nbsp; But the wind having in the course of the
+day shifted to the N.W., and as the passage to the tender, in the
+boats, was likely to be attended with difficulty, the whole of
+the artificers, with Mr. Logan, the foreman, preferred remaining
+all night on the beacon, which had of late become the solitary
+abode of George-Forsyth, a jobbing upholsterer, who had been
+employed in lining the beacon-house with cloth and in fitting up
+the bedding.&nbsp; Forsyth was a tall, thin, and rather
+loose-made man, who had an utter aversion at climbing upon the
+trap-ladders of the beacon, but especially at the process of
+boating, and the motion of the ship, which he said &lsquo;was
+death itself.&rsquo;&nbsp; He therefore pertinaciously insisted
+with the landing-master in being left upon the beacon, with a
+small black dog as his only companion.&nbsp; The writer, however,
+felt some delicacy in leaving a single individual upon the rock,
+who must have been so very helpless in case of accident.&nbsp;
+This fabric had, from the beginning, been rather intended by the
+writer to guard against accident from the loss or damage of a
+boat, and as a place for making mortar, a smith&rsquo;s shop, and
+a store for tools during the working months, than as permanent
+quarters; nor was it at all meant to be possessed until tile
+joiner-work was completely finished, and his own cabin, and that
+for the foreman, in readiness, when it was still to be left to
+the choice of the artificers to occupy the tender or the
+beacon.&nbsp; He, however, considered Forsyth&rsquo;s partiality
+and confidence in the latter as rather a fortunate
+occurrence.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Wednesday, 19th July]</p>
+<p>The whole of the artificers, twenty-three in number, now
+removed of their own accord from the tender, to lodge in the
+beacon, together with Peter Fortune, a person singularly adapted
+for a residence of this kind, both from the urbanity of his
+manners and the versatility of his talents.&nbsp; Fortune, in his
+person, was of small stature, and rather corpulent.&nbsp; Besides
+being a good Scots cook, he had acted both as groom and
+house-servant; he had been a soldier, a sutler, a writer&rsquo;s
+clerk, and an apothecary, from which he possessed the art of
+writing and suggesting recipes, and had hence, also, perhaps,
+acquired a turn for making collections in natural history.&nbsp;
+But in his practice in surgery on the Bell Rock, for which he
+received an annual fee of three guineas, he is supposed to have
+been rather partial to the use of the lancet.&nbsp; In short,
+Peter was the <i>factotum</i> of the beacon-house, where he
+ostensibly acted in the several capacities of cook, steward,
+surgeon, and barber, and kept a statement of the rations or
+expenditure of the provisions with the strictest integrity.</p>
+<p>In the present important state of the building, when it had
+just attained the height of sixteen feet, and the upper courses,
+and especially the imperfect one, were in the wash of the
+heaviest seas, an express boat arrived at the rock with a letter
+from Mr. Kennedy, of the workyard, stating that in consequence of
+the intended expedition to Walcheren, an embargo had been laid on
+shipping at all the ports of Great Britain: that both the
+<i>Smeaton</i> and <i>Patriot</i> were detained at Arbroath, and
+that but for the proper view which Mr. Ramsey, the port officer,
+had taken of his orders, neither the express boat nor one which
+had been sent with provisions and necessaries for the floating
+light would have been permitted to leave the harbour.&nbsp; The
+writer set off without delay for Arbroath, and on landing used
+every possible means with the official people, but their orders
+were deemed so peremptory that even boats were not permitted to
+sail from any port upon the coast.&nbsp; In the meantime, the
+collector of the Customs at Montrose applied to the Board at
+Edinburgh, but could, of himself, grant no relief to the Bell
+Rock shipping.</p>
+<p>At this critical period Mr. Adam Duff, then Sheriff of
+Forfarshire, now of the county of Edinburgh, and <i>ex
+officio</i> one of the Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouses,
+happened to be at Arbroath.&nbsp; Mr. Duff took an immediate
+interest in representing the circumstances of the case to the
+Board of Customs at Edinburgh.&nbsp; But such were the doubts
+entertained on the subject that, on having previously received
+the appeal from the collector at Montrose, the case had been
+submitted to the consideration of the Lords of the Treasury,
+whose decision was now waited for.</p>
+<p>In this state of things the writer felt particularly desirous
+to get the thirteenth course finished, that the building might be
+in a more secure state in the event of bad weather.&nbsp; An
+opportunity was therefore embraced on the 25th, in sailing with
+provisions for the floating light, to carry the necessary stones
+to the rock for this purpose, which were landed and built on the
+26th and 27th.&nbsp; But so closely was the watch kept up that a
+Custom-house officer was always placed on board of the
+<i>Smeaton</i> and <i>Patriot</i> while they were afloat, till
+the embargo was especially removed from the lighthouse
+vessels.&nbsp; The artificers at the Bell Rock had been reduced
+to fifteen, who were regularly supplied with provisions, along
+with the crew of the floating light, mainly through the port
+officer&rsquo;s liberal interpretation of his orders.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 1st Aug.]</p>
+<p>There being a considerable swell and breach of sea upon the
+rock yesterday, the stones could not be got landed till the day
+following, when the wind shifted to the southward and the weather
+improved.&nbsp; But to-day no less than seventy-eight blocks of
+stone were landed, of which forty were built, which completed the
+fourteenth and part of the fifteenth courses.&nbsp; The number of
+workmen now resident in the beacon-house was augmented to
+twenty-four, including the landing-master&rsquo;s crew from the
+tender and the boat&rsquo;s crew from the floating light, who
+assisted at landing the stones.&nbsp; Those daily at work upon
+the rock at this period amounted to forty-six.&nbsp; A cabin had
+been laid out for the writer on the beacon, but his apartment had
+been the last which was finished, and he had not yet taken
+possession of it; for though he generally spent the greater part
+of the day, at this time, upon the rock, yet he always slept on
+board of the tender.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 11th Aug.]</p>
+<p>The wind was at S. E. on the 11th, and there was so very heavy
+a swell of sea upon the rock that no boat could approach it.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Saturday, 12th Aug.]</p>
+<p>The gale still continuing from the S.E., the sea broke with
+great violence both upon the building and the beacon.&nbsp; The
+former being twenty-three feet in height, the upper part of the
+crane erected on it having been lifted from course to course as
+the building advanced, was now about thirty-six feet above the
+rock.&nbsp; From observations made on the rise of the sea by this
+crane, the artificers were enabled to estimate its height to be
+about fifty feet above the rock, while the sprays fell with a
+most alarming noise upon their cabins.&nbsp; At low-water, in the
+evening, a signal was made from the beacon, at the earnest desire
+of some of the artificers, for the boats to come to the rock; and
+although this could not be effected without considerable hazard,
+it was, however, accomplished, when twelve of their number, being
+much afraid, applied to the foreman to be relieved, and went on
+board of the tender.&nbsp; But the remaining fourteen continued
+on the rock, with Mr. Peter Logan, the foreman builder.&nbsp;
+Although this rule of allowing an option to every man either to
+remain on the rock or return to the tender was strictly adhered
+to, yet, as it would have been extremely inconvenient to have the
+men parcelled out in this manner, it became necessary to embrace
+the first opportunity of sending those who had left the beacon to
+the workyard, with as little appearance of intention as possible,
+lest it should hurt their feelings, or prevent others from acting
+according to their wishes, either in landing on the rock or
+remaining on the beacon.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 15th Aug.]</p>
+<p>The wind had fortunately shifted to the S.W. this morning, and
+though a considerable breach was still upon the rock, yet the
+landing-master&rsquo;s crew were enabled to get one praam-boat,
+lightly loaded with five stones, brought in safety to the western
+creek; these stones were immediately laid by the artificers, who
+gladly embraced the return of good weather to proceed with their
+operations.&nbsp; The writer had this day taken possession of his
+cabin in the beacon-house.&nbsp; It was small, but commodious,
+and was found particularly convenient in coarse and blowing
+weather, instead of being obliged to make a passage to the tender
+in an open boat at all times, both during the day and the night,
+which was often attended with much difficulty and danger.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Saturday, 19th Aug.]</p>
+<p>For some days past the weather had been occasionally so thick
+and foggy that no small difficulty was experienced in going even
+between the rock and the tender, though quite at hand.&nbsp; But
+the floating light&rsquo;s boat lost her way so far in returning
+on board that the first land she made, after rowing all night,
+was Fifeness, a distance of about fourteen miles.&nbsp; The
+weather having cleared in the morning, the crew stood off again
+for the floating light, and got on board in a half-famished and
+much exhausted state, having been constantly rowing for about
+sixteen hours.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 20th Aug.]</p>
+<p>The weather being very favourable to-day, fifty-three stones
+were landed, and the builders were not a little gratified in
+having built the twenty-second course, consisting of fifty-one
+stones, being the first course which had been completed in one
+day.&nbsp; This, as a matter of course, produced three hearty
+cheers.&nbsp; At twelve noon prayers were read for the first time
+on the Bell Rock; those present, counting thirty, were crowded
+into the upper apartment of the beacon, where the writer took a
+central position, while two of the artificers, joining hands,
+supported the Bible.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 25th Aug.]</p>
+<p>To-day the artificers laid forty-five stones, which completed
+the twenty-fourth course, reckoning above the first entire one,
+and the twenty-sixth above the rock.&nbsp; This finished the
+solid part of the building, and terminated the height of the
+outward casing of granite, which is thirty-one feet six inches
+above the rock or site of the foundation-stone, and about
+seventeen feet above high-water of spring-tides.&nbsp; Being a
+particular crisis in the progress of the lighthouse, the landing
+and laying of the last stone for the season was observed with the
+usual ceremonies.</p>
+<p>From observations often made by the writer, in so far as such
+can be ascertained, it appears that no wave in the open seas, in
+an unbroken state, rises more than from seven to nine feet above
+the general surface of the ocean.&nbsp; The Bell Rock Lighthouse
+may therefore now be considered at from eight to ten feet above
+the height of the waves; and, although the sprays and heavy seas
+have often been observed, in the present state of the building,
+to rise to the height of fifty feet, and fall with a tremendous
+noise on the beacon-house, yet such seas were not likely to make
+any impression on a mass of solid masonry, containing about 1400
+tons,</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Wednesday, 30th Aug.]</p>
+<p>The whole of the artificers left the rock at mid-day, when the
+tender made sail for Arbroath, which she reached about six
+p.m.&nbsp; The vessel being decorated with colours, and having
+fired a salute of three guns on approaching the harbour, the
+workyard artificers, with a multitude of people, assembled at the
+harbour, when mutual cheering and congratulations took place
+between those afloat and those on the quays.&nbsp; The tender had
+now, with little exception, been six months on the station at the
+Bell Rock, and during the last four months few of the squad of
+builders had been ashore.&nbsp; In particular, Mr. Peter Logan,
+the foreman, and Mr. Robert Selkirk, principal builder, had never
+once left the rock.&nbsp; The artificers, having made good wages
+during their stay, like seamen upon a return voyage, were
+extremely happy, and spent the evening with much innocent mirth
+and jollity.</p>
+<p>In reflecting upon the state of the matters at the Bell Rock
+during the working months, when the writer was much with the
+artificers, nothing can equal the happy manner in which these
+excellent workmen spent their time.&nbsp; They always went from
+Arbroath to their arduous task cheering and they generally
+returned in the same hearty state.&nbsp; While at the rock,
+between the tides, they amused themselves in reading, fishing,
+music, playing cards, draughts, etc., or in sporting with one
+another.&nbsp; In the workyard at Arbroath the young men were
+almost, without exception, employed in the evening at school, in
+writing and arithmetic, and not a few were learning architectural
+drawing, for which they had every convenience and facility, and
+were, in a very obliging manner, assisted in their studies by Mr.
+David Logan, clerk of the works.&nbsp; It therefore affords the
+most pleasing reflections to look back upon the pursuits of about
+sixty individuals who for years conducted themselves, on all
+occasions, in a sober and rational manner.</p>
+<h3>IV&mdash;OPERATIONS OF 1810</h3>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Thursday, 10th May]</p>
+<p>The wind had shifted to-day to W.N.W., when the writer, with
+considerable difficulty, was enabled to land upon the rock for
+the first time this season, at ten a.m.&nbsp; Upon examining the
+state of the building, and apparatus in general, he had the
+satisfaction to find everything in good order.&nbsp; The mortar
+in all the joints was perfectly entire.&nbsp; The building, now
+thirty feet in height, was thickly coated with <i>fuci</i> to the
+height of about fifteen feet, calculating from the rock: on the
+eastern side, indeed, the growth of seaweed was observable to the
+full height of thirty feet, and even on the top or upper bed of
+the last-laid course, especially towards the eastern side, it had
+germinated, so as to render walking upon it somewhat
+difficult.</p>
+<p>The beacon-house was in a perfectly sound state, and
+apparently just as it had been left in the month of
+November.&nbsp; But the tides being neap, the lower parts,
+particularly where the beams rested on the rock, could not now be
+seen.&nbsp; The floor of the mortar gallery having been already
+laid down by Mr. Watt and his men on a former visit, was merely
+soaked with the sprays; but the joisting-beams which supported it
+had, in the course of the winter, been covered with a fine downy
+conferva produced by the range of the sea.&nbsp; They were also a
+good deal whitened with the mute of the cormorant and other
+sea-fowls, which had roosted upon the beacon in winter.&nbsp;
+Upon ascending to the apartments, it was found that the motion of
+the sea had thrown open the door of the cook-house: this was only
+shut with a single latch, that in case of shipwreck at the Bell
+Rock the mariner might find ready access to the shelter of this
+forlorn habitation, where a supply of provisions was kept; and
+being within two miles and a half of the floating light, a signal
+could readily be observed, when a boat might be sent to his
+relief as the weather permitted.&nbsp; An arrangement for this
+purpose formed one of the instructions on board of the floating
+light, but happily no instance occurred for putting it in
+practice.&nbsp; The hearth or fireplace of the cook-house was
+built of brick in as secure a manner as possible, to prevent
+accident from fire; but some of the plaster-work had shaken
+loose, from its damp state and the tremulous motion of the beacon
+in stormy weather.&nbsp; The writer next ascended to the floor
+which was occupied by the cabins of himself and his assistants,
+which were in tolerably good order, having only a damp and musty
+smell.&nbsp; The barrack for the artificers, over all, was next
+visited; it had now a very dreary and deserted appearance when
+its former thronged state was recollected.&nbsp; In some parts
+the water had come through the boarding, and had discoloured the
+lining of green cloth, but it was, nevertheless, in a good
+habitable condition.&nbsp; While the seamen were employed in
+landing a stock of provisions, a few of the artificers set to
+work with great eagerness to sweep and clean the several
+apartments.&nbsp; The exterior of the beacon was, in the
+meantime, examined, and found in perfect order.&nbsp; The
+painting, though it had a somewhat blanched appearance, adhered
+firmly both on the sides and roof, and only two or three panes of
+glass were broken in the cupola, which had either been blown out
+by the force of the wind, or perhaps broken by sea-fowl.</p>
+<p>Having on this occasion continued upon the building and beacon
+a considerable time after the tide had begun to flow, the
+artificers were occupied in removing the forge from the top of
+the building, to which the gangway or wooden bridge gave great
+facility; and, although it stretched or had a span of forty-two
+feet, its construction was extremely simple, while the road-way
+was perfectly firm and steady.&nbsp; In returning from this visit
+to the rock every one was pretty well soused in spray before
+reaching the tender at two o&rsquo;clock p.m., where things
+awaited the landing party in as comfortable a way as such a
+situation would admit.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 11th May]</p>
+<p>The wind was still easterly, accompanied with rather a heavy
+swell of sea for the operations in hand.&nbsp; A landing was,
+however, made this morning, when the artificers were immediately
+employed in scraping the seaweed off the upper course of the
+building, in order to apply the moulds of the first course of the
+staircase, that the joggle-holes might be marked off in the upper
+course of the solid.&nbsp; This was also necessary previously to
+the writer&rsquo;s fixing the position of the entrance door,
+which was regulated chiefly by the appearance of the growth of
+the seaweed on the building, indicating the direction of the
+heaviest seas, on the opposite side of which the door was
+placed.&nbsp; The landing-master&rsquo;s crew succeeded in towing
+into the creek on the western side of the rock the praam-boat
+with the balance-crane, which had now been on board of the praam
+for five days.&nbsp; The several pieces of this machine, having
+been conveyed along the railways upon the waggons to a position
+immediately under the bridge, were elevated to its level, or
+thirty feet above the rock, in the following manner.&nbsp; A
+chain-tackle was suspended over a pulley from the cross-beam
+connecting the tops of the kingposts of the bridge, which was
+worked by a winch-machine with wheel, pinion, and barrel, round
+which last the chain was wound.&nbsp; This apparatus was placed
+on the beacon side of the bridge, at the distance of about twelve
+feet from the cross-beam and pulley in the middle of the
+bridge.&nbsp; Immediately under the cross-beam a hatch was formed
+in the roadway of the bridge, measuring seven feet in length and
+five feet in breadth, made to shut with folding boards like a
+double door, through which stones and other articles were raised;
+the folding doors were then let down, and the stone or load was
+gently lowered upon a waggon which was wheeled on railway trucks
+towards the lighthouse.&nbsp; In this manner the several castings
+of the balance-crane were got up to the top of the solid of the
+building.</p>
+<p>The several apartments of the beacon-house having been cleaned
+out and supplied with bedding, a sufficient stock of provisions
+was put into the store, when Peter Fortune, formerly noticed,
+lighted his fire in the beacon for the first time this
+season.&nbsp; Sixteen artificers at the same time mounted to
+their barrack-room, and all the foremen of the works also took
+possession of their cabin, all heartily rejoiced at getting rid
+of the trouble of boating and the sickly motion of the
+tender.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Saturday, 12th May]</p>
+<p>The wind was at E.N.E., blowing so fresh, and accompanied with
+so much sea, that no stones could be landed to-day.&nbsp; The
+people on the rock, however, were busily employed in screwing
+together the balance-crane, cutting out the joggle-holes in the
+upper course, and preparing all things for commencing the
+building operations.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 13th May]</p>
+<p>The weather still continues boisterous, although the barometer
+has all the while stood at about 30 inches.&nbsp; Towards evening
+the wind blew so fresh at E. by S. that the boats both of the
+<i>Smeaton</i> and tender were obliged to be hoisted in, and it
+was feared that the <i>Smeaton</i> would have to slip her
+moorings.&nbsp; The people on the rock were seen busily employed,
+and had the balance-crane apparently ready for use, but no
+communication could be had with them to-day.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Monday, 14th May]</p>
+<p>The wind continued to blow so fresh, and the <i>Smeaton</i>
+rode so heavily with her cargo, that at noon a signal was made
+for her getting under weigh, when she stood towards Arbroath; and
+on board of the tender we are still without any communication
+with the people on the rock, where the sea was seen breaking over
+the top of the building in great sprays, and raging with much
+agitation among the beams of the beacon.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Thursday, 17th May]</p>
+<p>The wind, in the course of the day, had shifted from north to
+west; the sea being also considerably less, a boat landed on the
+rock at six p.m., for the first time since the 11th, with the
+provisions and water brought off by the <i>Patriot</i>.&nbsp; The
+inhabitants of the beacon were all well, but tired above measure
+for want of employment, as the balance-crane and apparatus was
+all in readiness.&nbsp; Under these circumstances they felt no
+less desirous of the return of good weather than those afloat,
+who were continually tossed with the agitation of the sea.&nbsp;
+The writer, in particular, felt himself almost as much fatigued
+and worn-out as he had been at any period since the commencement
+of the work.&nbsp; The very backward state of the weather at so
+advanced a period of the season unavoidably created some alarm,
+lest he should be overtaken with bad weather at a late period of
+the season, with the building operations in an unfinished
+state.&nbsp; These apprehensions were, no doubt, rather increased
+by the inconveniences of his situation afloat, as the tender
+rolled and pitched excessively at times.&nbsp; This being also
+his first off-set for the season, every bone of his body felt
+sore with preserving a sitting posture while he endeavoured to
+pass away the time in reading; as for writing, it was wholly
+impracticable.&nbsp; He had several times entertained thoughts of
+leaving the station for a few days and going into Arbroath with
+the tender till the weather should improve; but as the artificers
+had been landed on the rock he was averse to this at the
+commencement of the season, knowing also that he would be equally
+uneasy in every situation till the first cargo was landed: and he
+therefore resolved to continue at his post until this should be
+effected.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 18th May]</p>
+<p>The wind being now N.W., the sea was considerably run down,
+and this morning at five o&rsquo;clock the landing-master&rsquo;s
+crew, thirteen in number, left the tender; and having now no
+detention with the landing of artificers, they proceeded to
+unmoor the <i>Hedderwick</i> praam-boat, and towed her alongside
+of the <i>Smeaton</i>: and in the course of the day twenty-three
+blocks of stone, three casks of pozzolano, three of sand, three
+of lime, and one of Roman cement, together with three bundles of
+trenails and three of wedges, were all landed on the rock and
+raised the top of the building by means of the tackle suspended
+from the cross-beam on the middle of the bridge.&nbsp; The stones
+were then moved along the bridge on the waggon to the building
+within reach of the balance-crane, with which they were laid in
+their respective places on the building.&nbsp; The masons
+immediately thereafter proceeded to bore the trenail-holes into
+the course below, and otherwise to complete the one in
+hand.&nbsp; When the first stone was to be suspended by the
+balance-crane, the bell on the beacon was rung, and all the
+artificers and seamen were collected on the building.&nbsp; Three
+hearty cheers were given while it was lowered into its place, and
+the steward served round a glass of rum, when success was drunk
+to the further progress of the building.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 20th May]</p>
+<p>The wind was southerly to-day, but there was much less sea
+than yesterday, and the landing-master&rsquo;s crew were enabled
+to discharge and land twenty-three pieces of stone and other
+articles for the work.&nbsp; The artificers had completed the
+laying of the twenty-seventh or first course of the staircase
+this morning, and in the evening they finished the boring,
+trenailing, wedging, and grouting it with mortar.&nbsp; At twelve
+o&rsquo;clock noon the beacon-house bell was rung, and all hands
+were collected on the top of the building, where prayers were
+read for the first time on the lighthouse, which forcibly struck
+every one, and had, upon the whole, a very impressive effect.</p>
+<p>From the hazardous situation of the beacon-house with regard
+to fire, being composed wholly of timber, there was no small risk
+from accident: and on this account one of the most steady of the
+artificers was appointed to see that the fire of the
+cooking-house, and the lights in general, were carefully
+extinguished at stated hours.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Monday, 4th June]</p>
+<p>This being the birthday of our much-revered Sovereign King
+George <span class="smcap">iii</span>, now in the fiftieth year
+of his reign, the shipping of the Lighthouse service were this
+morning decorated with colours according to the taste of their
+respective captains.&nbsp; Flags were also hoisted upon the
+beacon-house and balance-crane on the top of the building.&nbsp;
+At twelve noon a salute was fired from the tender, when the
+King&rsquo;s health was drunk, with all the honours, both on the
+rock and on board of the shipping.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 5th June]</p>
+<p>As the lighthouse advanced in height, the cubical contents of
+the stones were less, but they had to be raised to a greater
+height; and the walls, being thinner, were less commodious for
+the necessary machinery and the artificers employed, which
+considerably retarded the work.&nbsp; Inconvenience was also
+occasionally experienced from the men dropping their coats, hats,
+mallets, and other tools, at high-water, which were carried away
+by the tide; and the danger to the people themselves was now
+greatly increased.&nbsp; Had any of them fallen from the beacon
+or building at high-water, while the landing-master&rsquo;s crew
+were generally engaged with the craft at a distance, it must have
+rendered the accident doubly painful to those on the rock, who at
+this time had no boat, and consequently no means of rendering
+immediate and prompt assistance.&nbsp; In such cases it would
+have been too late to have got a boat by signal from the
+tender.&nbsp; A small boat, which could be lowered at pleasure,
+was therefore suspended by a pair of davits projected from the
+cook-house, the keel being about thirty feet from the rock.&nbsp;
+This boat, with its tackle was put under the charge of James
+Glen, of whose exertions on the beacon mention has already been
+made, and who, having in early life been a seaman, was also very
+expert in the management of a boat.&nbsp; A life-buoy was
+likewise suspended from the bridge, to which a coil of line two
+hundred fathoms in length was attached, which could be let out to
+a person falling into the water, or to the people in the boat,
+should they not be able to work her with the oars.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 7th June]</p>
+<p>To-day twelve stones were landed on the rock, being the
+remainder of the <i>Patriot&rsquo;s</i> cargo; and the artificers
+built the thirty-ninth course, consisting of fourteen
+stones.&nbsp; The Bell Rock works had now a very busy appearance,
+as the lighthouse was daily getting more into form.&nbsp; Besides
+the artificers and their cook, the writer and his servant were
+also lodged on the beacon, counting in all twenty-nine; and at
+low-water the landing-master&rsquo;s crew, consisting of from
+twelve to fifteen seamen, were employed in transporting the
+building materials, working the landing apparatus on the rock,
+and dragging the stone waggons along the railways.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 8th June]</p>
+<p>In the course of this day the weather varied much.&nbsp; In
+the morning it was calm, in the middle part of the day there were
+light airs of wind from the south, and in the evening fresh
+breezes from the east.&nbsp; The barometer in the writer&rsquo;s
+cabin in the beacon-house oscillated from 30 inches to 30.42, and
+the weather was extremely pleasant.&nbsp; This, in any situation,
+forms one of the chief comforts of life; but, as may easily be
+conceived, it was doubly so to people stuck, as it were, upon a
+pinnacle in the middle of the ocean.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 10th June]</p>
+<p>One of the praam-boats had been brought to the rock with
+eleven stones, notwithstanding the perplexity which attended the
+getting of those formerly landed taken up to the building.&nbsp;
+Mr. Peter Logan, the foreman builder, interposed, and prevented
+this cargo from being delivered; but the landing-master&rsquo;s
+crew were exceedingly averse to this arrangement, from an idea
+that &ldquo;ill luck&rdquo; would in future attend the praam, her
+cargo, and those who navigated her, from thus reversing her
+voyage.&nbsp; It may be noticed that this was the first instance
+of a praam-boat having been sent from the Bell Rock with any part
+of her cargo on board, and was considered so uncommon an
+occurrence that it became a topic of conversation among the
+seamen and artificers.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 12th June]</p>
+<p>To-day the stones formerly sent from the rock were safely
+landed, notwithstanding the augury of the seamen in consequence
+of their being sent away two days before.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Thursday, 14th June]</p>
+<p>To-day twenty-seven stones and eleven joggle-pieces were
+landed, part of which consisted of the forty-seventh course,
+forming the storeroom floor.&nbsp; The builders were at work this
+morning by four o&rsquo;clock, in the hopes of being able to
+accomplish the laying of the eighteen stones of this
+course.&nbsp; But at eight o&rsquo;clock in the evening they had
+still two to lay, and as the stones of this course were very
+unwieldy, being six feet in length, they required much precaution
+and care both in lifting and laying them.&nbsp; It was only on
+the writer&rsquo;s suggestion to Mr. Logan that the artificers
+were induced to leave off, as they had intended to complete this
+floor before going to bed.&nbsp; The two remaining stones were,
+however, laid in their places without mortar when the bell on the
+beacon was rung, and, all hands being collected on the top of the
+building, three hearty cheers were given on covering the first
+apartment.&nbsp; The steward then served out a dram to each, when
+the whole retired to their barrack much fatigued, but with the
+anticipation of the most perfect repose even in the
+&ldquo;hurricane-house,&rdquo; amidst the dashing seas on the
+Bell Rock.</p>
+<p>While the workmen were at breakfast and dinner it was the
+writer&rsquo;s usual practice to spend his time on the walls of
+the building, which, notwithstanding the narrowness of the track,
+nevertheless formed his principal walk when the rock was under
+water.&nbsp; But this afternoon he had his writing-desk set upon
+the storeroom floor, when he wrote to Mrs.
+Stevenson&mdash;certainly the first letter dated from the Bell
+Rock <i>Lighthouse</i>&mdash;giving a detail of the fortunate
+progress of the work with an assurance that the lighthouse would
+soon be completed at the rate at which it now proceeded; and, the
+<i>Patriot</i> having sailed for Arbroath in the evening, he felt
+no small degree of pleasure in despatching this communication to
+his family.</p>
+<p>The weather still continuing favourable for the operations at
+the rock, the work proceeded with much energy, through the
+exertions both of the seamen and artificers.&nbsp; For the more
+speedy and effectual working of the several tackles in raising
+the materials as the building advanced in height, and there being
+a great extent of railway to attend to, which required constant
+repairs, two additional millwrights were added to the complement
+on the rock, which, including the writer, now counted thirty-one
+in all.&nbsp; So crowded was the men&rsquo;s barrack that the
+beds were ranged five tier in height, allowing only about one
+foot eight inches for each bed.&nbsp; The artificers commenced
+this morning at five o&rsquo;clock, and, in the course of the
+day, they laid the forty-eighth and forty-ninth courses,
+consisting each of sixteen blocks.&nbsp; From the favourable
+state of the weather, and the regular manner in which the work
+now proceeded, the artificers had generally from four to seven
+extra hours&rsquo; work, which, including their stated wages of
+3s. 4d., yielded them from 5s. 4d. to about 6s. 10d. per day
+besides their board; even the postage of their letters was paid
+while they were at the Bell Rock.&nbsp; In these advantages the
+foremen also shared, having about double the pay and amount of
+premiums of the artificers.&nbsp; The seamen being less out of
+their element in the Bell Rock operations than the landsmen,
+their premiums consisted in a slump sum payable at the end of the
+season, which extended from three to ten guineas.</p>
+<p>As the laying of the floors was somewhat tedious, the
+landing-master and his crew had got considerably beforehand with
+the building artificers in bringing materials faster to the rock
+than they could be built.&nbsp; The seamen having, therefore,
+some spare time, were occasionally employed during fine weather
+in dredging or grappling for the several mushroom anchors and
+mooring-chains which had been lost in the vicinity of the Bell
+Rock during the progress of the work by the breaking loose and
+drifting of the floating buoys.&nbsp; To encourage their
+exertions in this search, five guineas were offered as a premium
+for each set they should find; and, after much patient
+application, they succeeded to-day in hooking one of these lost
+anchors with its chain.</p>
+<p>It was a general remark at the Bell Rock, as before noticed,
+that fish were never plenty in its neighbourhood excepting in
+good weather.&nbsp; Indeed, the seamen used to speculate about
+the state of the weather from their success in fishing.&nbsp;
+When the fish disappeared at the rock, it was considered a sure
+indication that a gale was not far off, as the fish seemed to
+seek shelter in deeper water from the roughness of the sea during
+these changes in the weather.&nbsp; At this time the rock, at
+high-water, was completely covered with podlies, or the fry of
+the coal-fish, about six or eight inches in length.&nbsp; The
+artificers sometimes occupied half an hour after breakfast and
+dinner in catching these little fishes, but were more frequently
+supplied from the boats of the tender.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Saturday, 16th June]</p>
+<p>The landing-master having this day discharged the
+<i>Smeaton</i> and loaded the <i>Hedderwick and Dickie</i>
+praam-boats with nineteen stones, they were towed to their
+respective moorings, when Captain Wilson, in consequence of the
+heavy swell of sea, came in his boat to the beacon-house to
+consult with the writer as to the propriety of venturing the
+loaded praam-boats with their cargoes to the rock while so much
+sea was running.&nbsp; After some dubiety expressed on the
+subject, in which the ardent mind of the landing-master suggested
+many arguments in favour of his being able to convey the praams
+in perfect safety, it was acceded to.&nbsp; In bad weather, and
+especially on occasions of difficulty like the present, Mr.
+Wilson, who was an extremely active seaman, measuring about five
+feet three inches in height, of a robust habit, generally dressed
+himself in what he called a <i>monkey jacket</i>, made of thick
+duffle cloth, with a pair of Dutchman&rsquo;s petticoat trousers,
+reaching only to his knees, where they were met with a pair of
+long water-tight boots; with this dress, his glazed hat, and his
+small brass speaking trumpet in his hand, he bade defiance to the
+weather.&nbsp; When he made his appearance in this most suitable
+attire for the service his crew seemed to possess additional
+life, never failing to use their utmost exertions when the
+captain put on his <i>storm rigging</i>.&nbsp; They had this
+morning commenced loading the praam-boats at four o&rsquo;clock,
+and proceeded to tow them into the eastern landing-place, which
+was accomplished with much dexterity, though not without the risk
+of being thrown, by the force of the sea, on certain projecting
+ledges of the rock.&nbsp; In such a case the loss even of a
+single stone would have greatly retarded the work.&nbsp; For the
+greater safety in entering the creek it was necessary to put out
+several warps and guy-ropes to guide the boats into its narrow
+and intricate entrance; and it frequently happened that the sea
+made a clean breach over the praams, which not only washed their
+decks, but completely drenched the crew in water.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 17th June]</p>
+<p>It was fortunate, in the present state of the weather, that
+the fiftieth course was in a sheltered spot, within the reach of
+the tackle of the winch-machine upon the bridge; a few stones
+were stowed upon the bridge itself, and the remainder upon the
+building, which kept the artificers at work.&nbsp; The stowing of
+the materials upon the rock was the department of Alexander
+Brebner, mason, who spared no pains in attending to the safety of
+the stones, and who, in the present state of the work, when the
+stones were landed faster than could be built, generally worked
+till the water rose to his middle.&nbsp; At one o&rsquo;clock
+to-day the bell rung for prayers, and all hands were collected
+into the upper barrack-room of the beacon-house, when the usual
+service was performed.</p>
+<p>The wind blew very hard in the course of last night from N.E.,
+and to-day the sea ran so high that no boat could approach the
+rock.&nbsp; During the dinner-hour, when the writer was going to
+the top of the building as usual, but just as he had entered the
+door and was about to ascend the ladder, a great noise was heard
+overhead, and in an instant he was soused in water from a sea
+which had most unexpectedly come over the walls, though now about
+fifty-eight feet in height.&nbsp; On making his retreat he found
+himself completely whitened by the lime, which had mixed with the
+water while dashing down through the different floors; and, as
+nearly as he could guess, a quantity equal to about a hogshead
+had come over the walls, and now streamed out at the door.&nbsp;
+After having shifted himself, he again sat down in his cabin, the
+sea continuing to run so high that the builders did not resume
+their operations on the walls this afternoon.&nbsp; The incident
+just noticed did not create more surprise in the mind of the
+writer than the sublime appearance of the waves as they rolled
+majestically over the rock.&nbsp; This scene he greatly enjoyed
+while sitting at his cabin window; each wave approached the
+beacon like a vast scroll unfolding; and in passing discharged a
+quantity of air, which he not only distinctly felt, but was even
+sufficient to lift the leaves of a book which lay before
+him.&nbsp; These waves might be ten or twelve feet in height, and
+about 250 feet in length, their smaller end being towards the
+north, where the water was deep, and they were opened or cut
+through by the interposition of the building and beacon.&nbsp;
+The gradual manner in which the sea, upon these occasions, is
+observed to become calm or to subside, is a very remarkable
+feature of this phenomenon.&nbsp; For example, when a gale is
+succeeded by a calm, every third or fourth wave forms one of
+these great seas, which occur in spaces of from three to five
+minutes, as noted by the writer&rsquo;s watch; but in the course
+of the next tide they become less frequent, and take off so as to
+occur only in ten or fifteen minutes; and, singular enough, at
+the third tide after such gales, the writer has remarked that
+only one or two of these great waves appear in the course of the
+whole tide.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 19th June]</p>
+<p>The 19th was a very unpleasant and disagreeable day, both for
+the seamen and artificers, as it rained throughout with little
+intermission from four a.m. till eleven p.m., accompanied with
+thunder and lightning, during which period the work nevertheless
+continued unremittingly, and the builders laid the fifty-first
+and fifty-second courses.&nbsp; This state of weather was no less
+severe upon the mortar-makers, who required to temper or prepare
+the mortar of a thicker or thinner consistency, in some measure,
+according to the state of the weather.&nbsp; From the elevated
+position of the building, the mortar gallery on the beacon was
+now much lower, and the lime-buckets were made to traverse upon a
+rope distended between it and the building.&nbsp; On occasions
+like the present, however, there was often a difference of
+opinion between the builders and the mortar-makers.&nbsp; John
+Watt, who had the principal charge of the mortar, was a most
+active worker, but, being somewhat of an irascible temper, the
+builders occasionally amused themselves at his expense; for while
+he was eagerly at work with his large iron-shod pestle in the
+mortar-tub, they often sent down contradictory orders, some
+crying, &lsquo;Make it a little stiffer, or thicker, John,&rsquo;
+while others called out to make it &lsquo;thinner,&rsquo; to
+which he generally returned very speedy and sharp replies, so
+that these conversations at times were rather amusing.</p>
+<p>During wet weather the situation of the artificers on the top
+of the building was extremely disagreeable; for although their
+work did not require great exertion, yet, as each man had his
+particular part to perform, either in working the crane or in
+laying the stones, it required the closest application and
+attention, not only on the part of Mr. Peter Logan, the foreman,
+who was constantly on the walls, but also of the chief
+workmen.&nbsp; Robert Selkirk, the principal builder, for
+example, had every stone to lay in its place.&nbsp; David
+Cumming, a mason, had the charge of working the tackle of the
+balance-weight, and James Scott, also a mason, took charge of the
+purchase with which the stones were laid; while the pointing the
+joints of the walls with cement was intrusted to William Reid and
+William Kennedy, who stood upon a scaffold suspended over the
+walls in rather a frightful manner.&nbsp; The least act of
+carelessness or inattention on the part of any of these men might
+have been fatal, not only to themselves, but also to the
+surrounding workmen, especially if any accident had happened to
+the crane itself, while the material damage or loss of a single
+stone would have put an entire stop to the operations until
+another could have been brought from Arbroath.&nbsp; The
+artificers, having wrought seven and a half hours of extra time
+to-day, had 3s. 9d. of extra pay, while the foremen had 7s. 6d.
+over and above their stated pay and board.&nbsp; Although,
+therefore, the work was both hazardous and fatiguing, yet, the
+encouragement being considerable, they were always very cheerful,
+and perfectly reconciled to the confinement and other
+disadvantages of the place.</p>
+<p>During fine weather, and while the nights were short, the duty
+on board of the floating light was literally nothing but a
+waiting on, and therefore one of her boats, with a crew of five
+men, daily attended the rock, but always returned to the vessel
+at night.&nbsp; The carpenter, however, was one of those who was
+left on board of the ship, as he also acted in the capacity of
+assistant lightkeeper, being, besides, a person who was apt to
+feel discontent and to be averse to changing his quarters,
+especially to work with the millwrights and joiners at the rock,
+who often, for hours together, wrought knee-deep, and not
+unfrequently up to the middle, in water.&nbsp; Mr. Watt having
+about this time made a requisition for another hand, the
+carpenter was ordered to attend the rock in the floating
+light&rsquo;s boat.&nbsp; This he did with great reluctance, and
+found so much fault that he soon got into discredit with his
+messmates.&nbsp; On this occasion he left the Lighthouse service,
+and went as a sailor in a vessel bound for America&mdash;a step
+which, it is believed, he soon regretted, as, in the course of
+things, he would, in all probability, have accompanied Mr. John
+Reid, the principal lightkeeper of the floating light, to the
+Bell Rock Lighthouse as his principal assistant.&nbsp; The writer
+had a wish to be of service to this man, as he was one of those
+who came off to the floating light in the month of September
+1807, while she was riding at single anchor after the severe gale
+of the 7th, at a time when it was hardly possible to make up this
+vessel&rsquo;s crew; but the crossness of his manner prevented
+his reaping the benefit of such intentions.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 22nd June]</p>
+<p>The building operations had for some time proceeded more
+slowly, from the higher parts of the lighthouse requiring much
+longer time than an equal tonnage of the lower courses.&nbsp; The
+duty of the landing-master&rsquo;s crew had, upon the whole, been
+easy of late; for though the work was occasionally irregular, yet
+the stones being lighter, they were more speedily lifted from the
+hold of the stone vessel to the deck of the praam-boat, and again
+to the waggons on the railway, after which they came properly
+under the charge of the foreman builder.&nbsp; It is, however, a
+strange, though not an uncommon, feature in the human character,
+that, when people have least to complain of, they are most apt to
+become dissatisfied, as was now the case with the seamen employed
+in the Bell Rock service about their rations of beer.&nbsp;
+Indeed, ever since the carpenter of the floating light, formerly
+noticed, had been brought to the rock, expressions of discontent
+had been manifested upon various occasions.&nbsp; This being
+represented to the writer, he sent for Captain Wilson, the
+landing-master, and Mr. Taylor, commander of the tender, with
+whom he talked over the subject.&nbsp; They stated that they
+considered the daily allowance of the seamen in every respect
+ample, and that, the work being now much lighter than formerly,
+they had no just ground for complaint; Mr. Taylor adding that, if
+those who now complained &lsquo;were even to be fed upon soft
+bread and turkeys, they would not think themselves
+right.&rsquo;&nbsp; At twelve noon the work of the
+landing-master&rsquo;s crew was completed for the day; but at
+four o&rsquo;clock, while the rock was under water, those on the
+beacon were surprised by the arrival of a boat from the tender
+without any signal having been made from the beacon.&nbsp; It
+brought the following note to the writer from the
+landing-master&rsquo;s crew:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: right">&lsquo;<i>Sir Joseph
+Banks Tender</i>.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;<span class="smcap">Sir</span>,&mdash;We are informed
+by our masters that our allowance is to be as before, and it is
+not sufficient to serve us, for we have been at work since four
+o&rsquo;clock this morning, and we have come on board to dinner,
+and there is no beer for us before to-morrow morning, to which a
+sufficient answer is required before we go from the beacon; and
+we are, Sir, your most obedient servants.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>On reading this, the writer returned a verbal message,
+intimating that an answer would be sent on board of the tender,
+at the same time ordering the boat instantly to quit the
+beacon.&nbsp; He then addressed the following note to the
+landing-master:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align:
+right">&lsquo;<i>Beacon-house</i>, 22<i>nd</i> <i>June</i>
+1810,<br />
+<i>Five o&rsquo;clock p.m</i>.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;<span class="smcap">Sir</span>,&mdash;I have just now
+received a letter purporting to be from the
+landing-master&rsquo;s crew and seamen on board of the <i>Sir
+Joseph Banks</i>, though without either date or signature; in
+answer to which I enclose a statement of the daily allowance of
+provisions for the seamen in this service, which you will post up
+in the ship&rsquo;s galley, and at seven o&rsquo;clock this
+evening I will come on board to inquire into this unexpected and
+most unnecessary demand for an additional allowance of
+beer.&nbsp; In the enclosed you will not find any alteration from
+the original statement, fixed in the galley at the beginning of
+the season.&nbsp; I have, however, judged this mode of giving
+your people an answer preferable to that of conversing with them
+on the beacon. &mdash;I am, Sir, your most obedient servant,</p>
+<p style="text-align: right"><span class="smcap">Robert
+Stevenson</span>.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;To <span class="smcap">Captain
+Wilson</span>.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;<i>Beacon House</i>, 22<i>nd</i> <i>June</i>
+1810.&mdash;Schedule of the daily allowance of provisions to be
+served out on board of the <i>Sir Joseph Banks</i> tender:
+&ldquo;1&frac12; lb. beef; 1 lb. bread; 8 oz. oatmeal; 2 oz.
+barley; 2 oz. butter; 3 quarts beer; vegetables and salt no
+stated allowance.&nbsp; When the seamen are employed in unloading
+the <i>Smeaton</i> and <i>Patriot</i>, a draught of beer is, as
+formerly, to be allowed from the stock of these vessels.&nbsp;
+Further, in wet and stormy weather, or when the work commences
+very early in the morning, or continues till a late hour at
+night, a glass of spirits will also be served out to the crew as
+heretofore, on the requisition of the landing-master.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right"><span class="smcap">Robert
+Stevenson</span>.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>On writing this letter and schedule, a signal was made on the
+beacon for the landing-master&rsquo;s boat, which immediately
+came to the rock, and the schedule was afterwards stuck up in the
+tender&rsquo;s galley.&nbsp; When sufficient time had been
+allowed to the crew to consider of their conduct, a second signal
+was made for a boat, and at seven o&rsquo;clock the writer left
+the Bell Rock, after a residence of four successive weeks in the
+beacon-house.&nbsp; The first thing which occupied his attention
+on board of the tender was to look round upon the lighthouse,
+which he saw, with some degree of emotion and surprise, now vying
+in height with the beacon-house; for although he had often viewed
+it from the extremity of the western railway on the rock, yet the
+scene, upon the whole, seemed far more interesting from the
+tender&rsquo;s moorings at the distance of about half a mile.</p>
+<p>The <i>Smeaton</i> having just arrived at her moorings with a
+cargo, a signal was made for Captain Pool to come on board of the
+tender, that he might be at hand to remove from the service any
+of those who might persist in their discontented conduct.&nbsp;
+One of the two principal leaders in this affair, the master of
+one of the praam-boats, who had also steered the boat which
+brought the letter to the beacon, was first called upon deck, and
+asked if he had read the statement fixed up in the galley this
+afternoon, and whether he was satisfied with it.&nbsp; He replied
+that he had read the paper, but was not satisfied, as it held out
+no alteration in the allowance, on which he was immediately
+ordered into the <i>Smeaton&rsquo;s</i> boat.&nbsp; The next man
+called had but lately entered the service, and, being also
+interrogated as to his resolution, he declared himself to be of
+the same mind with the praam-master, and was also forthwith
+ordered into the boat.&nbsp; The writer, without calling any more
+of the seamen, went forward to the gangway, where they were
+collected and listening to what was passing upon deck.&nbsp; He
+addressed them at the hatchway, and stated that two of their
+companions had just been dismissed the service and sent on board
+of the <i>Smeaton</i> to be conveyed to Arbroath.&nbsp; He
+therefore wished each man to consider for himself how far it
+would be proper, by any unreasonableness of conduct, to place
+themselves in a similar situation, especially as they were aware
+that it was optional in him either to dismiss them or send them
+on board a man-of-war.&nbsp; It might appear that much
+inconveniency would be felt at the rock by a change of hands at
+this critical period, by checking for a time the progress of a
+building so intimately connected with the best interests of
+navigation; yet this would be but of a temporary nature, while
+the injury to themselves might be irreparable.&nbsp; It was now
+therefore, required of any man who, in this disgraceful manner,
+chose to leave the service, that he should instantly make his
+appearance on deck while the <i>Smeaton&rsquo;s</i> boat was
+alongside.&nbsp; But those below having expressed themselves
+satisfied with their situation-viz., William Brown, George Gibb,
+Alexander Scott, John Dick, Robert Couper, Alexander Shephard,
+James Grieve, David Carey, William Pearson, Stuart Eaton,
+Alexander Lawrence, and John Spink&mdash;were accordingly
+considered as having returned to their duty.&nbsp; This
+disposition to mutiny, which had so strongly manifested itself,
+being now happily suppressed, Captain Pool got orders to proceed
+for Arbroath Bay, and land the two men he had on board, and to
+deliver the following letter at the office of the
+workyard:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: right">&lsquo;<i>On board of
+the Tender off the Bell Rock</i>,<br />
+22<i>nd</i> <i>June</i> 1810, <i>eight o&rsquo;clock p.m.</i></p>
+<p>&lsquo;<span class="smcap">Dear Sir</span>,&mdash;A
+discontented and mutinous spirit having manifested itself of late
+among the landing-master&rsquo;s crew, they struck work to-day
+and demanded an additional allowance of beer, and I have found it
+necessary to dismiss D---d and M---e, who are now sent on shore
+with the <i>Smeaton</i>.&nbsp; You will therefore be so good as
+to pay them their wages, including this day only.&nbsp; Nothing
+can be more unreasonable than the conduct of the seamen on this
+occasion, as the landing-master&rsquo;s crew not only had their
+allowance on board of the tender, but, in the course of this day,
+they had drawn no fewer than twenty-four quart pots of beer from
+the stock of the <i>Patriot</i> while unloading her. &mdash;I
+remain, yours truly,</p>
+<p style="text-align: right"><span class="smcap">Robert
+Stevenson</span>.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;To Mr. <span class="smcap">Lachlan Kennedy</span>,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Bell Rock Office,
+Arbroath.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>On despatching this letter to Mr. Kennedy, the writer returned
+to the beacon about nine o&rsquo;clock, where this
+afternoon&rsquo;s business had produced many conjectures,
+especially when the <i>Smeaton</i> got under weigh, instead of
+proceeding to land her cargo.&nbsp; The bell on the beacon being
+rung, the artificers were assembled on the bridge, when the
+affair was explained to them.&nbsp; He, at the same time,
+congratulated them upon the first appearance of mutiny being
+happily set at rest by the dismissal of its two principal
+abettors.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 24th June]</p>
+<p>At the rock the landing of the materials and the building
+operations of the light-room store went on successfully, and in a
+way similar to those of the provision store.&nbsp; To-day it blew
+fresh breezes; but the seamen nevertheless landed twenty-eight
+stones, and the artificers built the fifty-eighth and fifty-ninth
+courses.&nbsp; The works were visited by Mr. Murdoch, junior,
+from Messrs. Boulton and Watt&rsquo;s works of Soho.&nbsp; He
+landed just as the bell rung for prayers, after which the writer
+enjoyed much pleasure from his very intelligent conversation;
+and, having been almost the only stranger he had seen for some
+weeks, he parted with him, after a short interview, with much
+regret.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Thursday, 28th June]</p>
+<p>Last night the wind had shifted to north-east, and, blowing
+fresh, was accompanied with a heavy surf upon the rock.&nbsp;
+Towards high-water it had a very grand and wonderful
+appearance.&nbsp; Waves of considerable magnitude rose as high as
+the solid or level of the entrance-door, which, being open to the
+south-west, was fortunately to the leeward; but on the windward
+side the sprays flew like lightning up the sloping sides of the
+building; and although the walls were now elevated sixty-four
+feet above the rock, and about fifty-two feet from high-water
+mark, yet the artificers were nevertheless wetted, and
+occasionally interrupted, in their operations on the top of the
+walls.&nbsp; These appearances were, in a great measure, new at
+the Bell Rock, there having till of late been no building to
+conduct the seas, or object to compare with them.&nbsp; Although,
+from the description of the Eddystone Lighthouse, the mind was
+prepared for such effects, yet they were not expected to the
+present extent in the summer season; the sea being most awful
+to-day, whether observed from the beacon or the building.&nbsp;
+To windward, the sprays fell from the height above noticed in the
+most wonderful cascades, and streamed down the walls of the
+building in froth as white as snow.&nbsp; To leeward of the
+lighthouse the collision or meeting of the waves produced a pure
+white kind of <i>drift</i>; it rose about thirty feet in height,
+like a fine downy mist, which, in its fall, fell upon the face
+and hands more like a dry powder than a liquid substance.&nbsp;
+The effect of these seas, as they raged among the beams and
+dashed upon the higher parts of the beacon, produced a temporary
+tremulous motion throughout the whole fabric, which to a stranger
+must have been frightful.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 1st July]</p>
+<p>The writer had now been at the Bell Rock since the latter end
+of May, or about six weeks, during four of which he had been a
+constant inhabitant of the beacon without having been once off
+the rock.&nbsp; After witnessing the laying of the sixty-seventh
+or second course of the bedroom apartment, he left the rock with
+the tender and went ashore, as some arrangements were to be made
+for the future conduct of the works at Arbroath, which were soon
+to be brought to a close; the landing-master&rsquo;s crew having,
+in the meantime, shifted on board of the <i>Patriot</i>.&nbsp; In
+leaving the rock, the writer kept his eyes fixed upon the
+lighthouse, which had recently got into the form of a house,
+having several tiers or stories of windows.&nbsp; Nor was he
+unmindful of his habitation in the beacon&mdash;now far
+overtopped by the masonry,&mdash;where he had spent several weeks
+in a kind of active retirement, making practical experiment of
+the fewness of the positive wants of man.&nbsp; His cabin
+measured not more than four feet three inches in breadth on the
+floor; and though, from the oblique direction of the beams of the
+beacon, it widened towards the top, yet it did not admit of the
+full extension of his arms when he stood on the floor; while its
+length was little more than sufficient for suspending a cot-bed
+during the night, calculated for being triced up to the roof
+through the day, which left free room for the admission of
+occasional visitants.&nbsp; His folding table was attached with
+hinges, immediately under the small window of the apartment, and
+his books, barometer, thermometer, portmanteau, and two or three
+camp-stools, formed the bulk of his movables.&nbsp; His diet
+being plain, the paraphernalia of the table were proportionally
+simple; though everything had the appearance of comfort, and even
+of neatness, the walls being covered with green cloth formed into
+panels with red tape, and his bed festooned with curtains of
+yellow cotton-stuff.&nbsp; If, in speculating upon the abstract
+wants of man in such a state of exclusion, one were reduced to a
+single book, the Sacred Volume&mdash;whether considered for the
+striking diversity of its story, the morality of its doctrine, or
+the important truths of its gospel&mdash;would have proved by far
+the greatest treasure.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Monday, 2nd July]</p>
+<p>In walking over the workyard at Arbroath this morning, the
+writer found that the stones of the course immediately under the
+cornice were all in hand, and that a week&rsquo;s work would now
+finish the whole, while the intermediate courses lay ready
+numbered and marked for shipping to the rock.&nbsp; Among other
+subjects which had occupied his attention to-day was a visit from
+some of the relations of George Dall, a young man who had been
+impressed near Dundee in the month of February last; a dispute
+had arisen between the magistrates of that burgh and the
+Regulating Officer as to his right of impressing Dall, who was
+<i>bon&acirc; fide</i> one of the protected seamen in the Bell
+Rock service.&nbsp; In the meantime, the poor lad was detained,
+and ultimately committed to the prison of Dundee, to remain until
+the question should be tried before the Court of Session.&nbsp;
+His friends were naturally very desirous to have him relieved
+upon bail.&nbsp; But, as this was only to be done by the judgment
+of the Court, all that could be said was that his pay and
+allowances should be continued in the same manner as if he had
+been upon the sick-list.&nbsp; The circumstances of Dall&rsquo;s
+case were briefly these:&mdash;He had gone to see some of his
+friends in the neighbourhood of Dundee, in winter, while the
+works were suspended, having got leave of absence from Mr.
+Taylor, who commanded the Bell Rock tender, and had in his
+possession one of the Protection Medals.&nbsp; Unfortunately,
+however, for Dall, the Regulating Officer thought proper to
+disregard these documents, as, according to the strict and
+literal interpretation of the Admiralty regulations, a seaman
+does not stand protected unless he is actually on board of his
+ship, or in a boat belonging to her, or has the Admiralty
+protection in his possession.&nbsp; This order of the Board,
+however, cannot be rigidly followed in practice; and therefore,
+when the matter is satisfactorily stated to the Regulating
+Officer, the impressed man is generally liberated.&nbsp; But in
+Dall&rsquo;s case this was peremptorily refused, and he was
+retained at the instance of the magistrates.&nbsp; The writer
+having brought the matter under the consideration of the
+Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouses, they authorised it to
+be tried on the part of the Lighthouse Board, as one of extreme
+hardship.&nbsp; The Court, upon the first hearing, ordered Dall
+to be liberated from prison; and the proceedings never went
+further.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Wednesday, 4th July]</p>
+<p>Being now within twelve courses of being ready for building
+the cornice, measures were taken for getting the stones of it and
+the parapet-wall of the light-room brought from Edinburgh, where,
+as before noticed, they had been prepared and were in readiness
+for shipping.&nbsp; The honour of conveying the upper part of the
+lighthouse, and of landing the last stone of the building on the
+rock, was considered to belong to Captain Pool of the
+<i>Smeaton</i>, who had been longer in the service than the
+master of the <i>Patriot</i>.&nbsp; The <i>Smeaton</i> was,
+therefore, now partly loaded with old iron, consisting of broken
+railways and other lumber which had been lying about the
+rock.&nbsp; After landing these at Arbroath, she took on board
+James Craw, with his horse and cart, which could now be spared at
+the workyard, to be employed in carting the stones from Edinburgh
+to Leith.&nbsp; Alexander Davidson and William Kennedy, two
+careful masons, were also sent to take charge of the loading of
+the stones at Greenside, and stowing them on board of the vessel
+at Leith.&nbsp; The writer also went on board, with a view to
+call at the Bell Rock and to take his passage up the Firth of
+Forth.&nbsp; The wind, however, coming to blow very fresh from
+the eastward, with thick and foggy weather, it became necessary
+to reef the mainsail and set the second jib.&nbsp; When in the
+act of making a tack towards the tender, the sailors who worked
+the head-sheets were, all of a sudden, alarmed with the sound of
+the smith&rsquo;s hammer and anvil on the beacon, and had just
+time to put the ship about to save her from running ashore on the
+northwestern point of the rock, marked &lsquo;James Craw&rsquo;s
+Horse.&rsquo;&nbsp; On looking towards the direction from whence
+the sound came, the building and beacon-house were seen, with
+consternation, while the ship was hailed by those on the rock,
+who were no less confounded at seeing the near approach of the
+<i>Smeaton</i>; and, just as the vessel cleared the danger, the
+smith and those in the mortar gallery made signs in token of
+their happiness at our fortunate escape.&nbsp; From this
+occurrence the writer had an experimental proof of the utility of
+the large bells which were in preparation to be rung by the
+machinery of the revolving light; for, had it not been the sound
+of the smith&rsquo;s anvil, the <i>Smeaton</i>, in all
+probability, would have been wrecked upon the rock.&nbsp; In case
+the vessel had struck, those on board might have been safe,
+having now the beacon-house, as a place of refuge; but the
+vessel, which was going at a great velocity, must have suffered
+severely, and it was more than probable that the horse would have
+been drowned, there being no means of getting him out of the
+vessel.&nbsp; Of this valuable animal and his master we shall
+take an opportunity of saying more in another place.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Thursday, 5th July]</p>
+<p>The weather cleared up in the course of the night, but the
+wind shifted to the N.E. and blew very fresh.&nbsp; From the
+force of the wind, being now the period of spring-tides, a very
+heavy swell was experienced at the rock.&nbsp; At two
+o&rsquo;clock on the following morning the people on the beacon
+were in a state of great alarm about their safety, as the sea had
+broke up part of the floor of the mortar gallery!, which was thus
+cleared of the lime-casks and other buoyant articles; and, the
+alarm-bell being rung, all hands were called to render what
+assistance was in their power for the safety of themselves and
+the materials.&nbsp; At this time some would willingly have left
+the beacon and gone into the building: the sea, however, ran so
+high that there was no passage along the bridge of communication,
+and, when the interior of the lighthouse came to be examined in
+the morning, it appeared that great quantities of water had come
+over the walls&mdash;now eighty feet in height&mdash;and had run
+down through the several apartments and out at the entrance
+door.</p>
+<p>The upper course of the lighthouse at the workyard of Arbroath
+was completed on the 6th, and the whole of the stones were,
+therefore, now ready for being shipped to the rock.&nbsp; From
+the present state of the works it was impossible that the two
+squads of artificers at Arbroath and the Bell Rock could meet
+together at this period; and as in public works of this kind,
+which had continued for a series of years, it is not customary to
+allow the men to separate without what is termed a
+&ldquo;finishing-pint,&rdquo; five guineas were for this purpose
+placed at the disposal of Mr. David Logan, clerk of works.&nbsp;
+With this sum the stone-cutters at Arbroath had a merry meeting
+in their barrack, collected their sweethearts and friends, and
+concluded their labours with a dance.&nbsp; It was remarked,
+however, that their happiness on this occasion was not without
+alloy.&nbsp; The consideration of parting and leaving a steady
+and regular employment, to go in quest of work and mix with other
+society, after having been harmoniously lodged for years together
+in one large &ldquo;guildhall or barrack,&rdquo; was rather
+painful.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 6th July]</p>
+<p>While the writer was at Edinburgh he was fortunate enough to
+meet with Mrs. Dickson, only daughter of the late celebrated Mr.
+Smeaton, whose works at the Eddystone Lighthouse had been of such
+essential consequence to the operations at the Bell Rock.&nbsp;
+Even her own elegant accomplishments are identified with her
+father&rsquo;s work, she having herself made the drawing of the
+vignette on the title-page of the <i>Narrative of the Eddystone
+Lighthouse</i>.&nbsp; Every admirer of the works of that
+singularly eminent man must also feel an obligation to her for
+the very comprehensive and distinct account given of his life,
+which is attached to his reports, published, in three volumes
+quarto, by the Society of Civil Engineers.&nbsp; Mrs. Dickson,
+being at this time returning from a tour to the Hebrides and
+Western Highlands of Scotland, had heard of the Bell Rock works,
+and from their similarity to those of the Eddystone was strongly
+impressed with a desire of visiting the spot.&nbsp; But on
+inquiring for the writer at Edinburgh, and finding from him that
+the upper part of the lighthouse, consisting of nine courses,
+might be seen in the immediate vicinity, and also that one of the
+vessels which, in compliment to her father&rsquo;s memory, had
+been named the <i>Smeaton</i>, might also now be seen in Leith,
+she considered herself extremely fortunate; and having first
+visited the works at Greenside, she afterwards went to Leith to
+see the <i>Smeaton</i>, then loading for the Bell Rock.&nbsp; On
+stepping on board, Mrs. Dickson seemed to be quite overcome with
+so many concurrent circumstances, tending in a peculiar manner to
+revive and enliven the memory of her departed father, and, on
+leaving the vessel, she would not be restrained from presenting
+the crew with a piece of money.&nbsp; The <i>Smeaton</i> had been
+named spontaneously, from a sense of the obligation which a
+public work of the description of the Bell Rock owed to the
+labours and abilities of Mr. Smeaton.&nbsp; The writer certainly
+never could have anticipated the satisfaction which he this day
+felt in witnessing the pleasure it afforded to the only
+representative of this great man&rsquo;s family.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 20th July]</p>
+<p>The gale from the N.E. still continued so strong, accompanied
+with a heavy sea, that the <i>Patriot</i> could not approach her
+moorings; and although the tender still kept her station, no
+landing was made to-day at the rock.&nbsp; At high-water it was
+remarked that the spray rose to the height of about sixty feet
+upon the building.&nbsp; The <i>Smeaton</i> now lay in Leith
+loaded, but, the wind and weather being so unfavourable for her
+getting down the Firth, she did not sail till this
+afternoon.&nbsp; It may be here proper to notice that the loading
+of the centre of the light-room floor, or last principal stone of
+the building, did not fail, when put on board, to excite an
+interest among those connected with the work.&nbsp; When the
+stone was laid upon the cart to be conveyed to Leith, the seamen
+fixed an ensign-staff and flag into the circular hole in the
+centre of the stone, and decorated their own hats, and that of
+James Craw, the Bell Rock carter, with ribbons; even his faithful
+and trusty horse Brassey was ornamented with bows and streamers
+of various colours.&nbsp; The masons also provided themselves
+with new aprons, and in this manner the cart was attended in its
+progress to the ship.&nbsp; When the cart came opposite the
+Trinity House of Leith, the officer of that corporation made his
+appearance dressed in his uniform, with his staff of office; and
+when it reached the harbour, the shipping in the different tiers
+where the <i>Smeaton</i> lay hoisted their colours, manifesting
+by these trifling ceremonies the interest with which the progress
+of this work was regarded by the public, as ultimately tending to
+afford safety and protection to the mariner.&nbsp; The wind had
+fortunately shifted to the S.W., and about five o&rsquo;clock
+this afternoon the <i>Smeaton</i> reached the Bell Rock.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 27th July]</p>
+<p>The artificers had finished the laying of the balcony course,
+excepting the centre-stone of the light-room floor, which, like
+the centres of the other floors, could not be laid in its place
+till after the removal of the foot and shaft of the
+balance-crane.&nbsp; During the dinner-hour, when the men were
+off work the writer generally took some exercise by walking round
+the walls when the rock was under water; but to-day his boundary
+was greatly enlarged, for, instead of the narrow wall as a path,
+he felt no small degree of pleasure in walking round the balcony
+and passing out and in at the space allotted for the light-room
+door.&nbsp; In the labours of this day both the artificers and
+seamen felt their work to be extremely easy compared with what it
+had been for some days past.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 29th July]</p>
+<p>Captain Wilson and his crew had made preparations for landing
+the last stone, and, as may well be supposed, this was a day of
+great interest at the Bell Rock.&nbsp; &lsquo;That it might lose
+none of its honours,&rsquo; as he expressed himself, the
+<i>Hedderwick</i> praam-boat, with which the first stone of the
+building had been landed, was appointed also to carry the
+last.&nbsp; At seven o&rsquo;clock this evening the seamen
+hoisted three flags upon the <i>Hedderwick</i>, when the colours
+of the <i>Dickie</i> praam-boat, tender, <i>Smeaton</i>, floating
+light, beacon-house, and lighthouse were also displayed; and, the
+weather being remarkably fine, the whole presented a very gay
+appearance, and, in connection with the associations excited, the
+effect was very pleasing.&nbsp; The praam which carried the stone
+was towed by the seamen in gallant style to the rock, and, on its
+arrival, cheers were given as a finale to the landing
+department.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Monday, 30th July]</p>
+<p>The ninetieth or last course of the building having been laid
+to-day, which brought the masonry to the height of one hundred
+and two feet six inches, the lintel of the light-room door, being
+the finishing-stone of the exterior walls, was laid with due
+formality by the writer, who, at the same time, pronounced the
+following benediction: &ldquo;May the Great Architect of the
+Universe, under whose blessing this perilous work has prospered,
+preserve it as a guide to the mariner.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 3rd Aug.]</p>
+<p>At three p.m., the necessary preparations having been made,
+the artificers commenced the completing of the floors of the
+several apartments, and at seven o&rsquo;clock the centre-stone
+of the light-room floor was laid, which may be held as finishing
+the masonry of this important national edifice.&nbsp; After going
+through the usual ceremonies observed by the brotherhood on
+occasions of this kind, the writer, addressing himself to the
+artificers and seamen who were present, briefly alluded to the
+utility of the undertaking as a monument of the wealth of British
+commerce, erected through the spirited measures of the
+Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouses by means of the able
+assistance of those who now surrounded him.&nbsp; He then took an
+opportunity of stating that toward those connected with this
+arduous work he would ever retain the most heartfelt regard in
+all their interests.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Saturday, 4th Aug.]</p>
+<p>When the bell was rung as usual on the beacon this morning,
+every one seemed as if he were at a loss what to make of
+himself.&nbsp; At this period the artificers at the rock
+consisted of eighteen masons, two joiners, one millwright, one
+smith, and one mortar-maker, besides Messrs. Peter Logan and
+Francis Watt, foremen, counting in all twenty-five; and matters
+were arranged for proceeding to Arbroath this afternoon with all
+hands.&nbsp; The <i>Sir Joseph Banks</i> tender had by this time
+been afloat, with little intermission, for six months, during
+greater part of which the artificers had been almost constantly
+off at the rock, and were now much in want of necessaries of
+almost every description.&nbsp; Not a few had lost different
+articles of clothing, which had dropped into the sea from the
+beacon and building.&nbsp; Some wanted jackets; others, from want
+of hats, wore nightcaps; each was, in fact, more or less
+curtailed in his wardrobe, and it must be confessed that at best
+the party were but in a very tattered condition.&nbsp; This
+morning was occupied in removing the artificers and their bedding
+on board of the tender; and although their personal luggage was
+easily shifted, the boats had, nevertheless, many articles to
+remove from the beacon-house, and were consequently employed in
+this service till eleven a.m.&nbsp; All hands being collected and
+just ready to embark, as the water had nearly overflowed the
+rock, the writer, in taking leave, after alluding to the harmony
+which had ever marked the conduct of those employed on the Bell
+Rock, took occasion to compliment the great zeal, attention, and
+abilities of Mr. Peter Logan and Mr. Francis Watt, foremen;
+Captain James Wilson, landing-master; and Captain David Taylor,
+commander of the tender, who, in their several departments, had
+so faithfully discharged the duties assigned to them, often under
+circumstances the most difficult and trying.&nbsp; The health of
+these gentlemen was drunk with much warmth of feeling by the
+artificers and seamen, who severally expressed the satisfaction
+they had experienced in acting under them; after which the whole
+party left the rock.</p>
+<p>In sailing past the floating light mutual compliments were
+made by a display of flags between that vessel and the tender;
+and at five p.m. the latter vessel entered the harbour of
+Arbroath, where the party were heartily welcomed by a numerous
+company of spectators, who had collected to see the artificers
+arrive after so long an absence from the port.&nbsp; In the
+evening the writer invited the foremen and captains of the
+service, together with Mr. David Logan, clerk of works at
+Arbroath, and Mr. Lachlan Kennedy, engineer&rsquo;s clerk and
+book-keeper, and some of their friends, to the principal inn,
+where the evening was spent very happily; and after &lsquo;His
+Majesty&rsquo;s Health&rsquo; and &lsquo;The Commissioners of the
+Northern Lighthouses&rsquo; had been given, &lsquo;Stability to
+the Bell Rock Lighthouse&rsquo; was hailed as a standing toast in
+the Lighthouse service.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 5th Aug.]</p>
+<p>The author has formerly noticed the uniformly decent and
+orderly deportment of the artificers who were employed at the
+Bell Rock Lighthouse, and to-day, it is believed, they very
+generally attended church, no doubt with grateful hearts for the
+narrow escapes from personal danger which all of them had more or
+less experienced during their residence at the rock.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 14th Aug.]</p>
+<p>The <i>Smeaton</i> sailed to-day at one p.m., having on board
+sixteen artificers, with Mr. Peter Logan, together with a supply
+of provisions and necessaries, who left the harbour pleased and
+happy to find themselves once more afloat in the Bell Rock
+service.&nbsp; At seven o&rsquo;clock the tender was made fast to
+her moorings, when the artificers landed on the rock and took
+possession of their old quarters in the beacon-house, with
+feelings very different from those of 1807, when the works
+commenced.</p>
+<p>The barometer for some days past had been falling from 29.90,
+and to-day it was 29.50, with the wind at N.E., which, in the
+course of this day, increased to a strong gale accompanied with a
+sea which broke with great violence upon the rock.&nbsp; At
+twelve noon the tender rode very heavily at her moorings, when
+her chain broke at about ten fathoms from the ships bows. The
+kedge-anchor was immediately let go, to hold her till the
+floating buoy and broken chain should be got on board.&nbsp; But
+while this was in operation the hawser of the kedge was chafed
+through on the rocky bottom and parted, when the vessel was again
+adrift.&nbsp; Most fortunately, however, she cast off with her
+head from the rock, and narrowly cleared it, when she sailed up
+the Firth of Forth to wait the return of better weather.&nbsp;
+The artificers were thus left upon the rock with so heavy a sea
+running that it was ascertained to have risen to a height of
+eighty feet on the building.&nbsp; Under such perilous
+circumstances it would be difficult to describe the feelings of
+those who, at this time, were cooped up in the beacon in so
+forlorn a situation, with the sea not only raging under them, but
+occasionally falling from a great height upon the roof of their
+temporary lodging, without even the attending vessel in view to
+afford the least gleam of hope in the event of any
+accident.&nbsp; It is true that they now had the masonry of the
+lighthouse to resort to, which, no doubt, lessened the actual
+danger of their situation; but the building was still without a
+roof, and the deadlights, or storm-shutters, not being yet
+fitted, the windows of the lower story were stove in and broken,
+and at high-water the sea ran in considerable quantities out at
+the entrance door.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Thursday, 16th Aug.]</p>
+<p>The gale continues with unabated violence to-day, and the
+sprays rise to a still greater height, having been carried over
+the masonry of the building, or about ninety feet above the level
+of the sea.&nbsp; At four o&rsquo;clock this morning it was
+breaking into the cook&rsquo;s berth, when he rang the
+alarm-bell, and all hands turned out to attend to their personal
+safety.&nbsp; The floor of the smith&rsquo;s, or mortar gallery,
+was now completely burst up by the force of the sea, when the
+whole of the deals and the remaining articles upon the floor were
+swept away, such as the cast-iron mortar-tubs, the iron hearth of
+the forge, the smith&rsquo;s bellows, and even his anvil were
+thrown down upon the rock.&nbsp; Before the tide rose to its full
+height to-day some of the artificers passed along the bridge into
+the lighthouse, to observe the effects of the sea upon it, and
+they reported that they had felt a slight tremulous motion in the
+building when great seas struck it in a certain direction, about
+high-water mark.&nbsp; On this occasion the sprays were again
+observed to wet the balcony, and even to come over the parapet
+wall into the interior of the light-room.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Thursday, 23rd Aug.]</p>
+<p>The wind being at W.S.W., and the weather more moderate, both
+the tender and the <i>Smeaton</i> got to their moorings on the
+23rd, when all hands were employed in transporting the
+sash-frames from on board of the <i>Smeaton</i> to the
+rock.&nbsp; In the act of setting up one of these frames upon the
+bridge, it was unguardedly suffered to lose its balance, and in
+saving it from damage Captain Wilson met with a severe bruise in
+the groin, on the seat of a gun-shot wound received in the early
+part of his life.&nbsp; This accident laid him aside for several
+days.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Monday, 27th Aug.]</p>
+<p>The sash-frames of the light-room, eight in number, and
+weighing each 254 pounds, having been got safely up to the top of
+the building, were ranged on the balcony in the order in which
+they were numbered for their places on the top of the
+parapet-wall; and the balance-crane, that useful machine having
+now lifted all the heavier articles, was unscrewed and lowered,
+to use the landing-master&rsquo;s phrase, &lsquo;in mournful
+silence.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 2nd Sept.]</p>
+<p>The steps of the stair being landed, and all the weightier
+articles of the light-room got up to the balcony, the wooden
+bridge was now to be removed, as it had a very powerful effect
+upon the beacon when a heavy sea struck it, and could not
+possibly have withstood the storms of a winter.&nbsp; Everything
+having been cleared from the bridge, and nothing left but the two
+principal beams with their horizontal braces, James Glen, at
+high-water, proceeded with a saw to cut through the beams at the
+end next the beacon, which likewise disengaged their opposite
+extremity, inserted a few inches into the building.&nbsp; The
+frame was then gently lowered into the water, and floated off to
+the <i>Smeaton</i> to be towed to Arbroath, to be applied as part
+of the materials in the erection of the lightkeepers&rsquo;
+houses.&nbsp; After the removal of the bridge, the aspect of
+things at the rock was much altered.&nbsp; The beacon-house and
+building had both a naked look to those accustomed to their
+former appearance; a curious optical deception was also remarked,
+by which the lighthouse seemed to incline from the perpendicular
+towards the beacon.&nbsp; The horizontal rope-ladder before
+noticed was again stretched to preserve the communication, and
+the artificers were once more obliged to practise the awkward and
+straddling manner of their passage between them during 1809.</p>
+<p>At twelve noon the bell rung for prayers, after which the
+artificers went to dinner, when the writer passed along the
+rope-ladder to the lighthouse, and went through the several
+apartments, which were now cleared of lumber.&nbsp; In the
+afternoon all hands were summoned to the interior of the house,
+when he had the satisfaction of laying the upper step of the
+stair, or last stone of the building.&nbsp; This ceremony
+concluded with three cheers, the sound of which had a very loud
+and strange effect within the walls of the lighthouse.&nbsp; At
+six o&rsquo;clock Mr. Peter Logan and eleven of the artificers
+embarked with the writer for Arbroath, leaving Mr. James Glen
+with the special charge of the beacon and railways, Mr. Robert
+Selkirk with the building, with a few artificers to fit the
+temporary windows to render the house habitable.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Sunday, 14th Oct.]</p>
+<p>On returning from his voyage to the Northern Lighthouses, the
+writer landed at the Bell Rock on Sunday, the 14th of October,
+and had the pleasure to find, from the very favourable state of
+the weather, that the artificers had been enabled to make great
+progress with the fitting-up of the light-room.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Friday, 19th Oct.]</p>
+<p>The light-room work had proceeded, as usual, to-day under the
+direction of Mr. Dove, assisted in the plumber-work by Mr. John
+Gibson, and in the brazier-work by Mr. Joseph Fraser; while Mr.
+James Slight, with the joiners, were fitting up the
+storm-shuttters of the windows.&nbsp; In these several
+departments the artificers were at work till seven o&rsquo;clock
+p.m., and it being then dark, Mr. Dove gave orders to drop work
+in the light-room; and all hands proceeded from thence to the
+beacon-house, when Charles Henderson, smith, and Henry Dickson,
+brazier, left the work together.&nbsp; Being both young men, who
+had been for several weeks upon the rock, they had become
+familiar, and even playful, on the most difficult parts about the
+beacon and building.&nbsp; This evening they were trying to
+outrun each other in descending from the light-room, when
+Henderson led the way; but they were in conversation with each
+other till they came to the rope-ladder distended between the
+entrance-door of the lighthouse and the beacon.&nbsp; Dickson, on
+reaching the cook-room, was surprised at not seeing his
+companion, and inquired hastily for Henderson.&nbsp; Upon which
+the cook replied, &lsquo;Was he before you upon the
+rope-ladder?&rsquo;&nbsp; Dickson answered, &lsquo;Yes; and I
+thought I heard something fall.&rsquo;&nbsp; Upon this the alarm
+was given, and links were immediately lighted, with which the
+artificers descended on the legs of the beacon, as near the
+surface of the water as possible, it being then about full tide,
+and the sea breaking to a considerable height upon the building,
+with the wind at S.S.E.&nbsp; But, after watching till low-water,
+and searching in every direction upon the rock, it appeared that
+poor Henderson must have unfortunately fallen through the
+rope-ladder, and been washed into the deep water.</p>
+<p>The deceased had passed along this rope-ladder many hundred
+times, both by day and night, and the operations in which he was
+employed being nearly finished, he was about to leave the rock
+when this melancholy catastrophe took place.&nbsp; The
+unfortunate loss of Henderson cast a deep gloom upon the minds of
+all who were at the rock, and it required some management on the
+part of those who had charge to induce the people to remain
+patiently at their work; as the weather now became more
+boisterous, and the nights long, they found their habitation
+extremely cheerless, while the winds were howling about their
+ears, and the waves lashing with fury against the beams of their
+insulated habitation.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 23rd Oct.]</p>
+<p>The wind had shifted in the night to N.W., and blew a fresh
+gale, while the sea broke with violence upon the rock.&nbsp; It
+was found impossible to land, but the writer, from the boat,
+hailed Mr. Dove, and directed the ball to be immediately
+fixed.&nbsp; The necessary preparations were accordingly made,
+while the vessel made short tacks on the southern side of the
+rock, in comparatively smooth water.&nbsp; At noon Mr. Dove,
+assisted by Mr. James Slight, Mr. Robert Selkirk, Mr. James Glen,
+and Mr. John Gibson, plumber, with considerable difficulty, from
+the boisterous state of the weather, got the gilded ball screwed
+on, measuring two feet in diameter, and forming the principal
+ventilator at the upper extremity of the cupola of the
+light-room.&nbsp; At Mr. Hamilton&rsquo;s desire, a salute of
+seven guns was fired on this occasion, and, all hands being
+called to the quarter-deck, &lsquo;Stability to the Bell Rock
+Lighthouse&rsquo; was not forgotten.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 30th Oct.]</p>
+<p>On reaching the rock it was found that a very heavy sea still
+ran upon it; but the writer having been disappointed on two
+former occasions, and, as the erection of the house might now be
+considered complete, there being nothing wanted externally,
+excepting some of the storm-shutters for the defence of the
+windows, he was the more anxious at this time to inspect
+it.&nbsp; Two well-manned boats were therefore ordered to be in
+attendance; and, after some difficulty, the wind being at N.N.E.,
+they got safely into the western creek, though not without
+encountering plentiful sprays.&nbsp; It would have been
+impossible to have attempted a landing to-day, under any other
+circumstances than with boats perfectly adapted to the purpose,
+and with seamen who knew every ledge of the rock, and even the
+length of the sea-weeds at each particular spot, so as to dip
+their oars into the water accordingly, and thereby prevent them
+from getting entangled.&nbsp; But what was of no less consequence
+to the safety of the party, Captain Wilson, who always steered
+the boat, had a perfect knowledge of the set of the different
+waves, while the crew never shifted their eyes from observing his
+motions, and the strictest silence was preserved by every
+individual except himself.</p>
+<p>On entering the house, the writer had the pleasure to find it
+in a somewhat habitable condition, the lower apartments being
+closed in with temporary windows, and fitted with proper
+storm-shutters.&nbsp; The lowest apartment at the head of the
+staircase was occupied with water, fuel, and provisions, put up
+in a temporary way until the house could be furnished with proper
+utensils.&nbsp; The second, or light-room store, was at present
+much encumbered with various tools and apparatus for the use of
+the workmen.&nbsp; The kitchen immediately over this had, as yet,
+been supplied only with a common ship&rsquo;s caboose and
+plate-iron funnel, while the necessary cooking utensils had been
+taken from the beacon.&nbsp; The bedroom was for the present used
+as the joiners&rsquo; workshop, and the strangers&rsquo; room,
+immediately under the light-room, was occupied by the artificers,
+the beds being ranged in tiers, as was done in the barrack of the
+beacon.&nbsp; The light-room, though unprovided with its
+machinery, being now covered over with the cupola, glazed and
+painted, had a very complete and cleanly appearance.&nbsp; The
+balcony was only as yet fitted with a temporary rail, consisting
+of a few iron stanchions, connected with ropes; and in this state
+it was necessary to leave it during the winter.</p>
+<p>Having gone over the whole of the low-water works on the rock,
+the beacon, and lighthouse, and being satisfied that only the
+most untoward accident in the landing of the machinery could
+prevent the exhibition of the light in the course of the winter,
+Mr. John Reid, formerly of the floating light, was now put in
+charge of the lighthouse as principal keeper; Mr. James Slight
+had charge of the operations of the artificers, while Mr. James
+Dove and the smiths, having finished the frame of the light-room,
+left the rock for the present.&nbsp; With these arrangements the
+writer bade adieu to the works for the season.&nbsp; At eleven
+a.m. the tide was far advanced; and there being now little or no
+shelter for the boats at the rock, they had to be pulled through
+the breach of sea, which came on board in great quantities, and
+it was with extreme difficulty that they could be kept in the
+proper direction of the landing-creek.&nbsp; On this occasion he
+may be permitted to look back with gratitude on the many escapes
+made in the course of this arduous undertaking, now brought so
+near to a successful conclusion.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Monday, 5th Nov.]</p>
+<p>On Monday, the 5th, the yacht again visited the rock, when Mr.
+Slight and the artificers returned with her to the workyard,
+where a number of things were still to prepare connected with the
+temporary fitting up of the accommodation for the
+lightkeepers.&nbsp; Mr. John Reid and Peter Fortune were now the
+only inmates of the house.&nbsp; This was the smallest number of
+persons hitherto left in the lighthouse.&nbsp; As four
+lightkeepers were to be the complement, it was intended that
+three should always be at the rock.&nbsp; Its present inmates,
+however, could hardly have been better selected for such a
+situation; Mr. Reid being a person possessed of the strictest
+notions of duty and habits of regularity from long service on
+board of a man-of-war, while Mr. Fortune had one of the most
+happy and contented dispositions imaginable.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Tuesday, 13th Nov.]</p>
+<p>From Saturday the 10th till Tuesday the 13th, the wind had
+been from N.E. blowing a heavy gale; but to-day, the weather
+having greatly moderated, Captain Taylor, who now commanded the
+<i>Smeaton</i>, sailed at two o&rsquo;clock a.m. for the Bell
+Rock.&nbsp; At five the floating light was hailed and found to be
+all well.&nbsp; Being a fine moonlight morning, the seamen were
+changed from the one ship to the other.&nbsp; At eight, the
+<i>Smeaton</i> being off the rock, the boats were manned, and
+taking a supply of water, fuel, and other necessaries, landed at
+the western side, when Mr. Reid and Mr. Fortune were found in
+good health and spirits.</p>
+<p>Mr. Reid stated that during the late gales, particularly on
+Friday, the 30th, the wind veering from S.E. to N.E., both he and
+Mr. Fortune sensibly felt the house tremble when particular seas
+struck, about the time of high-water; the former observing that
+it was a tremor of that sort which rather tended to convince him
+that everything about the building was sound, and reminded him of
+the effect produced when a good log of timber is struck sharply
+with a mallet; but, with every confidence in the stability of the
+building, he nevertheless confessed that, in so forlorn a
+situation, they were not insensible to those emotions which, he
+emphatically observed, &lsquo;made a man look back upon his
+former life.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[1881 Friday, 1st Feb.]</p>
+<p>The day, long wished for, on which the mariner was to see a
+light exhibited on the Bell Rock at length arrived.&nbsp; Captain
+Wilson, as usual, hoisted the float&rsquo;s lanterns to the
+topmast on the evening of the 1st of February; but the moment
+that the light appeared on the rock, the crew, giving three
+cheers, lowered them, and finally extinguished the lights.</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="gapmediumline">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">Printed by <span
+class="smcap">T.</span> and <span class="smcap">A.
+Constable</span>, Printers to His Majesty<br />
+at the Edinburgh University Press.</p>
+<h2>Footnotes:</h2>
+<p><a name="footnote2a"></a><a href="#citation2a"
+class="footnote">[2a]</a>&nbsp; An error: Stevensons owned at
+this date the barony of Dolphingston in Haddingtonshire,
+Montgrennan in Ayrshire, and several other lesser places.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote3a"></a><a href="#citation3a"
+class="footnote">[3a]</a>&nbsp; Pitcairn&rsquo;s <i>Criminal
+Trials</i>, at large.&mdash;[R. L. S.]</p>
+<p><a name="footnote4a"></a><a href="#citation4a"
+class="footnote">[4a]</a>&nbsp; Fountainhall&rsquo;s
+<i>Decisions</i>, vol. i. pp. 56, 132, 186, 204, 368.&mdash;[R.
+L. S.]</p>
+<p><a name="footnote4b"></a><a href="#citation4b"
+class="footnote">[4b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i> pp. 158,
+299.&mdash;[R. L. S.]</p>
+<p><a name="footnote4c"></a><a href="#citation4c"
+class="footnote">[4c]</a>&nbsp; Working farmer:&nbsp; Fr.
+<i>laboureur</i>.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote7a"></a><a href="#citation7a"
+class="footnote">[7a]</a>&nbsp; This John Stevenson was not the
+only &lsquo;witness&rsquo; of the name; other Stevensons were
+actually killed during the persecutions, in the Glen of Trool, on
+Pentland, etc.; and it is very possible that the author&rsquo;s
+own ancestor was one of the mounted party embodied by Muir of
+Caldwell, only a day too late for Pentland.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote7b"></a><a href="#citation7b"
+class="footnote">[7b]</a>&nbsp; Wodrow Society&rsquo;s <i>Select
+Biographies</i>, vol. ii.&mdash;[R. L. S.]</p>
+<p><a name="footnote9a"></a><a href="#citation9a"
+class="footnote">[9a]</a>&nbsp; Though the districts here named
+are those in which the name of Stevenson is most common, it is in
+point of fact far more wide-spread than the text indicates, and
+occurs from Dumfries and Berwickshire to Aberdeen and Orkney.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote12a"></a><a href="#citation12a"
+class="footnote">[12a]</a>&nbsp; Mr. J. H. Stevenson is satisfied
+that these speculations as to a possible Norse, Highland, or
+French origin are vain.&nbsp; All we know about the engineer
+family is that it was sprung from a stock of Westland Whigs
+settled in the latter part of the seventeenth century in the
+parish of Neilston, as mentioned at the beginning of the next
+chapter.&nbsp; It may be noted that the Ayrshire parish of
+Stevenston, the lands of which are said to have received the name
+in the twelfth century, lies within thirteen miles south-west of
+this place.&nbsp; The lands of Stevenson in Lanarkshire first
+mentioned in the next century, in the Ragman Roll, lie within
+twenty miles east.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote54a"></a><a href="#citation54a"
+class="footnote">[54a]</a>&nbsp; This is only a probable
+hypothesis; I have tried to identify my father&rsquo;s anecdote
+in my grandfather&rsquo;s diary, and may very well have been
+deceived.&mdash;[R. L. S.]</p>
+<p><a name="footnote91a"></a><a href="#citation91a"
+class="footnote">[91a]</a>&nbsp; This is, of course, the
+tradition commemorated by Southey in his ballad of &lsquo;The
+Inchcape Bell.&rsquo;&nbsp; Whether true or not, it points to the
+fact that from the infancy of Scottish navigation, the seafaring
+mind had been fully alive to the perils of this reef.&nbsp;
+Repeated attempts had been made to mark the place with beacons,
+but all efforts were unavailing (one such beacon having been
+carried away within eight days of its erection) until Robert
+Stevenson conceived and carried out the idea of the stone
+tower.&nbsp; But the number of vessels actually lost upon the
+reef was as nothing to those that were cast away in fruitless
+efforts to avoid it.&nbsp; Placed right in the fairway of two
+navigations, and one of these the entrance to the only harbour of
+refuge between the Downs and the Moray Firth, it breathed abroad
+along the whole coast an atmosphere of terror and perplexity; and
+no ship sailed that part of the North Sea at night, but what the
+ears of those on board would be strained to catch the roaring of
+the seas on the Bell Rock.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote92a"></a><a href="#citation92a"
+class="footnote">[92a]</a>&nbsp; The particular event which
+concentrated Mr. Stevenson&rsquo;s attention on the problem of
+the Bell Rock was the memorable gale of December 1799, when,
+among many other vessels, H.M.S. <i>York</i>, a seventy-four-gun
+ship, went down with all hands on board.&nbsp; Shortly after this
+disaster Mr. Stevenson made a careful survey, and prepared his
+models for a stone tower, the idea of which was at first received
+with pretty general scepticism, Smeaton&rsquo;s Eddystone tower
+could not be cited as affording a parallel, for there the rock is
+not submerged even at high-water, while the problem of the Bell
+Rock was to build a tower of masonry on a sunken reef far distant
+from land, covered at every tide to a depth of twelve feet or
+more, and having thirty-two fathoms&rsquo; depth of water within
+a mile of its eastern edge.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote94a"></a><a href="#citation94a"
+class="footnote">[94a]</a>&nbsp; The grounds for the rejection of
+the Bill by the House of Lords in 1802&ndash;3 had been that the
+extent of coast over which dues were proposed to be levied would
+be too great.&nbsp; Before going to Parliament again, the Board
+of Northern Lights, desiring to obtain support and corroboration
+for Mr. Stevenson&rsquo;s views, consulted first Telford, who was
+unable to give the matter his attention, and then (on
+Stevenson&rsquo;s suggestion) Rennie, who concurred in affirming
+the practicability of a stone tower, and supported the Bill when
+it came again before Parliament in 1806.&nbsp; Rennie was
+afterwards appointed by the Commissioners as advising engineer,
+whom Stevenson might consult in cases of emergency.&nbsp; It
+seems certain that the title of chief engineer had in this
+instance no more meaning than the above.&nbsp; Rennie, in point
+of fact, proposed certain modifications in Stevenson&rsquo;s
+plans, which the latter did not accept; nevertheless Rennie
+continued to take a kindly interest in the work, and the two
+engineers remained in friendly correspondence during its
+progress.&nbsp; The official view taken by the Board as to the
+quarter in which lay both the merit and the responsibility of the
+work may be gathered from a minute of the Commissioners at their
+first meeting held after Stevenson died; in which they record
+their regret &lsquo;at the death of this zealous, faithful, and
+able officer, <i>to whom is due the honour of conceiving and
+executing the Bell Rock Lighthouse</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp; The matter
+is briefly summed up in the <i>Life</i> of Robert Stevenson by
+his son David Stevenson (A. &amp; C. Black, 1878), and fully
+discussed, on the basis of official facts and figures, by the
+same writer in a letter to the <i>Civil Engineers&rsquo; and
+Architects&rsquo; Journal</i>, 1862.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote122a"></a><a href="#citation122a"
+class="footnote">[122a]</a>&nbsp; &lsquo;Nothing was said, but I
+was <i>looked out of countenance</i>,&rsquo; he says in a
+letter.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote171a"></a><a href="#citation171a"
+class="footnote">[171a]</a>&nbsp;
+Ill-formed&mdash;ugly.&mdash;[R. L. S.]</p>
+<p><a name="footnote174a"></a><a href="#citation174a"
+class="footnote">[174a]</a>&nbsp; This is an incurable illusion
+of my grandfather&rsquo;s; he always writes
+&lsquo;distended&rsquo; for &lsquo;extended.&rsquo;&mdash;[R. L.
+S.]</p>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECORDS OF A FAMILY OF ENGINEERS***</p>
+<pre>
+
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+</pre></body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Records of a Family of Engineers, by Robert
+Louis Stevenson
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Records of a Family of Engineers
+
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 3, 2010  [eBook #280]
+[This file was first posted on July 9, 1995]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECORDS OF A FAMILY OF ENGINEERS***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1912 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org.  Additional proofing by Peter Barnes.
+
+
+
+
+
+                               RECORDS OF A
+                           FAMILY OF ENGINEERS
+
+
+                                    BY
+
+                          ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+            [Picture: Decorative graphic for Chatto & Windus]
+
+                                  LONDON
+
+                             CHATTO & WINDUS
+
+                                   1912
+
+                          _All rights reserved_
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION: THE SURNAME OF STEVENSON
+
+
+From the thirteenth century onwards, the name, under the various
+disguises of Stevinstoun, Stevensoun, Stevensonne, Stenesone, and
+Stewinsoune, spread across Scotland from the mouth of the Firth of Forth
+to the mouth of the Firth of Clyde.  Four times at least it occurs as a
+place-name.  There is a parish of Stevenston in Cunningham; a second
+place of the name in the Barony of Bothwell in Lanark; a third on Lyne,
+above Drochil Castle; the fourth on the Tyne, near Traprain Law.
+Stevenson of Stevenson (co. Lanark) swore fealty to Edward I in 1296, and
+the last of that family died after the Restoration.  Stevensons of
+Hirdmanshiels, in Midlothian, rode in the Bishops' Raid of Aberlady,
+served as jurors, stood bail for neighbours--Hunter of Polwood, for
+instance--and became extinct about the same period, or possibly earlier.
+A Stevenson of Luthrie and another of Pitroddie make their bows, give
+their names, and vanish.  And by the year 1700 it does not appear that
+any acre of Scots land was vested in any Stevenson. {2a}
+
+Here is, so far, a melancholy picture of backward progress, and a family
+posting towards extinction.  But the law (however administered, and I am
+bound to aver that, in Scotland, 'it couldna weel be waur') acts as a
+kind of dredge, and with dispassionate impartiality brings up into the
+light of day, and shows us for a moment, in the jury-box or on the
+gallows, the creeping things of the past.  By these broken glimpses we
+are able to trace the existence of many other and more inglorious
+Stevensons, picking a private way through the brawl that makes Scots
+history.  They were members of Parliament for Peebles, Stirling,
+Pittenweem, Kilrenny, and Inverurie.  We find them burgesses of
+Edinburgh; indwellers in Biggar, Perth, and Dalkeith.  Thomas was the
+forester of Newbattle Park, Gavin was a baker, John a maltman, Francis a
+chirurgeon, and 'Schir William' a priest.  In the feuds of Humes and
+Heatleys, Cunninghams, Montgomeries, Mures, Ogilvies, and Turnbulls, we
+find them inconspicuously involved, and apparently getting rather better
+than they gave.  Schir William (reverend gentleman) was cruellie
+slaughtered on the Links of Kincraig in 1582; James ('in the mill-town of
+Roberton'), murdered in 1590; Archibald ('in Gallowfarren'), killed with
+shots of pistols and hagbuts in 1608.  Three violent deaths in about
+seventy years, against which we can only put the case of Thomas, servant
+to Hume of Cowden Knowes, who was arraigned with his two young masters
+for the death of the Bastard of Mellerstanes in 1569.  John ('in
+Dalkeith') stood sentry without Holyrood while the banded lords were
+despatching Rizzio within.  William, at the ringing of Perth bell, ran
+before Gowrie House 'with ane sword, and, entering to the yearde, saw
+George Craiggingilt with ane twa-handit sword and utheris nychtbouris; at
+quilk time James Boig cryit ower ane wynds, "Awa hame! ye will all be
+hangit"'--a piece of advice which William took, and immediately
+'depairtit.'  John got a maid with child to him in Biggar, and seemingly
+deserted her; she was hanged on the Castle Hill for infanticide, June
+1614; and Martin, elder in Dalkeith, eternally disgraced the name by
+signing witness in a witch trial, 1661.  These are two of our black
+sheep. {3a}  Under the Restoration, one Stevenson was a bailie in
+Edinburgh, and another the lessee of the Canonmills.  There were at the
+same period two physicians of the name in Edinburgh, one of whom, Dr.
+Archibald, appears to have been a famous man in his day and generation.
+The Court had continual need of him; it was he who reported, for
+instance, on the state of Rumbold; and he was for some time in the
+enjoyment of a pension of a thousand pounds Scots (about eighty pounds
+sterling) at a time when five hundred pounds is described as 'an opulent
+future.'  I do not know if I should be glad or sorry that he failed to
+keep favour; but on 6th January 1682 (rather a cheerless New Year's
+present) his pension was expunged. {4a}  There need be no doubt, at
+least, of my exultation at the fact that he was knighted and recorded
+arms.  Not quite so genteel, but still in public life, Hugh was
+Under-Clerk to the Privy Council, and liked being so extremely.  I gather
+this from his conduct in September 1681, when, with all the lords and
+their servants, he took the woful and soul-destroying Test, swearing it
+'word by word upon his knees.'  And, behold! it was in vain, for Hugh was
+turned out of his small post in 1684. {4b}  Sir Archibald and Hugh were
+both plainly inclined to be trimmers; but there was one witness of the
+name of Stevenson who held high the banner of the Covenant--John,
+'Land-Labourer, {4c} in the parish of Daily, in Carrick,' that 'eminently
+pious man.'  He seems to have been a poor sickly soul, and shows himself
+disabled with scrofula, and prostrate and groaning aloud with fever; but
+the enthusiasm of the martyr burned high within him.
+
+'I was made to take joyfully the spoiling of my goods, and with pleasure
+for His name's sake wandered in deserts and in mountains, in dens and
+caves of the earth.  I lay four months in the coldest season of the year
+in a haystack in my father's garden, and a whole February in the open
+fields not far from Camragen, and this I did without the least prejudice
+from the night air; one night, when lying in the fields near to the
+Carrick-Miln, I was all covered with snow in the morning.  Many nights
+have I lain with pleasure in the churchyard of Old Daily, and made a
+grave my pillow; frequently have I resorted to the old walls about the
+glen, near to Camragen, and there sweetly rested.'  The visible band of
+God protected and directed him.  Dragoons were turned aside from the
+bramble-bush where he lay hidden.  Miracles were performed for his
+behoof.  'I got a horse and a woman to carry the child, and came to the
+same mountain, where I wandered by the mist before; it is commonly known
+by the name of Kellsrhins: when we came to go up the mountain, there came
+on a great rain, which we thought was the occasion of the child's
+weeping, and she wept so bitterly, that all we could do could not divert
+her from it, so that she was ready to burst.  When we got to the top of
+the mountain, where the Lord had been formerly kind to my soul in prayer,
+I looked round me for a stone, and espying one, I went and brought it.
+When the woman with me saw me set down the stone, she smiled, and asked
+what I was going to do with it.  I told her I was going to set it up as
+my Ebenezer, because hitherto, and in that place, the Lord had formerly
+helped, and I hoped would yet help.  The rain still continuing, the child
+weeping bitterly, I went to prayer, and no sooner did I cry to God, but
+the child gave over weeping, and when we got up from prayer, the rain was
+pouring down on every side, but in the way where we were to go there fell
+not one drop; the place not rained on was as big as an ordinary avenue.'
+And so great a saint was the natural butt of Satan's persecutions.  'I
+retired to the fields for secret prayer about mid-night.  When I went to
+pray I was much straitened, and could not get one request, but "Lord
+pity," "Lord help"; this I came over frequently; at length the terror of
+Satan fell on me in a high degree, and all I could say even then
+was--"Lord help."  I continued in the duty for some time, notwithstanding
+of this terror.  At length I got up to my feet, and the terror still
+increased; then the enemy took me by the arm-pits, and seemed to lift me
+up by my arms.  I saw a loch just before me, and I concluded he designed
+to throw me there by force; and had he got leave to do so, it might have
+brought a great reproach upon religion. {7a}  But it was otherwise
+ordered, and the cause of piety escaped that danger. {7b}
+
+On the whole, the Stevensons may be described as decent, reputable folk,
+following honest trades--millers, maltsters, and doctors, playing the
+character parts in the Waverley Novels with propriety, if without
+distinction; and to an orphan looking about him in the world for a
+potential ancestry, offering a plain and quite unadorned refuge, equally
+free from shame and glory.  John, the land-labourer, is the one living
+and memorable figure, and he, alas! cannot possibly be more near than a
+collateral.  It was on August 12, 1678, that he heard Mr. John Welsh on
+the Craigdowhill, and 'took the heavens, earth, and sun in the firmament
+that was shining on us, as also the ambassador who made the offer, and
+_the clerk who raised the psalms_, to witness that I did give myself away
+to the Lord in a personal and perpetual covenant never to be forgotten';
+and already, in 1675, the birth of my direct ascendant was registered in
+Glasgow.  So that I have been pursuing ancestors too far down; and John
+the land-labourer is debarred me, and I must relinquish from the trophies
+of my house his _rare soul-strengthening and comforting cordial_.  It is
+the same case with the Edinburgh bailie and the miller of the Canonmills,
+worthy man! and with that public character, Hugh the Under-Clerk, and,
+more than all, with Sir Archibald, the physician, who recorded arms.  And
+I am reduced to a family of inconspicuous maltsters in what was then the
+clean and handsome little city on the Clyde.
+
+The name has a certain air of being Norse.  But the story of Scottish
+nomenclature is confounded by a continual process of translation and
+half-translation from the Gaelic which in olden days may have been
+sometimes reversed.  Roy becomes Reid; Gow, Smith.  A great Highland clan
+uses the name of Robertson; a sept in Appin that of Livingstone; Maclean
+in Glencoe answers to Johnstone at Lockerby.  And we find such hybrids as
+Macalexander for Macallister.  There is but one rule to be deduced: that
+however uncompromisingly Saxon a name may appear, you can never be sure
+it does not designate a Celt.  My great-grandfather wrote the name
+_Stevenson_ but pronounced it _Steenson_, after the fashion of the
+immortal minstrel in _Redgauntlet_; and this elision of a medial
+consonant appears a Gaelic process; and, curiously enough, I have come
+across no less than two Gaelic forms: _John Macstophane cordinerius in
+Crossraguel_, 1573, and _William M'Steen_ in Dunskeith (co. Ross), 1605.
+Stevenson, Steenson, Macstophane, M'Steen: which is the original? which
+the translation?  Or were these separate creations of the patronymic,
+some English, some Gaelic?  The curiously compact territory in which we
+find them seated--Ayr, Lanark, Peebles, Stirling, Perth, Fife, and the
+Lothians--would seem to forbid the supposition. {9a}
+
+'STEVENSON--or according to tradition of one of the proscribed of the
+clan MacGregor, who was born among the willows or in a hill-side
+sheep-pen--"Son of my love," a heraldic bar sinister, but history reveals
+a reason for the birth among the willows far other than the sinister
+aspect of the name': these are the dark words of Mr. Cosmo Innes; but
+history or tradition, being interrogated, tells a somewhat tangled tale.
+The heir of Macgregor of Glenorchy, murdered about 1858 by the Argyll
+Campbells, appears to have been the original 'Son of my love'; and his
+more loyal clansmen took the name to fight under.  It may be supposed the
+story of their resistance became popular, and the name in some sort
+identified with the idea of opposition to the Campbells.  Twice
+afterwards, on some renewed aggression, in 1502 and 1552, we find the
+Macgregors again banding themselves into a sept of 'Sons of my love'; and
+when the great disaster fell on them in 1603, the whole original legend
+reappears, and we have the heir of Alaster of Glenstrae born 'among the
+willows' of a fugitive mother, and the more loyal clansmen again rallying
+under the name of Stevenson.  A story would not be told so often unless
+it had some base in fact; nor (if there were no bond at all between the
+Red Macgregors and the Stevensons) would that extraneous and somewhat
+uncouth name be so much repeated in the legends of the Children of the
+Mist.
+
+But I am enabled, by my very lively and obliging correspondent, Mr.
+George A. Macgregor Stevenson of New York, to give an actual instance.
+His grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and
+great-great-great-grandfather, all used the names of Macgregor and
+Stevenson as occasion served; being perhaps Macgregor by night and
+Stevenson by day.  The great-great-great-grandfather was a mighty man of
+his hands, marched with the clan in the 'Forty-five, and returned with
+_spolia opima_ in the shape of a sword, which he had wrested from an
+officer in the retreat, and which is in the possession of my
+correspondent to this day.  His great-grandson (the grandfather of my
+correspondent), being converted to Methodism by some wayside preacher,
+discarded in a moment his name, his old nature, and his political
+principles, and with the zeal of a proselyte sealed his adherence to the
+Protestant Succession by baptising his next son George.  This George
+became the publisher and editor of the _Wesleyan Times_.  His children
+were brought up in ignorance of their Highland pedigree; and my
+correspondent was puzzled to overhear his father speak of him as a true
+Macgregor, and amazed to find, in rummaging about that peaceful and pious
+house, the sword of the Hanoverian officer.  After he was grown up and
+was better informed of his descent, 'I frequently asked my father,' he
+writes, 'why he did not use the name of Macgregor; his replies were
+significant, and give a picture of the man: "It isn't a good _Methodist_
+name.  You can use it, but it will do you no _good_."  Yet the old
+gentleman, by way of pleasantry, used to announce himself to friends as
+"Colonel Macgregor."'
+
+Here, then, are certain Macgregors habitually using the name of
+Stevenson, and at last, under the influence of Methodism, adopting it
+entirely.  Doubtless a proscribed clan could not be particular; they took
+a name as a man takes an umbrella against a shower; as Rob Roy took
+Campbell, and his son took Drummond.  But this case is different;
+Stevenson was not taken and left--it was consistently adhered to.  It
+does not in the least follow that all Stevensons are of the clan Alpin;
+but it does follow that some may be.  And I cannot conceal from myself
+the possibility that James Stevenson in Glasgow, my first authentic
+ancestor, may have had a Highland _alias_ upon his conscience and a
+claymore in his back parlour.
+
+To one more tradition I may allude, that we are somehow descended from a
+French barber-surgeon who came to St. Andrews in the service of one of
+the Cardinal Beatons.  No details were added.  But the very name of
+France was so detested in my family for three generations, that I am
+tempted to suppose there may be something in it. {12a}
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I: DOMESTIC ANNALS
+
+
+It is believed that in 1665, James Stevenson in Nether Carsewell, parish
+of Neilston, county of Renfrew, and presumably a tenant farmer, married
+one Jean Keir; and in 1675, without doubt, there was born to these two a
+son Robert, possibly a maltster in Glasgow.  In 1710, Robert married, for
+a second time, Elizabeth Cumming, and there was born to them, in 1720,
+another Robert, certainly a maltster in Glasgow.  In 1742, Robert the
+second married Margaret Fulton (Margret, she called herself), by whom he
+had ten children, among whom were Hugh, born February 1749, and Alan,
+born June 1752.
+
+With these two brothers my story begins.  Their deaths were simultaneous;
+their lives unusually brief and full.  Tradition whispered me in
+childhood they were the owners of an islet near St. Kitts; and it is
+certain they had risen to be at the head of considerable interests in the
+West Indies, which Hugh managed abroad and Alan at home, at an age when
+others are still curveting a clerk's stool.  My kinsman, Mr. Stevenson of
+Stirling, has heard his father mention that there had been 'something
+romantic' about Alan's marriage: and, alas! he has forgotten what.  It
+was early at least.  His wife was Jean, daughter of David Lillie, a
+builder in Glasgow, and several times 'Deacon of the Wrights': the date
+of the marriage has not reached me; but on 8th June 1772, when Robert,
+the only child of the union, was born, the husband and father had scarce
+passed, or had not yet attained, his twentieth year.  Here was a youth
+making haste to give hostages to fortune.  But this early scene of
+prosperity in love and business was on the point of closing.
+
+There hung in the house of this young family, and successively in those
+of my grandfather and father, an oil painting of a ship of many tons
+burthen.  Doubtless the brothers had an interest in the vessel; I was
+told she had belonged to them outright; and the picture was preserved
+through years of hardship, and remains to this day in the possession of
+the family, the only memorial of my great-grandsire Alan.  It was on this
+ship that he sailed on his last adventure, summoned to the West Indies by
+Hugh.  An agent had proved unfaithful on a serious scale; and it used to
+be told me in my childhood how the brothers pursued him from one island
+to another in an open boat, were exposed to the pernicious dews of the
+tropics, and simultaneously struck down.  The dates and places of their
+deaths (now before me) would seem to indicate a more scattered and
+prolonged pursuit: Hugh, on the 16th April 1774, in Tobago, within sight
+of Trinidad; Alan, so late as 26th May, and so far away as 'Santt
+Kittes,' in the Leeward Islands--both, says the family Bible, 'of a
+fiver'(!).  The death of Hugh was probably announced by Alan in a letter,
+to which we may refer the details of the open boat and the dew.  Thus, at
+least, in something like the course of post, both were called away, the
+one twenty-five, the other twenty-two; their brief generation became
+extinct, their short-lived house fell with them; and 'in these lawless
+parts and lawless times'--the words are my grandfather's--their property
+was stolen or became involved.  Many years later, I understand some small
+recovery to have been made; but at the moment almost the whole means of
+the family seem to have perished with the young merchants.  On the 27th
+April, eleven days after Hugh Stevenson, twenty-nine before Alan, died
+David Lillie, the Deacon of the Wrights; so that mother and son were
+orphaned in one month.  Thus, from a few scraps of paper bearing little
+beyond dates, we construct the outlines of the tragedy that shadowed the
+cradle of Robert Stevenson.
+
+Jean Lillie was a young woman of strong sense, well fitted to contend
+with poverty, and of a pious disposition, which it is like that these
+misfortunes heated.  Like so many other widowed Scots-women, she vowed
+her son should wag his head in a pulpit; but her means were inadequate to
+her ambition.  A charity school, and some time under a Mr. M'Intyre, 'a
+famous linguist,' were all she could afford in the way of education to
+the would-be minister.  He learned no Greek; in one place he mentions
+that the Orations of Cicero were his highest book in Latin; in another
+that he had 'delighted' in Virgil and Horace; but his delight could never
+have been scholarly.  This appears to have been the whole of his training
+previous to an event which changed his own destiny and moulded that of
+his descendants--the second marriage of his mother.
+
+There was a Merchant-Burgess of Edinburgh of the name of Thomas Smith.
+The Smith pedigree has been traced a little more particularly than the
+Stevensons', with a similar dearth of illustrious names.  One character
+seems to have appeared, indeed, for a moment at the wings of history: a
+skipper of Dundee who smuggled over some Jacobite big-wig at the time of
+the 'Fifteen, and was afterwards drowned in Dundee harbour while going on
+board his ship.  With this exception, the generations of the Smiths
+present no conceivable interest even to a descendant; and Thomas, of
+Edinburgh, was the first to issue from respectable obscurity.  His
+father, a skipper out of Broughty Ferry, was drowned at sea while Thomas
+was still young.  He seems to have owned a ship or two--whalers, I
+suppose, or coasters--and to have been a member of the Dundee Trinity
+House, whatever that implies.  On his death the widow remained in
+Broughty, and the son came to push his future in Edinburgh.  There is a
+story told of him in the family which I repeat here because I shall have
+to tell later on a similar, but more perfectly authenticated, experience
+of his stepson, Robert Stevenson.  Word reached Thomas that his mother
+was unwell, and he prepared to leave for Broughty on the morrow.  It was
+between two and three in the morning, and the early northern daylight was
+already clear, when he awoke and beheld the curtains at the bed-foot
+drawn aside and his mother appear in the interval, smile upon him for a
+moment, and then vanish.  The sequel is stereo-type; he took the time by
+his watch, and arrived at Broughty to learn it was the very moment of her
+death.  The incident is at least curious in having happened to such a
+person--as the tale is being told of him.  In all else, he appears as a
+man ardent, passionate, practical, designed for affairs and prospering in
+them far beyond the average.  He founded a solid business in lamps and
+oils, and was the sole proprietor of a concern called the Greenside
+Company's Works--'a multifarious concern it was,' writes my cousin,
+Professor Swan, 'of tinsmiths, coppersmiths, brass-founders, blacksmiths,
+and japanners.'  He was also, it seems, a shipowner and underwriter.  He
+built himself 'a land'--Nos. 1 and 2 Baxter's Place, then no such
+unfashionable neighbourhood--and died, leaving his only son in easy
+circumstances, and giving to his three surviving daughters portions of
+five thousand pounds and upwards.  There is no standard of success in
+life; but in one of its meanings, this is to succeed.
+
+In what we know of his opinions, he makes a figure highly characteristic
+of the time.  A high Tory and patriot, a captain--so I find it in my
+notes--of Edinburgh Spearmen, and on duty in the Castle during the Muir
+and Palmer troubles, he bequeathed to his descendants a bloodless sword
+and a somewhat violent tradition, both long preserved.  The judge who sat
+on Muir and Palmer, the famous Braxfield, let fall from the bench the
+_obiter dictum_--'I never liked the French all my days, but now I hate
+them.'  If Thomas Smith, the Edinburgh Spearman, were in court, he must
+have been tempted to applaud.  The people of that land were his
+abhorrence; he loathed Buonaparte like Antichrist.  Towards the end he
+fell into a kind of dotage; his family must entertain him with games of
+tin soldiers, which he took a childish pleasure to array and overset; but
+those who played with him must be upon their guard, for if his side,
+which was always that of the English against the French, should chance to
+be defeated, there would be trouble in Baxter's Place.  For these
+opinions he may almost be said to have suffered.  Baptised and brought up
+in the Church of Scotland, he had, upon some conscientious scruple,
+joined the communion of the Baptists.  Like other Nonconformists, these
+were inclined to the Liberal side in politics, and, at least in the
+beginning, regarded Buonaparte as a deliverer.  From the time of his
+joining the Spearmen, Thomas Smith became in consequence a bugbear to his
+brethren in the faith.   'They that take the sword shall perish with the
+sword,' they told him; they gave him 'no rest'; 'his position became
+intolerable'; it was plain he must choose between his political and his
+religious tenets; and in the last years of his life, about 1812, he
+returned to the Church of his fathers.
+
+August 1786 was the date of his chief advancement, when, having designed
+a system of oil lights to take the place of the primitive coal fires
+before in use, he was dubbed engineer to the newly-formed Board of
+Northern Lighthouses.  Not only were his fortunes bettered by the
+appointment, but he was introduced to a new and wider field for the
+exercise of his abilities, and a new way of life highly agreeable to his
+active constitution.  He seems to have rejoiced in the long journeys, and
+to have combined them with the practice of field sports.  'A tall, stout
+man coming ashore with his gun over his arm'--so he was described to my
+father--the only description that has come down to me by a light-keeper
+old in the service.  Nor did this change come alone.  On the 9th July of
+the same year, Thomas Smith had been left for the second time a widower.
+As he was still but thirty-three years old, prospering in his affairs,
+newly advanced in the world, and encumbered at the time with a family of
+children, five in number, it was natural that he should entertain the
+notion of another wife.  Expeditious in business, he was no less so in
+his choice; and it was not later than June 1787--for my grandfather is
+described as still in his fifteenth year--that he married the widow of
+Alan Stevenson.
+
+The perilous experiment of bringing together two families for once
+succeeded.  Mr. Smith's two eldest daughters, Jean and Janet, fervent in
+piety, unwearied in kind deeds, were well qualified both to appreciate
+and to attract the stepmother; and her son, on the other hand, seems to
+have found immediate favour in the eyes of Mr. Smith.  It is, perhaps,
+easy to exaggerate the ready-made resemblances; the tired woman must have
+done much to fashion girls who were under ten; the man, lusty and
+opinionated, must have stamped a strong impression on the boy of fifteen.
+But the cleavage of the family was too marked, the identity of character
+and interest produced between the two men on the one hand, and the three
+women on the other, was too complete to have been the result of influence
+alone.  Particular bonds of union must have pre-existed on each side.
+And there is no doubt that the man and the boy met with common ambitions,
+and a common bent, to the practice of that which had not so long before
+acquired the name of civil engineering.
+
+For the profession which is now so thronged, famous, and influential, was
+then a thing of yesterday.  My grandfather had an anecdote of Smeaton,
+probably learned from John Clerk of Eldin, their common friend.  Smeaton
+was asked by the Duke of Argyll to visit the West Highland coast for a
+professional purpose.  He refused, appalled, it seems, by the rough
+travelling.  'You can recommend some other fit person?' asked the Duke.
+'No,' said Smeaton, 'I'm sorry I can't.'  'What!' cried the Duke, 'a
+profession with only one man in it!  Pray, who taught you?'  'Why,' said
+Smeaton, 'I believe I may say I was self-taught, an't please your grace.'
+Smeaton, at the date of Thomas Smith's third marriage, was yet living;
+and as the one had grown to the new profession from his place at the
+instrument-maker's, the other was beginning to enter it by the way of his
+trade.  The engineer of to-day is confronted with a library of acquired
+results; tables and formulae to the value of folios full have been
+calculated and recorded; and the student finds everywhere in front of him
+the footprints of the pioneers.  In the eighteenth century the field was
+largely unexplored; the engineer must read with his own eyes the face of
+nature; he arose a volunteer, from the workshop or the mill, to undertake
+works which were at once inventions and adventures.  It was not a science
+then--it was a living art; and it visibly grew under the eyes and between
+the hands of its practitioners.
+
+The charm of such an occupation was strongly felt by stepfather and
+stepson.  It chanced that Thomas Smith was a reformer; the superiority of
+his proposed lamp and reflectors over open fires of coal secured his
+appointment; and no sooner had he set his hand to the task than the
+interest of that employment mastered him.  The vacant stage on which he
+was to act, and where all had yet to be created--the greatness of the
+difficulties, the smallness of the means intrusted him--would rouse a man
+of his disposition like a call to battle.  The lad introduced by marriage
+under his roof was of a character to sympathise; the public usefulness of
+the service would appeal to his judgment, the perpetual need for fresh
+expedients stimulate his ingenuity.  And there was another attraction
+which, in the younger man at least, appealed to, and perhaps first
+aroused, a profound and enduring sentiment of romance: I mean the
+attraction of the life.  The seas into which his labours carried the new
+engineer were still scarce charted, the coasts still dark; his way on
+shore was often far beyond the convenience of any road; the isles in
+which he must sojourn were still partly savage.  He must toss much in
+boats; he must often adventure on horseback by the dubious bridle-track
+through unfrequented wildernesses; he must sometimes plant his lighthouse
+in the very camp of wreckers; and he was continually enforced to the
+vicissitudes of outdoor life.  The joy of my grandfather in this career
+was strong as the love of woman.  It lasted him through youth and
+manhood, it burned strong in age, and at the approach of death his last
+yearning was to renew these loved experiences.  What he felt himself he
+continued to attribute to all around him.  And to this supposed sentiment
+in others I find him continually, almost pathetically, appealing; often
+in vain.
+
+Snared by these interests, the boy seems to have become almost at once
+the eager confidant and adviser of his new connection; the Church, if he
+had ever entertained the prospect very warmly, faded from his view; and
+at the age of nineteen I find him already in a post of some authority,
+superintending the construction of the lighthouse on the isle of Little
+Cumbrae, in the Firth of Clyde.  The change of aim seems to have caused
+or been accompanied by a change of character.  It sounds absurd to couple
+the name of my grandfather with the word indolence; but the lad who had
+been destined from the cradle to the Church, and who had attained the age
+of fifteen without acquiring more than a moderate knowledge of Latin, was
+at least no unusual student.  And from the day of his charge at Little
+Cumbrae he steps before us what he remained until the end, a man of the
+most zealous industry, greedy of occupation, greedy of knowledge, a stern
+husband of time, a reader, a writer, unflagging in his task of
+self-improvement.  Thenceforward his summers were spent directing works
+and ruling workmen, now in uninhabited, now in half-savage islands; his
+winters were set apart, first at the Andersonian Institution, then at the
+University of Edinburgh to improve himself in mathematics, chemistry,
+natural history, agriculture, moral philosophy, and logic; a bearded
+student--although no doubt scrupulously shaved.  I find one reference to
+his years in class which will have a meaning for all who have studied in
+Scottish Universities.  He mentions a recommendation made by the
+professor of logic.  'The high-school men,' he writes, 'and _bearded men
+like myself_, were all attention.'  If my grandfather were throughout
+life a thought too studious of the art of getting on, much must be
+forgiven to the bearded and belated student who looked across, with a
+sense of difference, at 'the high-school men.'  Here was a gulf to be
+crossed; but already he could feel that he had made a beginning, and that
+must have been a proud hour when he devoted his earliest earnings to the
+repayment of the charitable foundation in which he had received the
+rudiments of knowledge.
+
+In yet another way he followed the example of his father-in-law, and from
+1794 to 1807, when the affairs of the Bell Rock made it necessary for him
+to resign, he served in different corps of volunteers.  In the last of
+these he rose to a position of distinction, no less than captain of the
+Grenadier Company, and his colonel, in accepting his resignation,
+entreated he would do them 'the favour of continuing as an honorary
+member of a corps which has been so much indebted for your zeal and
+exertions.'
+
+To very pious women the men of the house are apt to appear worldly.  The
+wife, as she puts on her new bonnet before church, is apt to sigh over
+that assiduity which enabled her husband to pay the milliner's bill.  And
+in the household of the Smiths and Stevensons the women were not only
+extremely pious, but the men were in reality a trifle worldly.  Religious
+they both were; conscious, like all Scots, of the fragility and unreality
+of that scene in which we play our uncomprehended parts; like all Scots,
+realising daily and hourly the sense of another will than ours and a
+perpetual direction in the affairs of life.  But the current of their
+endeavours flowed in a more obvious channel.  They had got on so far; to
+get on further was their next ambition--to gather wealth, to rise in
+society, to leave their descendants higher than themselves, to be (in
+some sense) among the founders of families.  Scott was in the same town
+nourishing similar dreams.  But in the eyes of the women these dreams
+would be foolish and idolatrous.
+
+I have before me some volumes of old letters addressed to Mrs. Smith and
+the two girls, her favourites, which depict in a strong light their
+characters and the society in which they moved.
+
+    'My very dear and much esteemed Friend,' writes one correspondent,
+    'this day being the anniversary of our acquaintance, I feel inclined
+    to address you; but where shall I find words to express the fealings
+    of a graitful _Heart_, first to the Lord who graiciously inclined you
+    on this day last year to notice an afflicted Strainger providentially
+    cast in your way far from any Earthly friend? . . .  Methinks I shall
+    hear him say unto you, "Inasmuch as ye shewed kindness to my
+    afflicted handmaiden, ye did it unto me."'
+
+This is to Jean; but the same afflicted lady wrote indifferently to Jean,
+to Janet, and to Ms. Smith, whom she calls 'my Edinburgh mother.'  It is
+plain the three were as one person, moving to acts of kindness, like the
+Graces, inarmed.  Too much stress must not be laid on the style of this
+correspondence; Clarinda survived, not far away, and may have met the
+ladies on the Calton Hill; and many of the writers appear, underneath the
+conventions of the period, to be genuinely moved.  But what unpleasantly
+strikes a reader is, that these devout unfortunates found a revenue in
+their devotion.  It is everywhere the same tale; on the side of the
+soft-hearted ladies, substantial acts of help; on the side of the
+correspondents, affection, italics, texts, ecstasies, and imperfect
+spelling.  When a midwife is recommended, not at all for proficiency in
+her important art, but because she has 'a sister whom I [the
+correspondent] esteem and respect, and [who] is a spiritual daughter of
+my Hond Father in the Gosple,' the mask seems to be torn off, and the
+wages of godliness appear too openly.  Capacity is a secondary matter in
+a midwife, temper in a servant, affection in a daughter, and the
+repetition of a shibboleth fulfils the law.  Common decency is at times
+forgot in the same page with the most sanctified advice and aspiration.
+Thus I am introduced to a correspondent who appears to have been at the
+time the housekeeper at Invermay, and who writes to condole with my
+grandmother in a season of distress.  For nearly half a sheet she keeps
+to the point with an excellent discretion in language then suddenly
+breaks out:
+
+    'It was fully my intention to have left this at Martinmass, but the
+    Lord fixes the bounds of our habitation.  I have had more need of
+    patience in my situation here than in any other, partly from the very
+    violent, unsteady, deceitful temper of the Mistress of the Family,
+    and also from the state of the house.  It was in a train of repair
+    when I came here two years ago, and is still in Confusion.  There is
+    above six Thousand Pounds' worth of Furniture come from London to be
+    put up when the rooms are completely finished; and then, woe be to
+    the Person who is Housekeeper at Invermay!'
+
+And by the tail of the document, which is torn, I see she goes on to ask
+the bereaved family to seek her a new place.  It is extraordinary that
+people should have been so deceived in so careless an impostor; that a
+few sprinkled 'God willings' should have blinded them to the essence of
+this venomous letter; and that they should have been at the pains to bind
+it in with others (many of them highly touching) in their memorial of
+harrowing days.  But the good ladies were without guile and without
+suspicion; they were victims marked for the axe, and the religious
+impostors snuffed up the wind as they drew near.
+
+I have referred above to my grandmother; it was no slip of the pen: for
+by an extraordinary arrangement, in which it is hard not to suspect the
+managing hand of a mother, Jean Smith became the wife of Robert
+Stevenson.  Mrs. Smith had failed in her design to make her son a
+minister, and she saw him daily more immersed in business and worldly
+ambition.  One thing remained that she might do: she might secure for him
+a godly wife, that great means of sanctification; and she had two under
+her hand, trained by herself, her dear friends and daughters both in law
+and love--Jean and Janet.  Jean's complexion was extremely pale, Janet's
+was florid; my grandmother's nose was straight, my great-aunt's aquiline;
+but by the sound of the voice, not even a son was able to distinguish one
+from other.  The marriage of a man of twenty-seven and a girl of twenty
+who have lived for twelve years as brother and sister, is difficult to
+conceive.  It took place, however, and thus in 1799 the family was still
+further cemented by the union of a representative of the male or worldly
+element with one of the female and devout.
+
+This essential difference remained unbridged, yet never diminished the
+strength of their relation.  My grandfather pursued his design of
+advancing in the world with some measure of success; rose to distinction
+in his calling, grew to be the familiar of members of Parliament, judges
+of the Court of Session, and 'landed gentlemen'; learned a ready address,
+had a flow of interesting conversation, and when he was referred to as 'a
+highly respectable _bourgeois_,' resented the description.  My
+grandmother remained to the end devout and unambitious, occupied with her
+Bible, her children, and her house; easily shocked, and associating
+largely with a clique of godly parasites.  I do not know if she called in
+the midwife already referred to; but the principle on which that lady was
+recommended, she accepted fully.  The cook was a godly woman, the butcher
+a Christian man, and the table suffered.  The scene has been often
+described to me of my grandfather sawing with darkened countenance at
+some indissoluble joint--'Preserve me, my dear, what kind of a reedy,
+stringy beast is this?'--of the joint removed, the pudding substituted
+and uncovered; and of my grandmother's anxious glance and hasty,
+deprecatory comment, 'Just mismanaged!'  Yet with the invincible
+obstinacy of soft natures, she would adhere to the godly woman and the
+Christian man, or find others of the same kidney to replace them.  One of
+her confidants had once a narrow escape; an unwieldy old woman, she had
+fallen from an outside stair in a close of the Old Town; and my
+grandmother rejoiced to communicate the providential circumstance that a
+baker had been passing underneath with his bread upon his head.  'I would
+like to know what kind of providence the baker thought it!' cried my
+grandfather.
+
+But the sally must have been unique.  In all else that I have heard or
+read of him, so far from criticising, he was doing his utmost to honour
+and even to emulate his wife's pronounced opinions.  In the only letter
+which has come to my hand of Thomas Smith's, I find him informing his
+wife that he was 'in time for afternoon church'; similar assurances or
+cognate excuses abound in the correspondence of Robert Stevenson; and it
+is comical and pretty to see the two generations paying the same court to
+a female piety more highly strung: Thomas Smith to the mother of Robert
+Stevenson--Robert Stevenson to the daughter of Thomas Smith.  And if for
+once my grandfather suffered himself to be hurried, by his sense of
+humour and justice, into that remark about the case of Providence and the
+Baker, I should be sorry for any of his children who should have stumbled
+into the same attitude of criticism.  In the apocalyptic style of the
+housekeeper of Invermay, woe be to that person!  But there was no fear;
+husband and sons all entertained for the pious, tender soul the same
+chivalrous and moved affection.  I have spoken with one who remembered
+her, and who had been the intimate and equal of her sons, and I found
+this witness had been struck, as I had been, with a sense of
+disproportion between the warmth of the adoration felt and the nature of
+the woman, whether as described or observed.  She diligently read and
+marked her Bible; she was a tender nurse; she had a sense of humour under
+strong control; she talked and found some amusement at her (or rather at
+her husband's) dinner-parties.  It is conceivable that even my
+grandmother was amenable to the seductions of dress; at least, I find her
+husband inquiring anxiously about 'the gowns from Glasgow,' and very
+careful to describe the toilet of the Princess Charlotte, whom he had
+seen in church 'in a Pelisse and Bonnet of the same colour of cloth as
+the Boys' Dress jackets, trimmed with blue satin ribbons; the hat or
+Bonnet, Mr. Spittal said, was a Parisian slouch, and had a plume of three
+white feathers.'  But all this leaves a blank impression, and it is
+rather by reading backward in these old musty letters, which have moved
+me now to laughter and now to impatience, that I glean occasional
+glimpses of how she seemed to her contemporaries, and trace (at work in
+her queer world of godly and grateful parasites) a mobile and responsive
+nature.  Fashion moulds us, and particularly women, deeper than we
+sometimes think; but a little while ago, and, in some circles, women
+stood or fell by the degree of their appreciation of old pictures; in the
+early years of the century (and surely with more reason) a character like
+that of my grandmother warmed, charmed, and subdued, like a strain of
+music, the hearts of the men of her own household.  And there is little
+doubt that Mrs. Smith, as she looked on at the domestic life of her son
+and her stepdaughter, and numbered the heads in their increasing nursery,
+must have breathed fervent thanks to her Creator.
+
+Yet this was to be a family unusually tried; it was not for nothing that
+one of the godly women saluted Miss Janet Smith as 'a veteran in
+affliction'; and they were all before middle life experienced in that
+form of service.  By the 1st of January 1808, besides a pair of
+still-born twins, children had been born and still survived to the young
+couple.  By the 11th two were gone; by the 28th a third had followed, and
+the two others were still in danger.  In the letters of a former
+nurserymaid--I give her name, Jean Mitchell, _honoris causa_--we are
+enabled to feel, even at this distance of time, some of the bitterness of
+that month of bereavement.
+
+    'I have this day received,' she writes to Miss Janet, 'the melancholy
+    news of my dear babys' deaths.  My heart is like to break for my dear
+    Mrs. Stevenson.  O may she be supported on this trying occasion!  I
+    hope her other three babys will be spared to her.  O, Miss Smith, did
+    I think when I parted from my sweet babys that I never was to see
+    them more?'  'I received,' she begins her next, 'the mournful news of
+    my dear Jessie's death.  I also received the hair of my three sweet
+    babys, which I will preserve as dear to their memorys and as a token
+    of Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson's friendship and esteem.  At my leisure
+    hours, when the children are in bed, they occupy all my thoughts, I
+    dream of them.  About two weeks ago I dreamed that my sweet little
+    Jessie came running to me in her usual way, and I took her in my
+    arms.  O my dear babys, were mortal eyes permitted to see them in
+    heaven, we would not repine nor grieve for their loss.'
+
+By the 29th of February, the Reverend John Campbell, a man of obvious
+sense and human value, but hateful to the present biographer, because he
+wrote so many letters and conveyed so little information, summed up this
+first period of affliction in a letter to Miss Smith: 'Your dear sister
+but a little while ago had a full nursery, and the dear blooming
+creatures sitting around her table filled her breast with hope that one
+day they should fill active stations in society and become an ornament in
+the Church below.  But ah!'
+
+Near a hundred years ago these little creatures ceased to be, and for not
+much less a period the tears have been dried.  And to this day, looking
+in these stitched sheaves of letters, we hear the sound of many
+soft-hearted women sobbing for the lost.  Never was such a massacre of
+the innocents; teething and chincough and scarlet fever and smallpox ran
+the round; and little Lillies, and Smiths, and Stevensons fell like moths
+about a candle; and nearly all the sympathetic correspondents deplore and
+recall the little losses of their own.  'It is impossible to describe the
+Heavnly looks of the Dear Babe the three last days of his life,' writes
+Mrs. Laurie to Mrs. Smith.  'Never--never, my dear aunt, could I wish to
+eface the rememberance of this Dear Child.  Never, never, my dear aunt!'
+And so soon the memory of the dead and the dust of the survivors are
+buried in one grave.
+
+There was another death in 1812; it passes almost unremarked; a single
+funeral seemed but a small event to these 'veterans in affliction'; and
+by 1816 the nursery was full again.  Seven little hopefuls enlivened the
+house; some were growing up; to the elder girl my grandfather already
+wrote notes in current hand at the tail of his letters to his wife: and
+to the elder boys he had begun to print, with laborious care, sheets of
+childish gossip and pedantic applications.  Here, for instance, under
+date of 26th May 1816, is part of a mythological account of London, with
+a moral for the three gentlemen, 'Messieurs Alan, Robert, and James
+Stevenson,' to whom the document is addressed:
+
+    'There are many prisons here like Bridewell, for, like other large
+    towns, there are many bad men here as well as many good men.  The
+    natives of London are in general not so tall and strong as the people
+    of Edinburgh, because they have not so much pure air, and instead of
+    taking porridge they eat cakes made with sugar and plums.  Here you
+    have thousands of carts to draw timber, thousands of coaches to take
+    you to all parts of the town, and thousands of boats to sail on the
+    river Thames.  But you must have money to pay, otherwise you can get
+    nothing.  Now the way to get money is, become clever men and men of
+    education, by being good scholars.'
+
+From the same absence, he writes to his wife on a Sunday:
+
+    'It is now about eight o'clock with me, and I imagine you to be busy
+    with the young folks, hearing the questions [_Anglice_, catechism],
+    and indulging the boys with a chapter from the large Bible, with
+    their interrogations and your answers in the soundest doctrine.  I
+    hope James is getting his verse as usual, and that Mary is not
+    forgetting her little _hymn_.  While Jeannie will be reading
+    Wotherspoon, or some other suitable and instructive book, I presume
+    our friend, Aunt Mary, will have just arrived with the news of _a
+    throng kirk_ [a crowded church] and a great sermon.  You may mention,
+    with my compliments to my mother, that I was at St. Paul's to-day,
+    and attended a very excellent service with Mr. James Lawrie.  The
+    text was "Examine and see that ye be in the faith."'
+
+A twinkle of humour lights up this evocation of the distant scene--the
+humour of happy men and happy homes.  Yet it is penned upon the threshold
+of fresh sorrow.  James and Mary--he of the verse and she of the
+hymn--did not much more than survive to welcome their returning father.
+On the 25th, one of the godly women writes to Janet:
+
+    'My dearest beloved madam, when I last parted from you, you was so
+    affected with your affliction [you? or I?] could think of nothing
+    else.  But on Saturday, when I went to inquire after your health, how
+    was I startled to hear that dear James was gone!  Ah, what is this?
+    My dear benefactors, doing so much good to many, to the Lord,
+    suddenly to be deprived of their most valued comforts!  I was thrown
+    into great perplexity, could do nothing but murmur, why these things
+    were done to such a family.  I could not rest, but at midnight,
+    whether spoken [or not] it was presented to my mind--"Those whom ye
+    deplore are walking with me in white."  I conclude from this the Lord
+    saying to sweet Mrs. Stevenson: "I gave them to be brought up for me:
+    well done, good and faithful! they are fully prepared, and now I must
+    present them to my father and your father, to my God and your God."'
+
+It would be hard to lay on flattery with a more sure and daring hand.  I
+quote it as a model of a letter of condolence; be sure it would console.
+Very different, perhaps quite as welcome, is this from a lighthouse
+inspector to my grandfather:
+
+    'In reading your letter the trickling tear ran down ray cheeks in
+    silent sorrow for your departed dear ones, my sweet little friends.
+    Well do I remember, and you will call to mind, their little innocent
+    and interesting stories.  Often have they come round me and taken me
+    by the hand, but alas!  I am no more destined to behold them.'
+
+The child who is taken becomes canonised, and the looks of the homeliest
+babe seem in the retrospect 'heavenly the three last days of his life.'
+But it appears that James and Mary had indeed been children more than
+usually engaging; a record was preserved a long while in the family of
+their remarks and 'little innocent and interesting stories,' and the blow
+and the blank were the more sensible.
+
+Early the next month Robert Stevenson must proceed upon his voyage of
+inspection, part by land, part by sea.  He left his wife plunged in low
+spirits; the thought of his loss, and still more of her concern, was
+continually present in his mind, and he draws in his letters home an
+interesting picture of his family relations:
+
+                      '_Windygates Inn_, _Monday_ (_Postmark July_ 16_th_)
+
+    'MY DEAREST JEANNIE,--While the people of the inn are getting me a
+    little bit of something to eat, I sit down to tell you that I had a
+    most excellent passage across the water, and got to Wemyss at
+    mid-day.  I hope the children will be very good, and that Robert will
+    take a course with you to learn his Latin lessons daily; he may,
+    however, read English in company.  Let them have strawberries on
+    Saturdays.'
+
+                                              '_Westhaven_, 17_th_ _July_.
+
+    'I have been occupied to-day at the harbour of Newport, opposite
+    Dundee, and am this far on my way to Arbroath.  You may tell the boys
+    that I slept last night in Mr. Steadman's tent.  I found my bed
+    rather hard, but the lodgings were otherwise extremely comfortable.
+    The encampment is on the Fife side of the Tay, immediately opposite
+    to Dundee.  From the door of the tent you command the most beautiful
+    view of the Firth, both up and down, to a great extent.  At night all
+    was serene and still, the sky presented the most beautiful appearance
+    of bright stars, and the morning was ushered in with the song of many
+    little birds.'
+
+                                               '_Aberdeen_, _July_ 19_th_.
+
+    'I hope, my dear, that you are going out of doors regularly and
+    taking much exercise.  I would have you to _make the markets
+    daily_--and by all means to take a seat in the coach once or twice in
+    the week and see what is going on in town.  [The family were at the
+    sea-side.]  It will be good not to be too great a stranger to the
+    house.  It will be rather painful at first, but as it is to be done,
+    I would have you not to be too strange to the house in town.
+
+    'Tell the boys that I fell in with a soldier--his name is
+    Henderson--who was twelve years with Lord Wellington and other
+    commanders.  He returned very lately with only eightpence-halfpenny
+    in his pocket, and found his father and mother both in life, though
+    they had never heard from him, nor he from them.  He carried my
+    great-coat and umbrella a few miles.'
+
+                                            '_Fraserburgh_, _July_ 20_th_.
+
+    'Fraserburgh is the same dull place which [Auntie] Mary and Jeannie
+    found it.  As I am travelling along the coast which they are
+    acquainted with, you had better cause Robert bring down the map from
+    Edinburgh; and it will be a good exercise in geography for the young
+    folks to trace my course.  I hope they have entered upon the writing.
+    The library will afford abundance of excellent books, which I wish
+    you would employ a little.  I hope you are doing me the favour to go
+    much out with the boys, which will do you much good and prevent them
+    from getting so very much overheated.'
+
+                        [_To the Boys--Printed_.]
+
+    'When I had last the pleasure of writing to you, your dear little
+    brother James and your sweet little sister Mary were still with us.
+    But it has pleased God to remove them to another and a better world,
+    and we must submit to the will of Providence.  I must, however,
+    request of you to think sometimes upon them, and to be very careful
+    not to do anything that will displease or vex your mother.  It is
+    therefore proper that you do not roamp [Scottish indeed] too much
+    about, and that you learn your lessons.'
+
+    'I went to Fraserburgh and visited Kinnaird Head Lighthouse, which I
+    found in good order.  All this time I travelled upon good roads, and
+    paid many a toll-man by the way; but from Fraserburgh to Banff there
+    is no toll-bars, and the road is so bad that I had to walk up and
+    down many a hill, and for want of bridges the horses had to drag the
+    chaise up to the middle of the wheels in water.  At Banff I saw a
+    large ship of 300 tons lying on the sands upon her beam-ends, and a
+    wreck for want of a good harbour.  Captain Wilson--to whom I beg my
+    compliments--will show you a ship of 300 tons.  At the towns of
+    Macduff, Banff, and Portsoy, many of the houses are built of marble,
+    and the rocks on this part of the coast or sea-side are marble.  But,
+    my dear Boys, unless marble be polished and dressed, it is a very
+    coarse-looking stone, and has no more beauty than common rock.  As a
+    proof of this, ask the favour of your mother to take you to Thomson's
+    Marble Works in South Leith, and you will see marble in all its
+    stages, and perhaps you may there find Portsoy marble!  The use I
+    wish to make of this is to tell you that, without education, a man is
+    just like a block of rough, unpolished marble.  Notice, in proof of
+    this, how much Mr. Neill and Mr. M'Gregor [the tutor] know, and
+    observe how little a man knows who is not a good scholar.  On my way
+    to Fochabers I passed through many thousand acres of Fir timber, and
+    saw many deer running in these woods.'
+
+                            [_To Mrs. Stevenson_.]
+
+                                              '_Inverness_, _July_ 21_st_.
+
+    'I propose going to church in the afternoon, and as I have
+    breakfasted late, I shall afterwards take a walk, and dine about six
+    o'clock.  I do not know who is the clergyman here, but I shall think
+    of you all.  I travelled in the mail-coach [from Banff] almost alone.
+    While it was daylight I kept the top, and the passing along a country
+    I had never before seen was a considerable amusement.  But, my dear,
+    you are all much in my thoughts, and many are the objects which
+    recall the recollection of our tender and engaging children we have
+    so recently lost.  We must not, however, repine.  I could not for a
+    moment wish any change of circumstances in their case; and in every
+    comparative view of their state, I see the Lord's goodness in
+    removing them from an evil world to an abode of bliss; and I must
+    earnestly hope that you may be enabled to take such a view of this
+    affliction as to live in the happy prospect of our all meeting again
+    to part no more--and that under such considerations you are getting
+    up your spirits.  I wish you would walk about, and by all means go to
+    town, and do not sit much at home.'
+
+                                              '_Inverness_, _July_ 23_rd_.
+
+    'I am duly favoured with your much-valued letter, and I am happy to
+    find that you are so much with my mother, because that sort of
+    variety has a tendency to occupy the mind, and to keep it from
+    brooding too much upon one subject.  Sensibility and tenderness are
+    certainly two of the most interesting and pleasing qualities of the
+    mind.  These qualities are also none of the least of the many
+    endearingments of the female character.  But if that kind of sympathy
+    and pleasing melancholy, which is familiar to us under distress, be
+    much indulged, it becomes habitual, and takes such a hold of the mind
+    as to absorb all the other affections, and unfit us for the duties
+    and proper enjoyments of life.  Resignation sinks into a kind of
+    peevish discontent.  I am far, however, from thinking there is the
+    least danger of this in your case, my dear; for you have been on all
+    occasions enabled to look upon the fortunes of this life as under the
+    direction of a higher power, and have always preserved that propriety
+    and consistency of conduct in all circumstances which endears your
+    example to your family in particular, and to your friends.  I am
+    therefore, my dear, for you to go out much, and to go to the house
+    up-stairs [he means to go up-stairs in the house, to visit the place
+    of the dead children], and to put yourself in the way of the visits
+    of your friends.  I wish you would call on the Miss Grays, and it
+    would be a good thing upon a Saturday to dine with my mother, and
+    take Meggy and all the family with you, and let them have their
+    strawberries in town.  The tickets of one of the _old-fashioned
+    coaches_ would take you all up, and if the evening were good, they
+    could all walk down, excepting Meggy and little David.'
+
+                                    '_Inverness_, _July_ 25_th_, 11 _p.m._
+
+    'Captain Wemyss, of Wemyss, has come to Inverness to go the voyage
+    with me, and as we are sleeping in a double-bedded room, I must no
+    longer transgress.  You must remember me the best way you can to the
+    children.'
+
+                       '_On board of the Lighthouse Yacht_, _July_ 29_th_.
+
+    'I got to Cromarty yesterday about mid-day, and went to church.  It
+    happened to be the sacrament there, and I heard a Mr. Smith at that
+    place conclude the service with a very suitable exhortation.  There
+    seemed a great concourse of people, but they had rather an
+    unfortunate day for them at the tent, as it rained a good deal.
+    After drinking tea at the inn, Captain Wemyss accompanied me on
+    board, and we sailed about eight last night.  The wind at present
+    being rather a beating one, I think I shall have an opportunity of
+    standing into the bay of Wick, and leaving this letter to let you
+    know my progress and that I am well.'
+
+                         '_Lighthouse Yacht_, _Stornoway_, _August_ 4_th_.
+
+    'To-day we had prayers on deck as usual when at sea.  I read the 14th
+    chapter, I think, of Job.  Captain Wemyss has been in the habit of
+    doing this on board his own ship, agreeably to the Articles of War.
+    Our passage round the Cape [Cape Wrath] was rather a cross one, and
+    as the wind was northerly, we had a pretty heavy sea, but upon the
+    whole have made a good passage, leaving many vessels behind us in
+    Orkney.  I am quite well, my dear; and Captain Wemyss, who has much
+    spirit, and who is much given to observation, and a perfect
+    enthusiast in his profession, enlivens the voyage greatly.  Let me
+    entreat you to move about much, and take a walk with the boys to
+    Leith.  I think they have still many places to see there, and I wish
+    you would indulge them in this respect.  Mr. Scales is the best
+    person I know for showing them the sailcloth-weaving, etc., and he
+    would have great pleasure in undertaking this.  My dear, I trust soon
+    to be with you, and that through the goodness of God we shall meet
+    all well.'
+
+    'There are two vessels lying here with emigrants for America, each
+    with eighty people on board, at all ages, from a few days to upwards
+    of sixty!  Their prospects must be very forlorn to go with a slender
+    purse for distant and unknown countries.'
+
+                       '_Lighthouse Yacht_, _off Greenock_, _Aug._ 18_th_.
+
+    'It was after _church-time_ before we got here, but we had prayers
+    upon deck on the way up the Clyde.  This has, upon the whole, been a
+    very good voyage, and Captain Wemyss, who enjoys it much, has been an
+    excellent companion; we met with pleasure, and shall part with
+    regret.'
+
+Strange that, after his long experience, my grandfather should have
+learned so little of the attitude and even the dialect of the
+spiritually-minded; that after forty-four years in a most religious
+circle, he could drop without sense of incongruity from a period of
+accepted phrases to 'trust his wife was _getting up her spirits_,' or
+think to reassure her as to the character of Captain Wemyss by mentioning
+that he had read prayers on the deck of his frigate '_agreeably to the
+Articles of War_'!  Yet there is no doubt--and it is one of the most
+agreeable features of the kindly series--that he was doing his best to
+please, and there is little doubt that he succeeded.  Almost all my
+grandfather's private letters have been destroyed.  This correspondence
+has not only been preserved entire, but stitched up in the same covers
+with the works of the godly women, the Reverend John Campbell, and the
+painful Mrs. Ogle.  I did not think to mention the good dame, but she
+comes in usefully as an example.  Amongst the treasures of the ladies of
+my family, her letters have been honoured with a volume to themselves.  I
+read about a half of them myself; then handed over the task to one of
+stauncher resolution, with orders to communicate any fact that should be
+found to illuminate these pages.  Not one was found; it was her only art
+to communicate by post second-rate sermons at second-hand; and such, I
+take it, was the correspondence in which my grandmother delighted.  If I
+am right, that of Robert Stevenson, with his quaint smack of the
+contemporary 'Sandford and Merton,' his interest in the whole page of
+experience, his perpetual quest, and fine scent of all that seems
+romantic to a boy, his needless pomp of language, his excellent good
+sense, his unfeigned, unstained, unwearied human kindliness, would seem
+to her, in a comparison, dry and trivial and worldly.  And if these
+letters were by an exception cherished and preserved, it would be for one
+or both of two reasons--because they dealt with and were bitter-sweet
+reminders of a time of sorrow; or because she was pleased, perhaps
+touched, by the writer's guileless efforts to seem spiritually-minded.
+
+After this date there were two more births and two more deaths, so that
+the number of the family remained unchanged; in all five children
+survived to reach maturity and to outlive their parents.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II: THE SERVICE OF THE NORTHERN LIGHTS
+
+
+I
+
+
+It were hard to imagine a contrast more sharply defined than that between
+the lives of the men and women of this family: the one so chambered, so
+centred in the affections and the sensibilities; the other so active,
+healthy, and expeditious.  From May to November, Thomas Smith and Robert
+Stevenson were on the mail, in the saddle, or at sea; and my grandfather,
+in particular, seems to have been possessed with a demon of activity in
+travel.  In 1802, by direction of the Northern Lighthouse Board, he had
+visited the coast of England from St. Bees, in Cumberland, and round by
+the Scilly Islands to some place undecipherable by me; in all a distance
+of 2500 miles.  In 1806 I find him starting 'on a tour round the south
+coast of England, from the Humber to the Severn.'  Peace was not long
+declared ere he found means to visit Holland, where he was in time to
+see, in the navy-yard at Helvoetsluys, 'about twenty of Bonaparte's
+_English flotilla_ lying in a state of decay, the object of curiosity to
+Englishmen.'  By 1834 he seems to have been acquainted with the coast of
+France from Dieppe to Bordeaux; and a main part of his duty as Engineer
+to the Board of Northern Lights was one round of dangerous and laborious
+travel.
+
+In 1786, when Thomas Smith first received the appointment, the extended
+and formidable coast of Scotland was lighted at a single point--the Isle
+of May, in the jaws of the Firth of Forth, where, on a tower already a
+hundred and fifty years old, an open coal-fire blazed in an iron
+chauffer.  The whole archipelago, thus nightly plunged in darkness, was
+shunned by sea-going vessels, and the favourite courses were north about
+Shetland and west about St. Kilda.  When the Board met, four new lights
+formed the extent of their intentions--Kinnaird Head, in Aberdeenshire,
+at the eastern elbow of the coast; North Ronaldsay, in Orkney, to keep
+the north and guide ships passing to the south'ard of Shetland; Island
+Glass, on Harris, to mark the inner shore of the Hebrides and illuminate
+the navigation of the Minch; and the Mull of Kintyre.  These works were
+to be attempted against obstacles, material and financial, that might
+have staggered the most bold.  Smith had no ship at his command till
+1791; the roads in those outlandish quarters where his business lay were
+scarce passable when they existed, and the tower on the Mull of Kintyre
+stood eleven months unlighted while the apparatus toiled and foundered by
+the way among rocks and mosses.  Not only had towers to be built and
+apparatus transplanted; the supply of oil must be maintained, and the men
+fed, in the same inaccessible and distant scenes; a whole service, with
+its routine and hierarchy, had to be called out of nothing; and a new
+trade (that of lightkeeper) to be taught, recruited, and organised.  The
+funds of the Board were at the first laughably inadequate.  They embarked
+on their career on a loan of twelve hundred pounds, and their income in
+1789, after relief by a fresh Act of Parliament, amounted to less than
+three hundred.  It must be supposed that the thoughts of Thomas Smith, in
+these early years, were sometimes coloured with despair; and since he
+built and lighted one tower after another, and created and bequeathed to
+his successors the elements of an excellent administration, it may be
+conceded that he was not after all an unfortunate choice for a first
+engineer.
+
+War added fresh complications.  In 1794 Smith came 'very near to be
+taken' by a French squadron.  In 1813 Robert Stevenson was cruising about
+the neighbourhood of Cape Wrath in the immediate fear of Commodore
+Rogers.  The men, and especially the sailors, of the lighthouse service
+must be protected by a medal and ticket from the brutal activity of the
+press-gang.  And the zeal of volunteer patriots was at times
+embarrassing.
+
+    'I set off on foot,' writes my grandfather, 'for Marazion, a town at
+    the head of Mount's Bay, where I was in hopes of getting a boat to
+    freight.  I had just got that length, and was making the necessary
+    inquiry, when a young man, accompanied by several idle-looking
+    fellows, came up to me, and in a hasty tone said, "Sir, in the king's
+    name I seize your person and papers."  To which I replied that I
+    should be glad to see his authority, and know the reason of an
+    address so abrupt.  He told me the want of time prevented his taking
+    regular steps, but that it would be necessary for me to return to
+    Penzance, as I was suspected of being a French spy.  I proposed to
+    submit my papers to the nearest Justice of Peace, who was immediately
+    applied to, and came to the inn where I was.  He seemed to be greatly
+    agitated, and quite at a loss how to proceed.  The complaint
+    preferred against me was "that I had examined the Longships
+    Lighthouse with the most minute attention, and was no less particular
+    in my inquiries at the keepers of the lighthouse regarding the sunk
+    rocks lying off the Land's End, with the sets of the currents and
+    tides along the coast: that I seemed particularly to regret the
+    situation of the rocks called the Seven Stones, and the loss of a
+    beacon which the Trinity Board had caused to be fixed on the Wolf
+    Rock; that I had taken notes of the bearings of several sunk rocks,
+    and a drawing of the lighthouse, and of Cape Cornwall.  Further, that
+    I had refused the honour of Lord Edgecombe's invitation to dinner,
+    offering as an apology that I had some particular business on hand."'
+
+My grandfather produced in answer his credentials and letter of credit;
+but the justice, after perusing them, 'very gravely observed that they
+were "musty bits of paper,"' and proposed to maintain the arrest.  Some
+more enlightened magistrates at Penzance relieved him of suspicion and
+left him at liberty to pursue his journey,--'which I did with so much
+eagerness,' he adds, 'that I gave the two coal lights on the Lizard only
+a very transient look.'
+
+Lighthouse operations in Scotland differed essentially in character from
+those in England.  The English coast is in comparison a habitable, homely
+place, well supplied with towns; the Scottish presents hundreds of miles
+of savage islands and desolate moors.  The Parliamentary committee of
+1834, profoundly ignorant of this distinction, insisted with my
+grandfather that the work at the various stations should be let out on
+contract 'in the neighbourhood,' where sheep and deer, and gulls and
+cormorants, and a few ragged gillies, perhaps crouching in a bee-hive
+house, made up the only neighbours.  In such situations repairs and
+improvements could only be overtaken by collecting (as my grandfather
+expressed it) a few 'lads,' placing them under charge of a foreman, and
+despatching them about the coast as occasion served.  The particular
+danger of these seas increased the difficulty.  The course of the
+lighthouse tender lies amid iron-bound coasts, among tide-races, the
+whirlpools of the Pentland Firth, flocks of islands, flocks of reefs,
+many of them uncharted.  The aid of steam was not yet.  At first in
+random coasting sloop, and afterwards in the cutter belonging to the
+service, the engineer must ply and run amongst these multiplied dangers,
+and sometimes late into the stormy autumn.  For pages together my
+grandfather's diary preserves a record of these rude experiences; of hard
+winds and rough seas; and of 'the try-sail and storm-jib, those old
+friends which I never like to see.'  They do not tempt to quotation, but
+it was the man's element, in which he lived, and delighted to live, and
+some specimen must be presented.  On Friday, September 10th, 1830, the
+_Regent_ lying in Lerwick Bay, we have this entry: 'The gale increases,
+with continued rain.'  On the morrow, Saturday, 11th, the weather
+appeared to moderate, and they put to sea, only to be driven by evening
+into Levenswick.  There they lay, 'rolling much,' with both anchors ahead
+and the square yard on deck, till the morning of Saturday, 18th.
+Saturday and Sunday they were plying to the southward with a 'strong
+breeze and a heavy sea,' and on Sunday evening anchored in Otterswick.
+'Monday, 20th, it blows so fresh that we have no communication with the
+shore.  We see Mr. Rome on the beach, but we cannot communicate with him.
+It blows "mere fire," as the sailors express it.'  And for three days
+more the diary goes on with tales of davits unshipped, high seas, strong
+gales from the southward, and the ship driven to refuge in Kirkwall or
+Deer Sound.  I have many a passage before me to transcribe, in which my
+grandfather draws himself as a man of minute and anxious exactitude about
+details.  It must not be forgotten that these voyages in the tender were
+the particular pleasure and reward of his existence; that he had in him a
+reserve of romance which carried him delightedly over these hardships and
+perils; that to him it was 'great gain' to be eight nights and seven days
+in the savage bay of Levenswick--to read a book in the much agitated
+cabin--to go on deck and hear the gale scream in his ears, and see the
+landscape dark with rain and the ship plunge at her two anchors--and to
+turn in at night and wake again at morning, in his narrow berth, to the
+glamorous and continued voices of the gale.
+
+His perils and escapes were beyond counting.  I shall only refer to two:
+the first, because of the impression made upon himself; the second, from
+the incidental picture it presents of the north islanders.  On the 9th
+October 1794 he took passage from Orkney in the sloop _Elizabeth_ of
+Stromness.  She made a fair passage till within view of Kinnaird Head,
+where, as she was becalmed some three miles in the offing, and wind
+seemed to threaten from the south-east, the captain landed him, to
+continue his journey more expeditiously ashore.  A gale immediately
+followed, and the _Elizabeth_ was driven back to Orkney and lost with all
+hands.  The second escape I have been in the habit of hearing related by
+an eye-witness, my own father, from the earliest days of childhood.  On a
+September night, the _Regent_ lay in the Pentland Firth in a fog and a
+violent and windless swell.  It was still dark, when they were alarmed by
+the sound of breakers, and an anchor was immediately let go.  The peep of
+dawn discovered them swinging in desperate proximity to the Isle of Swona
+{54a} and the surf bursting close under their stern.  There was in this
+place a hamlet of the inhabitants, fisher-folk and wreckers; their huts
+stood close about the head of the beach.  All slept; the doors were
+closed, and there was no smoke, and the anxious watchers on board ship
+seemed to contemplate a village of the dead.  It was thought possible to
+launch a boat and tow the _Regent_ from her place of danger; and with
+this view a signal of distress was made and a gun fired with a red-hot
+poker from the galley.  Its detonation awoke the sleepers.  Door after
+door was opened, and in the grey light of the morning fisher after fisher
+was seen to come forth, yawning and stretching himself, nightcap on head.
+Fisher after fisher, I wrote, and my pen tripped; for it should rather
+stand wrecker after wrecker.  There was no emotion, no animation, it
+scarce seemed any interest; not a hand was raised; but all callously
+awaited the harvest of the sea, and their children stood by their side
+and waited also.  To the end of his life, my father remembered that
+amphitheatre of placid spectators on the beach; and with a special and
+natural animosity, the boys of his own age.  But presently a light air
+sprang up, and filled the sails, and fainted, and filled them again; and
+little by little the _Regent_ fetched way against the swell, and clawed
+off shore into the turbulent firth.
+
+The purpose of these voyages was to effect a landing on open beaches or
+among shelving rocks, not for persons only, but for coals and food, and
+the fragile furniture of light-rooms.  It was often impossible.  In 1831
+I find my grandfather 'hovering for a week' about the Pentland Skerries
+for a chance to land; and it was almost always difficult.  Much knack and
+enterprise were early developed among the seamen of the service; their
+management of boats is to this day a matter of admiration; and I find my
+grandfather in his diary depicting the nature of their excellence in one
+happily descriptive phrase, when he remarks that Captain Soutar had
+landed 'the small stores and nine casks of oil _with all the activity of
+a smuggler_.'  And it was one thing to land, another to get on board
+again.  I have here a passage from the diary, where it seems to have been
+touch-and-go.  'I landed at Tarbetness, on the eastern side of the point,
+in a _mere gale or blast of wind_ from west-south-west, at 2 p.m.  It
+blew so fresh that the captain, in a kind of despair, went off to the
+ship, leaving myself and the steward ashore.  While I was in the
+light-room, I felt it shaking and waving, not with the tremor of the Bell
+Rock, but with the _waving of a tree_!  This the light-keepers seemed to
+be quite familiar to, the principal keeper remarking that "it was very
+pleasant," perhaps meaning interesting or curious.  The captain worked
+the vessel into smooth water with admirable dexterity, and I got on board
+again about 6 p.m. from the other side of the point.'  But not even the
+dexterity of Soutar could prevail always; and my grandfather must at
+times have been left in strange berths and with but rude provision.  I
+may instance the case of my father, who was storm-bound three days upon
+an islet, sleeping in the uncemented and unchimneyed houses of the
+islanders, and subsisting on a diet of nettle-soup and lobsters.
+
+The name of Soutar has twice escaped my pen, and I feel I owe him a
+vignette.  Soutar first attracted notice as mate of a praam at the Bell
+Rock, and rose gradually to be captain of the _Regent_.  He was active,
+admirably skilled in his trade, and a man incapable of fear.  Once, in
+London, he fell among a gang of confidence-men, naturally deceived by his
+rusticity and his prodigious accent.  They plied him with drink--a
+hopeless enterprise, for Soutar could not be made drunk; they proposed
+cards, and Soutar would not play.  At last, one of them, regarding him
+with a formidable countenance, inquired if he were not frightened?  'I'm
+no' very easy fleyed,' replied the captain.  And the rooks withdrew after
+some easier pigeon.  So many perils shared, and the partial familiarity
+of so many voyages, had given this man a stronghold in my grandfather's
+estimation; and there is no doubt but he had the art to court and please
+him with much hypocritical skill.  He usually dined on Sundays in the
+cabin.  He used to come down daily after dinner for a glass of port or
+whisky, often in his full rig of sou'-wester, oilskins, and long boots;
+and I have often heard it described how insinuatingly he carried himself
+on these appearances, artfully combining the extreme of deference with a
+blunt and seamanlike demeanour.  My father and uncles, with the devilish
+penetration of the boy, were far from being deceived; and my father,
+indeed, was favoured with an object-lesson not to be mistaken.  He had
+crept one rainy night into an apple-barrel on deck, and from this place
+of ambush overheard Soutar and a comrade conversing in their oilskins.
+The smooth sycophant of the cabin had wholly disappeared, and the boy
+listened with wonder to a vulgar and truculent ruffian.  Of Soutar, I may
+say _tantum vidi_, having met him in the Leith docks now more than thirty
+years ago, when he abounded in the praises of my grandfather, encouraged
+me (in the most admirable manner) to pursue his footprints, and left
+impressed for ever on my memory the image of his own Bardolphian nose.
+He died not long after.
+
+The engineer was not only exposed to the hazards of the sea; he must
+often ford his way by land to remote and scarce accessible places, beyond
+reach of the mail or the post-chaise, beyond even the tracery of the
+bridle-path, and guided by natives across bog and heather.  Up to 1807 my
+grand-father seems to have travelled much on horseback; but he then gave
+up the idea--'such,' he writes with characteristic emphasis and capital
+letters, 'is the Plague of Baiting.'  He was a good pedestrian; at the
+age of fifty-eight I find him covering seventeen miles over the moors of
+the Mackay country in less than seven hours, and that is not bad
+travelling for a scramble.  The piece of country traversed was already a
+familiar track, being that between Loch Eriboll and Cape Wrath; and I
+think I can scarce do better than reproduce from the diary some traits of
+his first visit.  The tender lay in Loch Eriboll; by five in the morning
+they sat down to breakfast on board; by six they were ashore--my
+grandfather, Mr. Slight an assistant, and Soutar of the jolly nose, and
+had been taken in charge by two young gentlemen of the neighbourhood and
+a pair of gillies.  About noon they reached the Kyle of Durness and
+passed the ferry.  By half-past three they were at Cape Wrath--not yet
+known by the emphatic abbreviation of 'The Cape'--and beheld upon all
+sides of them unfrequented shores, an expanse of desert moor, and the
+high-piled Western Ocean.  The site of the tower was chosen.  Perhaps it
+is by inheritance of blood, but I know few things more inspiriting than
+this location of a lighthouse in a designated space of heather and air,
+through which the sea-birds are still flying.  By 9 p.m. the return
+journey had brought them again to the shores of the Kyle.  The night was
+dirty, and as the sea was high and the ferry-boat small, Soutar and Mr.
+Stevenson were left on the far side, while the rest of the party embarked
+and were received into the darkness.  They made, in fact, a safe though
+an alarming passage; but the ferryman refused to repeat the adventure;
+and my grand-father and the captain long paced the beach, impatient for
+their turn to pass, and tormented with rising anxiety as to the fate of
+their companions.  At length they sought the shelter of a shepherd's
+house.  'We had miserable up-putting,' the diary continues, 'and on both
+sides of the ferry much anxiety of mind.  Our beds were clean straw, and
+but for the circumstance of the boat, I should have slept as soundly as
+ever I did after a walk through moss and mire of sixteen hours.'
+
+To go round the lights, even to-day, is to visit past centuries.  The
+tide of tourists that flows yearly in Scotland, vulgarising all where it
+approaches, is still defined by certain barriers.  It will be long ere
+there is a hotel at Sumburgh or a hydropathic at Cape Wrath; it will be
+long ere any _char-a-banc_, laden with tourists, shall drive up to Barra
+Head or Monach, the Island of the Monks.  They are farther from London
+than St. Petersburg, and except for the towers, sounding and shining all
+night with fog-bells and the radiance of the light-room, glittering by
+day with the trivial brightness of white paint, these island and moorland
+stations seem inaccessible to the civilisation of to-day, and even to the
+end of my grandfather's career the isolation was far greater.  There ran
+no post at all in the Long Island; from the light-house on Barra Head a
+boat must be sent for letters as far as Tobermory, between sixty and
+seventy miles of open sea; and the posts of Shetland, which had surprised
+Sir Walter Scott in 1814, were still unimproved in 1833, when my
+grandfather reported on the subject.  The group contained at the time a
+population of 30,000 souls, and enjoyed a trade which had increased in
+twenty years seven-fold, to between three and four thousand tons.  Yet
+the mails were despatched and received by chance coasting vessels at the
+rate of a penny a letter; six and eight weeks often elapsed between
+opportunities, and when a mail was to be made up, sometimes at a moment's
+notice, the bellman was sent hastily through the streets of Lerwick.
+Between Shetland and Orkney, only seventy miles apart, there was 'no
+trade communication whatever.'
+
+Such was the state of affairs, only sixty years ago, with the three
+largest clusters of the Scottish Archipelago; and forty-seven years
+earlier, when Thomas Smith began his rounds, or forty-two, when Robert
+Stevenson became conjoined with him in these excursions, the barbarism
+was deep, the people sunk in superstition, the circumstances of their
+life perhaps unique in history.  Lerwick and Kirkwall, like Guam or the
+Bay of Islands, were but barbarous ports where whalers called to take up
+and to return experienced seamen.  On the outlying islands the clergy
+lived isolated, thinking other thoughts, dwelling in a different country
+from their parishioners, like missionaries in the South Seas.  My
+grandfather's unrivalled treasury of anecdote was never written down; it
+embellished his talk while he yet was, and died with him when he died;
+and such as have been preserved relate principally to the islands of
+Ronaldsay and Sanday, two of the Orkney group.  These bordered on one of
+the water-highways of civilisation; a great fleet passed annually in
+their view, and of the shipwrecks of the world they were the scene and
+cause of a proportion wholly incommensurable to their size.  In one year,
+1798, my grandfather found the remains of no fewer than five vessels on
+the isle of Sanday, which is scarcely twelve miles long.
+
+    'Hardly a year passed,' he writes, 'without instances of this kind;
+    for, owing to the projecting points of this strangely formed island,
+    the lowness and whiteness of its eastern shores, and the wonderful
+    manner in which the scanty patches of land are intersected with lakes
+    and pools of water, it becomes, even in daylight, a deception, and
+    has often been fatally mistaken for an open sea.  It had even become
+    proverbial with some of the inhabitants to observe that "if wrecks
+    were to happen, they might as well be sent to the poor isle of Sanday
+    as anywhere else."  On this and the neighbouring islands the
+    inhabitants had certainly had their share of wrecked goods, for the
+    eye is presented with these melancholy remains in almost every form.
+    For example, although quarries are to be met with generally in these
+    islands, and the stones are very suitable for building dykes
+    (_Anglice_, walls), yet instances occur of the land being enclosed,
+    even to a considerable extent, with ship-timbers.  The author has
+    actually seen a park (_Anglice_, meadow) paled round chiefly with
+    cedar-wood and mahogany from the wreck of a Honduras-built ship; and
+    in one island, after the wreck of a ship laden with wine, the
+    inhabitants have been known to take claret to their barley-meal
+    porridge.  On complaining to one of the pilots of the badness of his
+    boat's sails, he replied to the author with some degree of
+    pleasantry, "Had it been His will that you came na' here wi' your
+    lights, we might 'a' had better sails to our boats, and more o' other
+    things."  It may further be mentioned that when some of Lord Dundas's
+    farms are to be let in these islands a competition takes place for
+    the lease, and it is _bona fide_ understood that a much higher rent
+    is paid than the lands would otherwise give were it not for the
+    chance of making considerably by the agency and advantages attending
+    shipwrecks on the shores of the respective farms.'
+
+The people of North Ronaldsay still spoke Norse, or, rather, mixed it
+with their English.  The walls of their huts were built to a great
+thickness of rounded stones from the sea-beach; the roof flagged, loaded
+with earth, and perforated by a single hole for the escape of smoke.  The
+grass grew beautifully green on the flat house-top, where the family
+would assemble with their dogs and cats, as on a pastoral lawn; there
+were no windows, and in my grandfather's expression, 'there was really no
+demonstration of a house unless it were the diminutive door.'  He once
+landed on Ronaldsay with two friends.  The inhabitants crowded and
+pressed so much upon the strangers that the bailiff, or resident factor
+of the island, blew with his ox-horn, calling out to the natives to stand
+off and let the gentlemen come forward to the laird; upon which one of
+the islanders, as spokesman, called out, "God ha'e us, man! thou needsna
+mak' sic a noise.  It's no' every day we ha'e _three hatted men_ on our
+isle."'  When the Surveyor of Taxes came (for the first time, perhaps) to
+Sanday, and began in the King's name to complain of the unconscionable
+swarms of dogs, and to menace the inhabitants with taxation, it chanced
+that my grandfather and his friend, Dr. Patrick Neill, were received by
+an old lady in a Ronaldsay hut.  Her hut, which was similar to the model
+described, stood on a Ness, or point of land jutting into the sea.  They
+were made welcome in the firelit cellar, placed 'in _casey_ or
+straw-worked chairs, after the Norwegian fashion, with arms, and a canopy
+overhead,' and given milk in a wooden dish.  These hospitalities attended
+to, the old lady turned at once to Dr. Neill, whom she took for the
+Surveyor of Taxes.  'Sir,' said she, 'gin ye'll tell the King that I
+canna keep the Ness free o' the Bangers (sheep) without twa hun's, and
+twa guid hun's too, he'll pass me threa the tax on dugs.'
+
+This familiar confidence, these traits of engaging simplicity, are
+characters of a secluded people.  Mankind--and, above all,
+islanders--come very swiftly to a bearing, and find very readily, upon
+one convention or another, a tolerable corporate life.  The danger is to
+those from without, who have not grown up from childhood in the islands,
+but appear suddenly in that narrow horizon, life-sized apparitions.  For
+these no bond of humanity exists, no feeling of kinship is awakened by
+their peril; they will assist at a shipwreck, like the fisher-folk of
+Lunga, as spectators, and when the fatal scene is over, and the beach
+strewn with dead bodies, they will fence their fields with mahogany, and,
+after a decent grace, sup claret to their porridge.  It is not
+wickedness: it is scarce evil; it is only, in its highest power, the
+sense of isolation and the wise disinterestedness of feeble and poor
+races.  Think how many viking ships had sailed by these islands in the
+past, how many vikings had landed, and raised turmoil, and broken up the
+barrows of the dead, and carried off the wines of the living; and blame
+them, if you are able, for that belief (which may be called one of the
+parables of the devil's gospel) that a man rescued from the sea will
+prove the bane of his deliverer.  It might be thought that my
+grandfather, coming there unknown, and upon an employment so hateful to
+the inhabitants, must have run the hazard of his life.  But this were to
+misunderstand.  He came franked by the laird and the clergyman; he was
+the King's officer; the work was 'opened with prayer by the Rev. Walter
+Trail, minister of the parish'; God and the King had decided it, and the
+people of these pious islands bowed their heads.  There landed, indeed,
+in North Ronaldsay, during the last decade of the eighteenth century, a
+traveller whose life seems really to have been imperilled.  A very little
+man of a swarthy complexion, he came ashore, exhausted and unshaved, from
+a long boat passage, and lay down to sleep in the home of the parish
+schoolmaster.  But he had been seen landing.  The inhabitants had
+identified him for a Pict, as, by some singular confusion of name, they
+called the dark and dwarfish aboriginal people of the land.  Immediately
+the obscure ferment of a race-hatred, grown into a superstition, began to
+work in their bosoms, and they crowded about the house and the room-door
+with fearful whisperings.  For some time the schoolmaster held them at
+bay, and at last despatched a messenger to call my grand-father.  He
+came: he found the islanders beside themselves at this unwelcome
+resurrection of the dead and the detested; he was shown, as adminicular
+of testimony, the traveller's uncouth and thick-soled boots; he argued,
+and finding argument unavailing, consented to enter the room and examine
+with his own eyes the sleeping Pict.  One glance was sufficient: the man
+was now a missionary, but he had been before that an Edinburgh shopkeeper
+with whom my grandfather had dealt.  He came forth again with this
+report, and the folk of the island, wholly relieved, dispersed to their
+own houses.  They were timid as sheep and ignorant as limpets; that was
+all.  But the Lord deliver us from the tender mercies of a frightened
+flock!
+
+I will give two more instances of their superstition.  When Sir Walter
+Scott visited the Stones of Stennis, my grandfather put in his pocket a
+hundred-foot line, which he unfortunately lost.
+
+    'Some years afterwards,' he writes, 'one of my assistants on a visit
+    to the Stones of Stennis took shelter from a storm in a cottage close
+    by the lake; and seeing a box-measuring-line in the bole or sole of
+    the cottage window, he asked the woman where she got this well-known
+    professional appendage.  She said: "O sir, ane of the bairns fand it
+    lang syne at the Stanes; and when drawing it out we took fright, and
+    thinking it had belanged to the fairies, we threw it into the bole,
+    and it has layen there ever since."'
+
+This is for the one; the last shall be a sketch by the master hand of
+Scott himself:
+
+    'At the village of Stromness, on the Orkney main island, called
+    Pomona, lived, in 1814, an aged dame called Bessie Millie, who helped
+    out her subsistence by selling favourable winds to mariners.  He was
+    a venturous master of a vessel who left the roadstead of Stromness
+    without paying his offering to propitiate Bessie Millie!  Her fee was
+    extremely moderate, being exactly sixpence, for which she boiled her
+    kettle and gave the bark the advantage of her prayers, for she
+    disclaimed all unlawful acts.  The wind thus petitioned for was sure,
+    she said, to arrive, though occasionally the mariners had to wait
+    some time for it.  The woman's dwelling and appearance were not
+    unbecoming her pretensions.  Her house, which was on the brow of the
+    steep hill on which Stromness is founded, was only accessible by a
+    series of dirty and precipitous lanes, and for exposure might have
+    been the abode of Eolus himself, in whose commodities the inhabitant
+    dealt.  She herself was, as she told us, nearly one hundred years
+    old, withered and dried up like a mummy.  A clay-coloured kerchief,
+    folded round her neck, corresponded in colour to her corpse-like
+    complexion.  Two light blue eyes that gleamed with a lustre like that
+    of insanity, an utterance of astonishing rapidity, a nose and chin
+    that almost met together, and a ghastly expression of cunning, gave
+    her the effect of Hecate.  Such was Bessie Millie, to whom the
+    mariners paid a sort of tribute with a feeling between jest and
+    earnest.'
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+From about the beginning of the century up to 1807 Robert Stevenson was
+in partnership with Thomas Smith.  In the last-named year the partnership
+was dissolved; Thomas Smith returning to his business, and my grandfather
+becoming sole engineer to the Board of Northern Lights.
+
+I must try, by excerpts from his diary and correspondence, to convey to
+the reader some idea of the ardency and thoroughness with which he threw
+himself into the largest and least of his multifarious engagements in
+this service.  But first I must say a word or two upon the life of
+lightkeepers, and the temptations to which they are more particularly
+exposed.  The lightkeeper occupies a position apart among men.  In
+sea-towers the complement has always been three since the deplorable
+business in the Eddystone, when one keeper died, and the survivor,
+signalling in vain for relief, was compelled to live for days with the
+dead body.  These usually pass their time by the pleasant human expedient
+of quarrelling; and sometimes, I am assured, not one of the three is on
+speaking terms with any other.  On shore stations, which on the Scottish
+coast are sometimes hardly less isolated, the usual number is two, a
+principal and an assistant.  The principal is dissatisfied with the
+assistant, or perhaps the assistant keeps pigeons, and the principal
+wants the water from the roof.  Their wives and families are with them,
+living cheek by jowl.  The children quarrel; Jockie hits Jimsie in the
+eye, and the mothers make haste to mingle in the dissension.  Perhaps
+there is trouble about a broken dish; perhaps Mrs. Assistant is more
+highly born than Mrs. Principal and gives herself airs; and the men are
+drawn in and the servants presently follow.  'Church privileges have been
+denied the keeper's and the assistant's servants,' I read in one case,
+and the eminently Scots periphrasis means neither more nor less than
+excommunication, 'on account of the discordant and quarrelsome state of
+the families.  The cause, when inquired into, proves to be
+_tittle_-_tattle_ on both sides.'  The tender comes round; the foremen
+and artificers go from station to station; the gossip flies through the
+whole system of the service, and the stories, disfigured and exaggerated,
+return to their own birthplace with the returning tender.  The English
+Board was apparently shocked by the picture of these dissensions.  'When
+the Trinity House can,' I find my grandfather writing at Beachy Head, in
+1834, 'they do not appoint two keepers, they disagree so ill.  A man who
+has a family is assisted by his family; and in this way, to my experience
+and present observation, the business is very much neglected.  One keeper
+is, in my view, a bad system.  This day's visit to an English lighthouse
+convinces me of this, as the lightkeeper was walking on a staff with the
+gout, and the business performed by one of his daughters, a girl of
+thirteen or fourteen years of age.'  This man received a hundred a year!
+It shows a different reading of human nature, perhaps typical of Scotland
+and England, that I find in my grandfather's diary the following pregnant
+entry: '_The lightkeepers_, _agreeing ill_, _keep one another to their
+duty_.'  But the Scottish system was not alone founded on this cynical
+opinion.  The dignity and the comfort of the northern lightkeeper were
+both attended to.  He had a uniform to 'raise him in his own estimation,
+and in that of his neighbour, which is of consequence to a person of
+trust.  The keepers,' my grandfather goes on, in another place, 'are
+attended to in all the detail of accommodation in the best style as
+shipmasters; and this is believed to have a sensible effect upon their
+conduct, and to regulate their general habits as members of society.'  He
+notes, with the same dip of ink, that 'the brasses were not clean, and
+the persons of the keepers not _trig'_; and thus we find him writing to a
+culprit: 'I have to complain that you are not cleanly in your person, and
+that your manner of speech is ungentle, and rather inclines to rudeness.
+You must therefore take a different view of your duties as a
+lightkeeper.'  A high ideal for the service appears in these expressions,
+and will be more amply illustrated further on.  But even the Scottish
+lightkeeper was frail.  During the unbroken solitude of the winter
+months, when inspection is scarce possible, it must seem a vain toil to
+polish the brass hand-rail of the stair, or to keep an unrewarded vigil
+in the light-room; and the keepers are habitually tempted to the
+beginnings of sloth, and must unremittingly resist.  He who temporises
+with his conscience is already lost.  I must tell here an anecdote that
+illustrates the difficulties of inspection.  In the days of my uncle
+David and my father there was a station which they regarded with
+jealousy.  The two engineers compared notes and were agreed.  The tower
+was always clean, but seemed always to bear traces of a hasty cleansing,
+as though the keepers had been suddenly forewarned.  On inquiry, it
+proved that such was the case, and that a wandering fiddler was the
+unfailing harbinger of the engineer.  At last my father was storm-stayed
+one Sunday in a port at the other side of the island.  The visit was
+quite overdue, and as he walked across upon the Monday morning he
+promised himself that he should at last take the keepers unprepared.
+They were both waiting for him in uniform at the gate; the fiddler had
+been there on Saturday!
+
+My grandfather, as will appear from the following extracts, was much a
+martinet, and had a habit of expressing himself on paper with an almost
+startling emphasis.  Personally, with his powerful voice, sanguine
+countenance, and eccentric and original locutions, he was well qualified
+to inspire a salutary terror in the service.
+
+    'I find that the keepers have, by some means or another, got into the
+    way of cleaning too much with rotten-stone and oil.  I take the
+    principal keeper to _task_ on this subject, and make him bring a
+    clean towel and clean one of the brazen frames, which leaves the
+    towel in an odious state.  This towel I put up in a sheet of paper,
+    seal, and take with me to confront Mr. Murdoch, who has just left the
+    station.'  'This letter'--a stern enumeration of complaints--'to lie
+    a week on the light-room book-place, and to be put in the Inspector's
+    hands when he comes round.'  'It is the most painful thing that can
+    occur for me to have a correspondence of this kind with any of the
+    keepers; and when I come to the Lighthouse, instead of having the
+    satisfaction to meet them with approbation, it is distressing when
+    one is obliged to put on a most angry countenance and demeanour; but
+    from such culpable negligence as you have shown there is no avoiding
+    it.  I hold it as a fixed maxim that, when a man or a family put on a
+    slovenly appearance in their houses, stairs, and lanterns, I always
+    find their reflectors, burners, windows, and light in general, ill
+    attended to; and, therefore, I must insist on cleanliness
+    throughout.'  'I find you very deficient in the duty of the high
+    tower.  You thus place your appointment as Principal Keeper in
+    jeopardy; and I think it necessary, as an old servant of the Board,
+    to put you upon your guard once for all at this time.  I call upon
+    you to recollect what was formerly and is now said to you.  The state
+    of the backs of the reflectors at the high tower was disgraceful, as
+    I pointed out to you on the spot.  They were as if spitten upon, and
+    greasy finger-marks upon the back straps.  I demand an explanation of
+    this state of things.'  'The cause of the Commissioners dismissing
+    you is expressed in the minute; and it must be a matter of regret to
+    you that you have been so much engaged in smuggling, and also that
+    the Reports relative to the cleanliness of the Lighthouse, upon being
+    referred to, rather added to their unfavourable opinion.'  'I do not
+    go into the dwelling-house, but severely chide the lightkeepers for
+    the disagreement that seems to subsist among them.'  'The families of
+    the two lightkeepers here agree very ill.  I have effected a
+    reconciliation for the present.'  'Things are in a very _humdrum_
+    state here.  There is no painting, and in and out of doors no taste
+    or tidiness displayed.  Robert's wife _greets_ and M'Gregor's scolds;
+    and Robert is so down-hearted that he says he is unfit for duty.  I
+    told him that if he was to mind wives' quarrels, and to take them up,
+    the only way was for him and M'Gregor to go down to the point like
+    Sir G. Grant and Lord Somerset.'  'I cannot say that I have
+    experienced a more unpleasant meeting than that of the lighthouse
+    folks this morning, or ever saw a stronger example of unfeeling
+    barbarity than the conduct which the ---s exhibited.  These two
+    cold-hearted persons, not contented with having driven the daughter
+    of the poor nervous woman from her father's house, _both_ kept
+    _pouncing_ at her, lest she should forget her great misfortune.
+    Write me of their conduct.  Do not make any communication of the
+    state of these families at Kinnaird Head, as this would be like
+    _Tale-bearing_.'
+
+There is the great word out.  Tales and Tale-bearing, always with the
+emphatic capitals, run continually in his correspondence.  I will give
+but two instances:--
+
+    'Write to David [one of the lightkeepers] and caution him to be more
+    prudent how he expresses himself.  Let him attend his duty to the
+    Lighthouse and his family concerns, and give less heed to
+    Tale-bearers.'  'I have not your last letter at hand to quote its
+    date; but, if I recollect, it contains some kind of tales, which
+    nonsense I wish you would lay aside, and notice only the concerns of
+    your family and the important charge committed to you.'
+
+Apparently, however, my grandfather was not himself inaccessible to the
+Tale-bearer, as the following indicates:
+
+    'In walking along with Mr. --- , I explain to him that I should be
+    under the necessity of looking more closely into the business here
+    from his conduct at Buddonness, which had given an instance of
+    weakness in the Moral principle which had staggered my opinion of
+    him.  His answer was, "That will be with regard to the lass?"  I told
+    him I was to enter no farther with him upon the subject.'  'Mr.
+    Miller appears to be master and man.  I am sorry about this foolish
+    fellow.  Had I known his train, I should not, as I did, have rather
+    forced him into the service.  Upon finding the windows in the state
+    they were, I turned upon Mr. Watt, and especially upon Mr. Stewart.
+    The latter did not appear for a length of time to have visited the
+    light-room.  On asking the cause--did Mr. Watt and him (_sic_)
+    disagree; he said no; but he had got very bad usage from the
+    assistant, "who was a very obstreperous man."  I could not bring Mr.
+    Watt to put in language his objections to Miller; all I could get was
+    that, he being your friend, and saying he was unwell, he did not like
+    to complain or to push the man; that the man seemed to have no liking
+    to anything like work; that he was unruly; that, being an educated
+    man, he despised them.  I was, however, determined to have out of
+    these _unwilling_ witnesses the language alluded to.  I fixed upon
+    Mr. Stewart as chief; he hedged.  My curiosity increased, and I
+    urged.  Then he said, "What would I think, just exactly, of Mr. Watt
+    being called an Old B-?"  You may judge of my surprise.  There was
+    not another word uttered.  This was quite enough, as coming from a
+    person I should have calculated upon quite different behaviour from.
+    It spoke a volume of the man's mind and want of principle.'  'Object
+    to the keeper keeping a Bull-Terrier dog of ferocious appearance.  It
+    is dangerous, as we land at all times of the night.'  'Have only to
+    complain of the storehouse floor being spotted with oil.  Give orders
+    for this being instantly rectified, so that on my return to-morrow I
+    may see things in good order.'  'The furniture of both houses wants
+    much rubbing.  Mrs. ---'s carpets are absurd beyond anything I have
+    seen.  I want her to turn the fenders up with the bottom to the
+    fireplace: the carpets, when not likely to be in use, folded up and
+    laid as a hearthrug partly under the fender.'
+
+My grandfather was king in the service to his finger-tips.  All should go
+in his way, from the principal lightkeeper's coat to the assistant's
+fender, from the gravel in the garden-walks to the bad smell in the
+kitchen, or the oil-spots on the store-room floor.  It might be thought
+there was nothing more calculated to awake men's resentment, and yet his
+rule was not more thorough than it was beneficent.  His thought for the
+keepers was continual, and it did not end with their lives.  He tried to
+manage their successions; he thought no pains too great to arrange
+between a widow and a son who had succeeded his father; he was often
+harassed and perplexed by tales of hardship; and I find him writing,
+almost in despair, of their improvident habits and the destitution that
+awaited their families upon a death.  'The house being completely
+furnished, they come into possession without necessaries, and they go out
+NAKED.  The insurance seems to have failed, and what next is to be
+tried?'  While they lived he wrote behind their backs to arrange for the
+education of their children, or to get them other situations if they
+seemed unsuitable for the Northern Lights.  When he was at a lighthouse
+on a Sunday he held prayers and heard the children read.  When a keeper
+was sick, he lent him his horse and sent him mutton and brandy from the
+ship.  'The assistant's wife having been this morning confined, there was
+sent ashore a bottle of sherry and a few rusks--a practice which I have
+always observed in this service,' he writes.  They dwelt, many of them,
+in uninhabited isles or desert forelands, totally cut off from shops.
+Many of them were, besides, fallen into a rustic dishabitude of life, so
+that even when they visited a city they could scarce be trusted with
+their own affairs, as (for example) he who carried home to his children,
+thinking they were oranges, a bag of lemons.  And my grandfather seems to
+have acted, at least in his early years, as a kind of gratuitous agent
+for the service.  Thus I find him writing to a keeper in 1806, when his
+mind was already preoccupied with arrangements for the Bell Rock: 'I am
+much afraid I stand very unfavourably with you as a man of promise, as I
+was to send several things of which I believe I have more than once got
+the memorandum.  All I can say is that in this respect you are not
+singular.  This makes me no better; but really I have been driven about
+beyond all example in my past experience, and have been essentially
+obliged to neglect my own urgent affairs.'  No servant of the Northern
+Lights came to Edinburgh but he was entertained at Baxter's Place to
+breakfast.  There, at his own table, my grandfather sat down delightedly
+with his broad-spoken, homespun officers.  His whole relation to the
+service was, in fact, patriarchal; and I believe I may say that
+throughout its ranks he was adored.  I have spoken with many who knew
+him; I was his grandson, and their words may have very well been words of
+flattery; but there was one thing that could not be affected, and that
+was the look and light that came into their faces at the name of Robert
+Stevenson.
+
+In the early part of the century the foreman builder was a young man of
+the name of George Peebles, a native of Anstruther.  My grandfather had
+placed in him a very high degree of confidence, and he was already
+designated to be foreman at the Bell Rock, when, on Christmas-day 1806,
+on his way home from Orkney, he was lost in the schooner _Traveller_.
+The tale of the loss of the _Traveller_ is almost a replica of that of
+the _Elizabeth_ of Stromness; like the _Elizabeth_ she came as far as
+Kinnaird Head, was then surprised by a storm, driven back to Orkney, and
+bilged and sank on the island of Flotta.  It seems it was about the dusk
+of the day when the ship struck, and many of the crew and passengers were
+drowned.  About the same hour, my grandfather was in his office at the
+writing-table; and the room beginning to darken, he laid down his pen and
+fell asleep.  In a dream he saw the door open and George Peebles come in,
+'reeling to and fro, and staggering like a drunken man,' with water
+streaming from his head and body to the floor.  There it gathered into a
+wave which, sweeping forward, submerged my grandfather.  Well, no matter
+how deep; versions vary; and at last he awoke, and behold it was a dream!
+But it may be conceived how profoundly the impression was written even on
+the mind of a man averse from such ideas, when the news came of the wreck
+on Flotta and the death of George.
+
+George's vouchers and accounts had perished with himself; and it appeared
+he was in debt to the Commissioners.  But my grandfather wrote to Orkney
+twice, collected evidence of his disbursements, and proved him to be
+seventy pounds ahead.  With this sum, he applied to George's brothers,
+and had it apportioned between their mother and themselves.  He
+approached the Board and got an annuity of 5 pounds bestowed on the widow
+Peebles; and we find him writing her a long letter of explanation and
+advice, and pressing on her the duty of making a will.  That he should
+thus act executor was no singular instance.  But besides this we are able
+to assist at some of the stages of a rather touching experiment; no less
+than an attempt to secure Charles Peebles heir to George's favour.  He is
+despatched, under the character of 'a fine young man'; recommended to
+gentlemen for 'advice, as he's a stranger in your place, and indeed to
+this kind of charge, this being his first outset as Foreman'; and for a
+long while after, the letter-book, in the midst of that thrilling first
+year of the Bell Rock, is encumbered with pages of instruction and
+encouragement.  The nature of a bill, and the precautions that are to be
+observed about discounting it, are expounded at length and with
+clearness.  'You are not, I hope, neglecting, Charles, to work the
+harbour at spring-tides; and see that you pay the greatest attention to
+get the well so as to supply the keeper with water, for he is a very
+helpless fellow, and so unfond of hard work that I fear he could do ill
+to keep himself in water by going to the other side for it.'--'With
+regard to spirits, Charles, I see very little occasion for it.'  These
+abrupt apostrophes sound to me like the voice of an awakened conscience;
+but they would seem to have reverberated in vain in the ears of Charles.
+There was trouble in Pladda, his scene of operations; his men ran away
+from him, there was at least a talk of calling in the Sheriff.  'I fear,'
+writes my grandfather, 'you have been too indulgent, and I am sorry to
+add that men do not answer to be too well treated, a circumstance which I
+have experienced, and which you will learn as you go on in business.'  I
+wonder, was not Charles Peebles himself a case in point?  Either death,
+at least, or disappointment and discharge, must have ended his service in
+the Northern Lights; and in later correspondence I look in vain for any
+mention of his name--Charles, I mean, not Peebles: for as late as 1839 my
+grandfather is patiently writing to another of the family: 'I am sorry
+you took the trouble of applying to me about your son, as it lies quite
+out of my way to forward his views in the line of his profession as a
+Draper.'
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+A professional life of Robert Stevenson has been already given to the
+world by his son David, and to that I would refer those interested in
+such matters.  But my own design, which is to represent the man, would be
+very ill carried out if I suffered myself or my reader to forget that he
+was, first of all and last of all, an engineer.  His chief claim to the
+style of a mechanical inventor is on account of the Jib or Balance Crane
+of the Bell Rock, which are beautiful contrivances.  But the great merit
+of this engineer was not in the field of engines.  He was above all
+things a projector of works in the face of nature, and a modifier of
+nature itself.  A road to be made, a tower to be built, a harbour to be
+constructed, a river to be trained and guided in its channel--these were
+the problems with which his mind was continually occupied; and for these
+and similar ends he travelled the world for more than half a century,
+like an artist, note-book in hand.
+
+He once stood and looked on at the emptying of a certain oil-tube; he did
+so watch in hand, and accurately timed the operation; and in so doing
+offered the perfect type of his profession.  The fact acquired might
+never be of use: it was acquired: another link in the world's huge chain
+of processes was brought down to figures and placed at the service of the
+engineer.  'The very term mensuration sounds _engineer-like_,' I find him
+writing; and in truth what the engineer most properly deals with is that
+which can be measured, weighed, and numbered.  The time of any operation
+in hours and minutes, its cost in pounds, shillings, and pence, the
+strain upon a given point in foot-pounds--these are his conquests, with
+which he must continually furnish his mind, and which, after he has
+acquired them, he must continually apply and exercise.  They must be not
+only entries in note-books, to be hurriedly consulted; in the actor's
+phrase, he must be _stale_ in them; in a word of my grandfather's, they
+must be 'fixed in the mind like the ten fingers and ten toes.'
+
+These are the certainties of the engineer; so far he finds a solid
+footing and clear views.  But the province of formulas and constants is
+restricted.  Even the mechanical engineer comes at last to an end of his
+figures, and must stand up, a practical man, face to face with the
+discrepancies of nature and the hiatuses of theory.  After the machine is
+finished, and the steam turned on, the next is to drive it; and
+experience and an exquisite sympathy must teach him where a weight should
+be applied or a nut loosened.  With the civil engineer, more properly so
+called (if anything can be proper with this awkward coinage), the
+obligation starts with the beginning.  He is always the practical man.
+The rains, the winds and the waves, the complexity and the fitfulness of
+nature, are always before him.  He has to deal with the unpredictable,
+with those forces (in Smeaton's phrase) that 'are subject to no
+calculation'; and still he must predict, still calculate them, at his
+peril.  His work is not yet in being, and he must foresee its influence:
+how it shall deflect the tide, exaggerate the waves, dam back the
+rain-water, or attract the thunderbolt.  He visits a piece of sea-board;
+and from the inclination and soil of the beach, from the weeds and
+shell-fish, from the configuration of the coast and the depth of
+soundings outside, he must deduce what magnitude of waves is to be looked
+for.  He visits a river, its summer water babbling on shallows; and he
+must not only read, in a thousand indications, the measure of winter
+freshets, but be able to predict the violence of occasional great floods.
+Nay, and more; he must not only consider that which is, but that which
+may be.  Thus I find my grandfather writing, in a report on the North Esk
+Bridge: 'A less waterway might have sufficed, but the _valleys may come
+to be meliorated by drainage_.'  One field drained after another through
+all that confluence of vales, and we come to a time when they shall
+precipitate by so much a more copious and transient flood, as the gush of
+the flowing drain-pipe is superior to the leakage of a peat.
+
+It is plain there is here but a restricted use for formulas.  In this
+sort of practice, the engineer has need of some transcendental sense.
+Smeaton, the pioneer, bade him obey his 'feelings'; my father, that
+'power of estimating obscure forces which supplies a coefficient of its
+own to every rule.'  The rules must be everywhere indeed; but they must
+everywhere be modified by this transcendental coefficient, everywhere
+bent to the impression of the trained eye and the _feelings_ of the
+engineer.  A sentiment of physical laws and of the scale of nature, which
+shall have been strong in the beginning and progressively fortified by
+observation, must be his guide in the last recourse.  I had the most
+opportunity to observe my father.  He would pass hours on the beach,
+brooding over the waves, counting them, noting their least deflection,
+noting when they broke.  On Tweedside, or by Lyne or Manor, we have spent
+together whole afternoons; to me, at the time, extremely wearisome; to
+him, as I am now sorry to think, bitterly mortifying.  The river was to
+me a pretty and various spectacle; I could not see--I could not be made
+to see--it otherwise.  To my father it was a chequer-board of lively
+forces, which he traced from pool to shallow with minute appreciation and
+enduring interest.  'That bank was being under-cut,' he might say.  'Why?
+Suppose you were to put a groin out here, would not the _filum fluminis_
+be cast abruptly off across the channel? and where would it impinge upon
+the other shore? and what would be the result?  Or suppose you were to
+blast that boulder, what would happen?  Follow it--use the eyes God has
+given you--can you not see that a great deal of land would be reclaimed
+upon this side?'  It was to me like school in holidays; but to him, until
+I had worn him out with my invincible triviality, a delight.  Thus he
+pored over the engineer's voluminous handy-book of nature; thus must,
+too, have pored my grand-father and uncles.
+
+But it is of the essence of this knowledge, or this knack of mind, to be
+largely incommunicable.  'It cannot be imparted to another,' says my
+father.  The verbal casting-net is thrown in vain over these evanescent,
+inferential relations. Hence the insignificance of much engineering
+literature.  So far as the science can be reduced to formulas or
+diagrams, the book is to the point; so far as the art depends on intimate
+study of the ways of nature, the author's words will too often be found
+vapid.  This fact--that engineering looks one way, and literature
+another--was what my grand-father overlooked.  All his life long, his pen
+was in his hand, piling up a treasury of knowledge, preparing himself
+against all possible contingencies.  Scarce anything fell under his
+notice but he perceived in it some relation to his work, and chronicled
+it in the pages of his journal in his always lucid, but sometimes inexact
+and wordy, style.  The Travelling Diary (so he called it) was kept in
+fascicles of ruled paper, which were at last bound up, rudely indexed,
+and put by for future reference.  Such volumes as have reached me contain
+a surprising medley: the whole details of his employment in the Northern
+Lights and his general practice; the whole biography of an enthusiastic
+engineer.  Much of it is useful and curious; much merely otiose; and much
+can only be described as an attempt to impart that which cannot be
+imparted in words.  Of such are his repeated and heroic descriptions of
+reefs; monuments of misdirected literary energy, which leave upon the
+mind of the reader no effect but that of a multiplicity of words and the
+suggested vignette of a lusty old gentleman scrambling among tangle.  It
+is to be remembered that he came to engineering while yet it was in the
+egg and without a library, and that he saw the bounds of that profession
+widen daily.  He saw iron ships, steamers, and the locomotive engine,
+introduced.  He lived to travel from Glasgow to Edinburgh in the inside
+of a forenoon, and to remember that he himself had 'often been twelve
+hours upon the journey, and his grand-father (Lillie) two days'!  The
+profession was still but in its second generation, and had already broken
+down the barriers of time and space.  Who should set a limit to its
+future encroachments?  And hence, with a kind of sanguine pedantry, he
+pursued his design of 'keeping up with the day' and posting himself and
+his family on every mortal subject.  Of this unpractical idealism we
+shall meet with many instances; there was not a trade, and scarce an
+accomplishment, but he thought it should form part of the outfit of an
+engineer; and not content with keeping an encyclopaedic diary himself, he
+would fain have set all his sons to work continuing and extending it.
+They were more happily inspired.  My father's engineering pocket-book was
+not a bulky volume; with its store of pregnant notes and vital formulas,
+it served him through life, and was not yet filled when he came to die.
+As for Robert Stevenson and the Travelling Diary, I should be ungrateful
+to complain, for it has supplied me with many lively traits for this and
+subsequent chapters; but I must still remember much of the period of my
+study there as a sojourn in the Valley of the Shadow.
+
+The duty of the engineer is twofold--to design the work, and to see the
+work done.  We have seen already something of the vociferous thoroughness
+of the man, upon the cleaning of lamps and the polishing of reflectors.
+In building, in road-making, in the construction of bridges, in every
+detail and byway of his employments, he pursued the same ideal.
+Perfection (with a capital P and violently under-scored) was his design.
+A crack for a penknife, the waste of 'six-and-thirty shillings,' 'the
+loss of a day or a tide,' in each of these he saw and was revolted by the
+finger of the sloven; and to spirits intense as his, and immersed in
+vital undertakings, the slovenly is the dishonest, and wasted time is
+instantly translated into lives endangered.  On this consistent idealism
+there is but one thing that now and then trenches with a touch of
+incongruity, and that is his love of the picturesque.  As when he laid
+out a road on Hogarth's line of beauty; bade a foreman be careful, in
+quarrying, not 'to disfigure the island'; or regretted in a report that
+'the great stone, called the _Devil in the Hole_, was blasted or broken
+down to make road-metal, and for other purposes of the work.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III: THE BUILDING OF THE BELL ROCK
+
+
+Off the mouths of the Tay and the Forth, thirteen miles from Fifeness,
+eleven from Arbroath, and fourteen from the Red Head of Angus, lies the
+Inchcape or Bell Rock.  It extends to a length of about fourteen hundred
+feet, but the part of it discovered at low water to not more than four
+hundred and twenty-seven.  At a little more than half-flood in fine
+weather the seamless ocean joins over the reef, and at high-water springs
+it is buried sixteen feet.  As the tide goes down, the higher reaches of
+the rock are seen to be clothed by _Conferva rupestris_ as by a sward of
+grass; upon the more exposed edges, where the currents are most swift and
+the breach of the sea heaviest, Baderlock or Henware flourishes; and the
+great Tangle grows at the depth of several fathoms with luxuriance.
+Before man arrived, and introduced into the silence of the sea the smoke
+and clangour of a blacksmith's shop, it was a favourite resting-place of
+seals.  The crab and lobster haunt in the crevices; and limpets, mussels,
+and the white buckie abound.
+
+According to a tradition, a bell had been once hung upon this rock by an
+abbot of Arbroath, {91a} 'and being taken down by a sea-pirate, a year
+thereafter he perished upon the same rock, with ship and goods, in the
+righteous judgment of God.'  From the days of the abbot and the
+sea-pirate no man had set foot upon the Inchcape, save fishers from the
+neighbouring coast, or perhaps--for a moment, before the surges swallowed
+them--the unfortunate victims of shipwreck.  The fishers approached the
+rock with an extreme timidity; but their harvest appears to have been
+great, and the adventure no more perilous than lucrative.  In 1800, on
+the occasion of my grandfather's first landing, and during the two or
+three hours which the ebb-tide and the smooth water allowed them to pass
+upon its shelves, his crew collected upwards of two hundredweight of old
+metal: pieces of a kedge anchor and a cabin stove, crowbars, a hinge and
+lock of a door, a ship's marking-iron, a piece of a ship's caboose, a
+soldier's bayonet, a cannon ball, several pieces of money, a shoe-buckle,
+and the like.  Such were the spoils of the Bell Rock.
+
+From 1794 onward, the mind of my grandfather had been exercised with the
+idea of a light upon this formidable danger.  To build a tower on a sea
+rock, eleven miles from shore, and barely uncovered at low water of
+neaps, appeared a fascinating enterprise.  It was something yet
+unattempted, unessayed; and even now, after it has been lighted for more
+than eighty years, it is still an exploit that has never been repeated.
+{92a}  My grandfather was, besides, but a young man, of an experience
+comparatively restricted, and a reputation confined to Scotland; and when
+he prepared his first models, and exhibited them in Merchants' Hall, he
+can hardly be acquitted of audacity.  John Clerk of Eldin stood his
+friend from the beginning, kept the key of the model room, to which he
+carried 'eminent strangers,' and found words of counsel and encouragement
+beyond price.  'Mr. Clerk had been personally known to Smeaton, and used
+occasionally to speak of him to me,' says my grandfather; and again: 'I
+felt regret that I had not the opportunity of a greater range of practice
+to fit me for such an undertaking; but I was fortified by an expression
+of my friend Mr. Clerk in one of our conversations. "This work," said he,
+"is unique, and can be little forwarded by experience of ordinary masonic
+operations.  In this case Smeaton's 'Narrative' must be the text-book,
+and energy and perseverance the pratique."'
+
+A Bill for the work was introduced into Parliament and lost in the Lords
+in 1802-3.  John Rennie was afterwards, at my grandfather's suggestion,
+called in council, with the style of chief engineer.  The precise meaning
+attached to these words by any of the parties appears irrecoverable.
+Chief engineer should have full authority, full responsibility, and a
+proper share of the emoluments; and there were none of these for Rennie.
+I find in an appendix a paper which resumes the controversy on this
+subject; and it will be enough to say here that Rennie did not design the
+Bell Rock, that he did not execute it, and that he was not paid for it.
+{94a}  From so much of the correspondence as has come down to me, the
+acquaintance of this man, eleven years his senior, and already famous,
+appears to have been both useful and agreeable to Robert Stevenson.  It
+is amusing to find my grandfather seeking high and low for a brace of
+pistols which his colleague had lost by the way between Aberdeen and
+Edinburgh; and writing to Messrs. Dollond, 'I have not thought it
+necessary to trouble Mr. Rennie with this order, but _I beg you will see
+to get two minutes of him as he passes your door_'--a proposal calculated
+rather from the latitude of Edinburgh than from London, even in 1807.  It
+is pretty, too, to observe with what affectionate regard Smeaton was held
+in mind by his immediate successors.  'Poor old fellow,' writes Rennie to
+Stevenson, 'I hope he will now and then take a peep at us, and inspire
+you with fortitude and courage to brave all difficulties and dangers to
+accomplish a work which will, if successful, immortalise you in the
+annals of fame.'  The style might be bettered, but the sentiment is
+charming.
+
+Smeaton was, indeed, the patron saint of the Bell Rock.  Undeterred by
+the sinister fate of Winstanley, he had tackled and solved the problem of
+the Eddystone; but his solution had not been in all respects perfect.  It
+remained for my grand-father to outdo him in daring, by applying to a
+tidal rock those principles which had been already justified by the
+success of the Eddystone, and to perfect the model by more than one
+exemplary departure.  Smeaton had adopted in his floors the principle of
+the arch; each therefore exercised an outward thrust upon the walls,
+which must be met and combated by embedded chains.  My grandfather's
+flooring-stones, on the other hand, were flat, made part of the outer
+wall, and were keyed and dovetailed into a central stone, so as to bind
+the work together and be positive elements of strength.  In 1703
+Winstanley still thought it possible to erect his strange pagoda, with
+its open gallery, its florid scrolls and candlesticks: like a rich man's
+folly for an ornamental water in a park.  Smeaton followed; then
+Stevenson in his turn corrected such flaws as were left in Smeaton's
+design; and with his improvements, it is not too much to say the model
+was made perfect.  Smeaton and Stevenson had between them evolved and
+finished the sea-tower.  No subsequent builder has departed in anything
+essential from the principles of their design.  It remains, and it seems
+to us as though it must remain for ever, an ideal attained.  Every stone
+in the building, it may interest the reader to know, my grandfather had
+himself cut out in the model; and the manner in which the courses were
+fitted, joggled, trenailed, wedged, and the bond broken, is intricate as
+a puzzle and beautiful by ingenuity.
+
+In 1806 a second Bill passed both Houses, and the preliminary works were
+at once begun.  The same year the Navy had taken a great harvest of
+prizes in the North Sea, one of which, a Prussian fishing dogger,
+flat-bottomed and rounded at the stem and stern, was purchased to be a
+floating lightship, and re-named the _Pharos_.  By July 1807 she was
+overhauled, rigged for her new purpose, and turned into the lee of the
+Isle of May.  'It was proposed that the whole party should meet in her
+and pass the night; but she rolled from side to side in so extraordinary
+a manner, that even the most seahardy fled.  It was humorously observed
+of this vessel that she was in danger of making a round turn and
+appearing with her keel uppermost; and that she would even turn a
+half-penny if laid upon deck.'  By two o'clock on the morning of the 15th
+July this purgatorial vessel was moored by the Bell Rock.
+
+A sloop of forty tons had been in the meantime built at Leith, and named
+the _Smeaton_; by the 7th of August my grandfather set sail in her--
+
+    'carrying with him Mr. Peter Logan, foreman builder, and five
+    artificers selected from their having been somewhat accustomed to the
+    sea, the writer being aware of the distressing trial which the
+    floating light would necessarily inflict upon landsmen from her
+    rolling motion.  Here he remained till the 10th, and, as the weather
+    was favourable, a landing was effected daily, when the workmen were
+    employed in cutting the large seaweed from the sites of the
+    lighthouse and beacon, which were respectively traced with pickaxes
+    upon the rock.  In the meantime the crew of the _Smeaton_ was
+    employed in laying down the several sets of moorings within about
+    half a mile of the rock for the convenience of vessels.  The
+    artificers, having, fortunately, experienced moderate weather,
+    returned to the workyard of Arbroath with a good report of their
+    treatment afloat; when their comrades ashore began to feel some
+    anxiety to see a place of which they had heard so much, and to change
+    the constant operations with the iron and mallet in the process of
+    hewing for an occasional tide's work on the rock, which they figured
+    to themselves as a state of comparative ease and comfort.'
+
+I am now for many pages to let my grandfather speak for himself, and tell
+in his own words the story of his capital achievement.  The tall quarto
+of 533 pages from which the following narrative has been dug out is
+practically unknown to the general reader, yet good judges have perceived
+its merit, and it has been named (with flattering wit) 'The Romance of
+Stone and Lime' and 'The Robinson Crusoe of Civil Engineering.'  The
+tower was but four years in the building; it took Robert Stevenson, in
+the midst of his many avocations, no less than fourteen to prepare the
+_Account_.  The title-page is a solid piece of literature of upwards of a
+hundred words; the table of contents runs to thirteen pages; and the
+dedication (to that revered monarch, George IV) must have cost him no
+little study and correspondence.  Walter Scott was called in council, and
+offered one miscorrection which still blots the page.  In spite of all
+this pondering and filing, there remain pages not easy to construe, and
+inconsistencies not easy to explain away.  I have sought to make these
+disappear, and to lighten a little the baggage with which my grandfather
+marches; here and there I have rejointed and rearranged a sentence,
+always with his own words, and all with a reverent and faithful hand; and
+I offer here to the reader the true Monument of Robert Stevenson with a
+little of the moss removed from the inscription, and the Portrait of the
+artist with some superfluous canvas cut away.
+
+
+
+I--OPERATIONS OF 1807
+
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 16th Aug.]
+
+Everything being arranged for sailing to the rock on Saturday the 15th,
+the vessel might have proceeded on the Sunday; but understanding that
+this would not be so agreeable to the artificers it was deferred until
+Monday.  Here we cannot help observing that the men allotted for the
+operations at the rock seemed to enter upon the undertaking with a degree
+of consideration which fully marked their opinion as to the hazardous
+nature of the undertaking on which they were about to enter.  They went
+in a body to church on Sunday, and whether it was in the ordinary course,
+or designed for the occasion, the writer is not certain, but the service
+was, in many respects, suitable to their circumstances.
+
+                                                       [Monday, 17th Aug.]
+
+The tide happening to fall late in the evening of Monday the 17th, the
+party, counting twenty-four in number, embarked on board of the _Smeaton_
+about ten o'clock p.m., and sailed from Arbroath with a gentle breeze at
+west.  Our ship's colours having been flying all day in compliment to the
+commencement of the work, the other vessels in the harbour also saluted,
+which made a very gay appearance.  A number of the friends and
+acquaintances of those on board having been thus collected, the piers,
+though at a late hour, were perfectly crowded, and just as the _Smeaton_
+cleared the harbour, all on board united in giving three hearty cheers,
+which were returned by those on shore in such good earnest, that, in the
+still of the evening, the sound must have been heard in all parts of the
+town, re-echoing from the walls and lofty turrets of the venerable Abbey
+of Aberbrothwick.  The writer felt much satisfaction at the manner of
+this parting scene, though he must own that the present rejoicing was, on
+his part, mingled with occasional reflections upon the responsibility of
+his situation, which extended to the safety of all who should be engaged
+in this perilous work.  With such sensations he retired to his cabin; but
+as the artificers were rather inclined to move about the deck than to
+remain in their confined berths below, his repose was transient, and the
+vessel being small every motion was necessarily heard.  Some who were
+musically inclined occasionally sung; but he listened with peculiar
+pleasure to the sailor at the helm, who hummed over Dibdin's
+characteristic air:--
+
+    'They say there's a Providence sits up aloft,
+    To keep watch for the life of poor Jack.'
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 18th Aug.]
+
+The weather had been very gentle all night, and, about four in the
+morning of the 18th, the _Smeaton_ anchored.  Agreeably to an arranged
+plan of operations, all hands were called at five o'clock a.m., just as
+the highest part of the Bell Rock began to show its sable head among the
+light breakers, which occasionally whitened with the foaming sea.  The
+two boats belonging to the floating light attended the _Smeaton_, to
+carry the artificers to the rock, as her boat could only accommodate
+about six or eight sitters.  Every one was more eager than his neighbour
+to leap into the boats and it required a good deal of management on the
+part of the coxswains to get men unaccustomed to a boat to take their
+places for rowing and at the same time trimming her properly.  The
+landing-master and foreman went into one boat, while the writer took
+charge of another, and steered it to and from the rock.  This became the
+more necessary in the early stages of the work, as places could not be
+spared for more than two, or at most three seamen to each boat, who were
+always stationed, one at the bow, to use the boat-hook in fending or
+pushing off, and the other at the aftermost oar, to give the proper time
+in rowing, while the middle oars were double-banked, and rowed by the
+artificers.
+
+As the weather was extremely fine, with light airs of wind from the east,
+we landed without difficulty upon the central part of the rock at
+half-past five, but the water had not yet sufficiently left it for
+commencing the work.  This interval, however, did not pass unoccupied.
+The first and last of all the principal operations at the Bell Rock were
+accompanied by three hearty cheers from all hands, and, on occasions like
+the present, the steward of the ship attended, when each man was regaled
+with a glass of rum.  As the water left the rock about six, some began to
+bore the holes for the great bats or holdfasts, for fixing the beams of
+the Beacon-house, while the smith was fully attended in laying out the
+site of his forge, upon a somewhat sheltered spot of the rock, which also
+recommended itself from the vicinity of a pool of water for tempering his
+irons.  These preliminary steps occupied about an hour, and as nothing
+further could be done during this tide towards fixing the forge, the
+workmen gratified their curiosity by roaming about the rock, which they
+investigated with great eagerness till the tide overflowed it.  Those who
+had been sick picked dulse (_Fucus palmatus_), which they ate with much
+seeming appetite; others were more intent upon collecting limpets for
+bait, to enjoy the amusement of fishing when they returned on board of
+the vessel.  Indeed, none came away empty-handed, as everything found
+upon the Bell Rock was considered valuable, being connected with some
+interesting association.  Several coins, and numerous bits of shipwrecked
+iron, were picked up, of almost every description; and, in particular, a
+marking-iron lettered JAMES--a circumstance of which it was thought
+proper to give notice to the public, as it might lead to the knowledge of
+some unfortunate shipwreck, perhaps unheard of till this simple
+occurrence led to the discovery.  When the rock began to be overflowed,
+the landing-master arranged the crews of the respective boats, appointing
+twelve persons to each.  According to a rule which the writer had laid
+down to himself, he was always the last person who left the rock.
+
+In a short time the Bell Rock was laid completely under water, and the
+weather being extremely fine, the sea was so smooth that its place could
+not be pointed out from the appearance of the surface--a circumstance
+which sufficiently demonstrates the dangerous nature of this rock, even
+during the day, and in the smoothest and calmest state of the sea.
+During the interval between the morning and the evening tides, the
+artificers were variously employed in fishing and reading; others were
+busy in drying and adjusting their wet clothes, and one or two amused
+their companions with the violin and German flute.
+
+About seven in the evening the signal bell for landing on the rock was
+again rung, when every man was at his quarters.  In this service it was
+thought more appropriate to use the bell than to _pipe_ to quarters, as
+the use of this instrument is less known to the mechanic than the sound
+of the bell.  The landing, as in the morning, was at the eastern harbour.
+During this tide the seaweed was pretty well cleared from the site of the
+operations, and also from the tracks leading to the different
+landing-places; for walking upon the rugged surface of the Bell Rock,
+when covered with seaweed, was found to be extremely difficult and even
+dangerous.  Every hand that could possibly be occupied now employed in
+assisting the smith to fit up the apparatus for his forge.  At 9 p.m. the
+boats returned to the tender, after other two hours' work, in the same
+order as formerly--perhaps as much gratified with the success that
+attended the work of this day as with any other in the whole course of
+the operations.  Although it could not he said that the fatigues of this
+day had been great, yet all on board retired early to rest.  The sea
+being calm, and no movement on deck, it was pretty generally remarked in
+the morning that the bell awakened the greater number on board from their
+first sleep; and though this observation was not altogether applicable to
+the writer himself, yet he was not a little pleased to find that thirty
+people could all at once become so reconciled to a night's quarters
+within a few hundred paces of the Bell Rock.
+
+                                                    [Wednesday, 19th Aug.]
+
+Being extremely anxious at this time to get forward with fixing the
+smith's forge, on which the progress of the work at present depended, the
+writer requested that he might be called at daybreak to learn the
+landing-master's opinion of the weather from the appearance of the rising
+sun, a criterion by which experienced seamen can generally judge pretty
+accurately of the state of the weather for the following day.  About five
+o'clock, on coming upon deck, the sun's upper limb or disc had just begun
+to appear as if rising from the ocean, and in less than a minute he was
+seen in the fullest splendour; but after a short interval he was
+enveloped in a soft cloudy sky, which was considered emblematical of fine
+weather.  His rays had not yet sufficiently dispelled the clouds which
+hid the land from view, and the Bell Rock being still overflowed, the
+whole was one expanse of water.  This scene in itself was highly
+gratifying; and, when the morning bell was tolled, we were gratified with
+the happy forebodings of good weather and the expectation of having both
+a morning and an evening tide's work on the rock.
+
+The boat which the writer steered happened to be the last which
+approached the rock at this tide; and, in standing up in the stern, while
+at some distance, to see how the leading boat entered the creek, he was
+astonished to observe something in the form of a human figure, in a
+reclining posture, upon one of the ledges of the rock.  He immediately
+steered the boat through a narrow entrance to the eastern harbour, with a
+thousand unpleasant sensations in his mind.  He thought a vessel or boat
+must have been wrecked upon the rock during the night; and it seemed
+probable that the rock might be strewed with dead bodies, a spectacle
+which could not fail to deter the artificers from returning so freely to
+their work.  In the midst of these reveries the boat took the ground at
+an improper landing-place; but, without waiting to push her off, he leapt
+upon the rock, and making his way hastily to the spot which had privately
+given him alarm, he had the satisfaction to ascertain that he had only
+been deceived by the peculiar situation and aspect of the smith's anvil
+and block, which very completely represented the appearance of a lifeless
+body upon the rock.  The writer carefully suppressed his feelings, the
+simple mention of which might have had a bad effect upon the artificers,
+and his haste passed for an anxiety to examine the apparatus of the
+smith's forge, left in an unfinished state at evening tide.
+
+In the course of this morning's work two or three apparently distant
+peals of thunder were heard, and the atmosphere suddenly became thick and
+foggy.  But as the _Smeaton_, our present tender, was moored at no great
+distance from the rock, the crew on board continued blowing with a horn,
+and occasionally fired a musket, so that the boats got to the ship
+without difficulty.
+
+                                                     [Thursday, 20th Aug.]
+
+The wind this morning inclined from the north-east, and the sky had a
+heavy and cloudy appearance, but the sea was smooth, though there was an
+undulating motion on, the surface, which indicated easterly winds, and
+occasioned a slight surf upon the rock.  But the boats found no
+difficulty in landing at the western creek at half-past seven, and, after
+a good tide's work, left it again about a quarter from eleven.  In the
+evening the artificers landed at half-past seven, and continued till
+half-past eight, having completed the fixing of the smith's forge, his
+vice, and a wooden board or bench, which were also batted to a ledge of
+the rock, to the great joy of all, under a salute of three hearty cheers.
+From an oversight on the part of the smith, who had neglected to bring
+his tinder-box and matches from the vessel, the work was prevented from
+being continued for at least an hour longer.
+
+The smith's shop was, of course, in _open space_: the large bellows were
+carried to and from the rock every tide, for the serviceable condition of
+which, together with the tinder-box, fuel, and embers of the former fire,
+the smith was held responsible.  Those who have been placed in situations
+to feel the inconveniency and want of this useful artisan, will be able
+to appreciate his value in a case like the present.  It often happened,
+to our annoyance and disappointment, in the early state of the work, when
+the smith was in the middle of a _favourite heat_ in making some useful
+article, or in sharpening the tools, after the flood-tide had obliged the
+pickmen to strike work, a sea would come rolling over the rocks, dash out
+the fire, and endanger his indispensable implement, the bellows.  If the
+sea was smooth, while the smith often stood at work knee-deep in water,
+the tide rose by imperceptible degrees, first cooling the exterior of the
+fireplace, or hearth, and then quietly blackening and extinguishing the
+fire from below.  The writer has frequently been amused at the perplexing
+anxiety of the blacksmith when coaxing his fire and endeavouring to avert
+the effects of the rising tide.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 21st Aug.]
+
+Everything connected with the forge being now completed, the artificers
+found no want of sharp tools, and the work went forward with great
+alacrity and spirit.  It was also alleged that the rock had a more
+habitable appearance from the volumes of smoke which ascended from the
+smith's shop and the busy noise of his anvil, the operations of the
+masons, the movements of the boats, and shipping at a distance--all
+contributed to give life and activity to the scene.  This noise and
+traffic had, however, the effect of almost completely banishing the herd
+of seals which had hitherto frequented the rock as a resting-place during
+the period of low water.  The rock seemed to be peculiarly adapted to
+their habits, for, excepting two or three days at neap-tides, a part of
+it always dries at low water--at least, during the summer season--and as
+there was good fishing-ground in the neighbourhood, without a human being
+to disturb or molest them, it had become a very favourite residence of
+these amphibious animals, the writer having occasionally counted from
+fifty to sixty playing about the rock at a time.  But when they came to
+be disturbed every tide, and their seclusion was broken in upon by the
+kindling of great fires, together with the beating of hammers and picks
+during low water, after hovering about for a time, they changed their
+place, and seldom more than one or two were to be seen about the rock
+upon the more detached outlayers which dry partially, whence they seemed
+to look with that sort of curiosity which is observable in these animals
+when following a boat.
+
+                                                     [Saturday, 22nd Aug.]
+
+Hitherto the artificers had remained on board the _Smeaton_, which was
+made fast to one of the mooring buoys at a distance only of about a
+quarter of a mile from the rock, and, of course, a very great conveniency
+to the work.  Being so near, the seamen could never be mistaken as to the
+progress of the tide, or state of the sea upon the rock, nor could the
+boats be much at a loss to pull on board of the vessel during fog, or
+even in very rough weather; as she could be cast loose from her moorings
+at pleasure, and brought to the lee side of the rock.  But the _Smeaton_
+being only about forty register tons, her accommodations were extremely
+limited.  It may, therefore, be easily imagined that an addition of
+twenty-four persons to her own crew must have rendered the situation of
+those on board rather uncomfortable.  The only place for the men's
+hammocks on board being in the hold, they were unavoidably much crowded:
+and if the weather had required the hatches to be fastened down, so great
+a number of men could not possibly have been accommodated.  To add to
+this evil, the _co-boose_ or cooking-place being upon deck, it would not
+have been possible to have cooked for so large a company in the event of
+bad weather.
+
+The stock of water was now getting short, and some necessaries being also
+wanted for the floating light, the _Smeaton_ was despatched for Arbroath;
+and the writer, with the artificers at the same time shifted their
+quarters from her to the floating light.
+
+Although the rock barely made its appearance at this period of the tides
+till eight o'clock, yet, having now a full mile to row from the floating
+light to the rock, instead of about a quarter of a mile from the moorings
+of the _Smeaton_, it was necessary to be earlier astir, and to form
+different arrangements; breakfast was accordingly served up at seven
+o'clock this morning.  From the excessive motion of the floating light,
+the writer had looked forward rather with anxiety to the removal of the
+workmen to this ship.  Some among them, who had been congratulating
+themselves upon having become sea-hardy while on board the _Smeaton_, had
+a complete relapse upon returning to the floating light.  This was the
+case with the writer.  From the spacious and convenient berthage of the
+floating light, the exchange to the artificers was, in this respect, much
+for the better.  The boats were also commodious, measuring sixteen feet
+in length on the keel, so that, in fine weather, their complement of
+sitters was sixteen persons for each, with which, however, they were
+rather crowded, but she could not stow two boats of larger dimensions.
+When there was what is called a breeze of wind, and a swell in the sea,
+the proper number for each boat could not, with propriety, be rated at
+more than twelve persons.
+
+When the tide-bell rung the boats were hoisted out, and two active seamen
+were employed to keep them from receiving damage alongside.  The floating
+light being very buoyant, was so quick in her motions that when those who
+were about to step from her gunwale into a boat, placed themselves upon a
+cleat or step on the ship's side, with the man or rail ropes in their
+hands, they had often to wait for some time till a favourable opportunity
+occurred for stepping into the boat.  While in this situation, with the
+vessel rolling from side to side, watching the proper time for letting go
+the man-ropes, it required the greatest dexterity and presence of mind to
+leap into the boats.  One who was rather awkward would often wait a
+considerable period in this position: at one time his side of the ship
+would be so depressed that he would touch the boat to which he belonged,
+while the next sea would elevate him so much that he would see his
+comrades in the boat on the opposite side of the ship, his friends in the
+one boat calling to him to 'Jump,' while those in the boat on the other
+side, as he came again and again into their view, would jocosely say,
+'Are you there yet?  You seem to enjoy a swing.'  In this situation it
+was common to see a person upon each side of the ship for a length of
+time, waiting to quit his hold.
+
+On leaving the rock to-day a trial of seamanship was proposed amongst the
+rowers, for by this time the artificers had become tolerably expert in
+this exercise.  By inadvertency some of the oars provided had been made
+of fir instead of ash, and although a considerable stock had been laid
+in, the workmen, being at first awkward in the art, were constantly
+breaking their oars; indeed it was no uncommon thing to see the broken
+blades of a pair of oars floating astern, in the course of a passage from
+the rock to the vessel.  The men, upon the whole, had but little work to
+perform in the course of a day; for though they exerted themselves
+extremely hard while on the rock, yet, in the early state of the
+operations, this could not be continued for more than three or four hours
+at a time, and as their rations were large--consisting of one pound and a
+half of beef, one pound of ship biscuit, eight ounces oatmeal, two ounces
+barley, two ounces butter, three quarts of small beer, with vegetables
+and salt--they got into excellent spirits when free of sea-sickness.  The
+rowing of the boats against each other became a favourite amusement,
+which was rather a fortunate circumstance, as it must have been attended
+with much inconvenience had it been found necessary to employ a
+sufficient number of sailors for this purpose.  The writer, therefore,
+encouraged the spirit of emulation, and the speed of their respective
+boats became a favourite topic.  Premiums for boat-races were instituted,
+which were contended for with great eagerness, and the respective crews
+kept their stations in the boats with as much precision as they kept
+their beds on board of the ship.  With these and other pastimes, when the
+weather was favourable, the time passed away among the inmates of the
+forecastle and waist of the ship.  The writer looks back with interest
+upon the hours of solitude which he spent in this lonely ship with his
+small library.
+
+This being the first Saturday that the artificers were afloat, all hands
+were served with a glass of rum and water at night, to drink the sailors'
+favourite toast of 'Wives and Sweethearts.'  It was customary, upon these
+occasions, for the seamen and artificers to collect in the galley, when
+the musical instruments were put in requisition: for, according to
+invariable practice, every man must play a tune, sing a song, or tell a
+story.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 23rd Aug.]
+
+Having, on the previous evening, arranged matters with the landing-master
+as to the business of the day, the signal was rung for all hands at
+half-past seven this morning.  In the early state of the spring-tides the
+artificers went to the rock before breakfast, but as the tides fell later
+in the day, it became necessary to take this meal before leaving the
+ship.  At eight o'clock all hands were assembled on the quarter-deck for
+prayers, a solemnity which was gone through in as orderly a manner as
+circumstances would admit.  When the weather permitted, the flags of the
+ship were hung up as an awning or screen, forming the quarter-deck into a
+distinct compartment; the pendant was also hoisted at the mainmast, and a
+large ensign flag was displayed over the stern; and lastly, the ship's
+companion, or top of the staircase, was covered with the _flag proper_ of
+the Lighthouse Service, on which the Bible was laid.  A particular toll
+of the bell called all hands to the quarter-deck, when the writer read a
+chapter of the Bible, and, the whole ship's company being uncovered, he
+also read the impressive prayer composed by the Reverend Dr. Brunton, one
+of the ministers of Edinburgh.
+
+Upon concluding this service, which was attended with becoming reverence
+and attention, all on board retired to their respective berths to
+breakfast, and, at half-past nine, the bell again rung for the artificers
+to take their stations in their respective boats.  Some demur having been
+evinced on board about the propriety of working on Sunday, which had
+hitherto been touched upon as delicately as possible, all hands being
+called aft, the writer, from the quarter-deck, stated generally the
+nature of the service, expressing his hopes that every man would feel
+himself called upon to consider the erection of a lighthouse on the Bell
+Rock, in every point of view, as a work of necessity and mercy.  He knew
+that scruples had existed with some, and these had, indeed, been fairly
+and candidly urged before leaving the shore; but it was expected that,
+after having seen the critical nature of the rock, and the necessity of
+the measure, every man would now be satisfied of the propriety of
+embracing all opportunities of landing on the rock when the state of the
+weather would permit.  The writer further took them to witness that it
+did not proceed from want of respect for the appointments and established
+forms of religion that he had himself adopted the resolution of attending
+the Bell Rock works on the Sunday; but, as he hoped, from a conviction
+that it was his bounden duty, on the strictest principles of morality.
+At the same time it was intimated that, if any were of a different
+opinion, they should be perfectly at liberty to hold their sentiments
+without the imputation of contumacy or disobedience; the only difference
+would be in regard to the pay.
+
+Upon stating this much, he stepped into his boat, requesting all who were
+so disposed to follow him.  The sailors, from their habits, found no
+scruple on this subject, and all of the artificers, though a little
+tardy, also embarked, excepting four of the masons, who, from the
+beginning, mentioned that they would decline working on Sundays.  It may
+here be noticed that throughout the whole of the operations it was
+observable that the men wrought, if possible, with more keenness upon the
+Sundays than at other times from an impression that they were engaged in
+a work of imperious necessity, which required every possible exertion.
+On returning to the floating light, after finishing the tide's work, the
+boats were received by the part of the ship's crew left on board with the
+usual attention of handing ropes to the boats and helping the artificers
+on board; but the four masons who had absented themselves from the work
+did not appear upon deck.
+
+                                                       [Monday, 24th Aug.]
+
+The boats left the floating light at a quarter-past nine o'clock this
+morning, and the work began at three-quarters past nine; but as the
+neap-tides were approaching the working time at the rock became gradually
+shorter, and it was now with difficulty that two and a half hours' work
+could be got.  But so keenly had the workmen entered into the spirit of
+the beacon-house operations, that they continued to bore the holes in the
+rock till some of them were knee-deep in water.
+
+The operations at this time were entirely directed to the erection of the
+beacon, in which every man felt an equal interest, as at this critical
+period the slightest casualty to any of the boats at the rock might have
+been fatal to himself individually, while it was perhaps peculiar to the
+writer more immediately to feel for the safety of the whole.  Each log or
+upright beam of the beacon was to be fixed to the rock by two strong and
+massive bats or stanchions of iron.  These bats, for the fixture of the
+principal and diagonal beams and bracing chains, required fifty-four
+holes, each measuring two inches in diameter and eighteen inches in
+depth.  There had already been so considerable a progress made in boring
+and excavating the holes that the writer's hopes of getting the beacon
+erected this year began to be more and more confirmed, although it was
+now advancing towards what was considered the latter end of the proper
+working season at the Bell Rock.  The foreman joiner, Mr. Francis Watt,
+was accordingly appointed to attend at the rock to-day, when the
+necessary levels were taken for the step or seat of each particular beam
+of the beacon, that they might be cut to their respective lengths, to
+suit the inequalities of the rock; several of the stanchions were also
+tried into their places, and other necessary observations made, to
+prevent mistakes on the application of the apparatus, and to facilitate
+the operations when the beams came to be set up, which would require to
+be done in the course of a single tide.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 25th Aug.]
+
+We had now experienced an almost unvaried tract of light airs of easterly
+wind, with clear weather in the fore-part of the day and fog in the
+evenings.  To-day, however, it sensibly changed; when the wind came to
+the south-west, and blew a fresh breeze.  At nine a.m. the bell rung, and
+the boats were hoisted out, and though the artificers were now pretty
+well accustomed to tripping up and down the sides of the floating light,
+yet it required more seamanship this morning than usual.  It therefore
+afforded some merriment to those who had got fairly seated in their
+respective boats to see the difficulties which attended their companions,
+and the hesitating manner in which they quitted hold of the man-ropes in
+leaving the ship.  The passage to the rock was tedious, and the boats did
+not reach it till half-past ten.
+
+It being now the period of neap-tides, the water only partially left the
+rock, and some of the men who were boring on the lower ledges of the site
+of the beacon stood knee-deep in water.  The situation of the smith
+to-day was particularly disagreeable, but his services were at all times
+indispensable.  As the tide did not leave the site of the forge, he stood
+in the water, and as there was some roughness on the surface it was with
+considerable difficulty that, with the assistance of the sailors, he was
+enabled to preserve alive his fire; and, while his feet were immersed in
+water, his face was not only scorched but continually exposed to volumes
+of smoke, accompanied with sparks from the fire, which were occasionally
+set up owing to the strength and direction of the wind.
+
+                                                    [Wednesday, 26th Aug.]
+
+The wind had shifted this morning to N.N.W., with rain, and was blowing
+what sailors call a fresh breeze.  To speak, perhaps, somewhat more
+intelligibly to the general reader, the wind was such that a fishing-boat
+could just carry full sail.  But as it was of importance, specially in
+the outset of the business, to keep up the spirit of enterprise for
+landing on all practicable occasions, the writer, after consulting with
+the landing-master, ordered the bell to be rung for embarking, and at
+half-past eleven the boats reached the rock, and left it again at a
+quarter-past twelve, without, however, being able to do much work, as the
+smith could not be set to work from the smallness of the ebb and the
+strong breach of sea, which lashed with great force among the bars of the
+forge.
+
+Just as we were about to leave the rock the wind shifted to the S.W.,
+and, from a fresh gale, it became what seamen term a hard gale, or such
+as would have required the fisherman to take in two or three reefs in his
+sail.  It is a curious fact that the respective tides of ebb and flood
+are apparent upon the shore about an hour and a half sooner than at the
+distance of three or four miles in the offing.  But what seems chiefly
+interesting here is that the tides around this small sunken rock should
+follow exactly the same laws as on the extensive shores of the mainland.
+When the boats left the Bell Rock to-day it was overflowed by the
+flood-tide, but the floating light did not swing round to the flood-tide
+for more than an hour afterwards.  Under this disadvantage the boats had
+to struggle with the ebb-tide and a hard gale of wind, so that it was
+with the greatest difficulty that they reached the floating light.  Had
+this gale happened in spring-tides when the current was strong we must
+have been driven to sea in a very helpless condition.
+
+The boat which the writer steered was considerably behind the other, one
+of the masons having unluckily broken his oar.  Our prospect of getting
+on board, of course, became doubtful, and our situation was rather
+perilous, as the boat shipped so much sea that it occupied two of the
+artificers to bale and clear her of water.  When the oar gave way we were
+about half a mile from the ship, but, being fortunately to windward, we
+got into the wake of the floating light, at about 250 fathoms astern,
+just as the landing-master's boat reached the vessel.  He immediately
+streamed or floated a life-buoy astern, with a line which was always in
+readiness, and by means of this useful implement the boat was towed
+alongside of the floating light, where, from her rolling motion, it
+required no small management to get safely on board, as the men were much
+worn out with their exertions in pulling from the rock.  On the present
+occasion the crews of both boats were completely drenched with spray, and
+those who sat upon the bottom of the boats to bale them were sometimes
+pretty deep in the water before it could be cleared out.  After getting
+on board, all hands were allowed an extra dram, and, having shifted and
+got a warm and comfortable dinner, the affair, it is believed, was little
+more thought of.
+
+                                                     [Thursday, 27th Aug.]
+
+The tides were now in that state which sailors term the dead of the neap,
+and it was not expected that any part of the rock would be seen above
+water to-day; at any rate, it was obvious, from the experience of
+yesterday, that no work could be done upon it, and therefore the
+artificers were not required to land.  The wind was at west, with light
+breezes, and fine clear weather; and as it was an object with the writer
+to know the actual state of the Bell Rock at neap-tides, he got one of
+the boats manned, and, being accompanied by the landing-master, went to
+it at a quarter-past twelve.  The parts of the rock that appeared above
+water being very trifling, were covered by every wave, so that no landing
+was made.  Upon trying the depth of water with a boathook, particularly
+on the sites of the lighthouse and beacon, on the former, at low water,
+the depth was found to be three feet, and on the central parts of the
+latter it was ascertained to be two feet eight inches.  Having made these
+remarks, the boat returned to the ship at two p.m., and the weather being
+good, the artificers were found amusing themselves with fishing.  The
+_Smeaton_ came from Arbroath this afternoon, and made fast to her
+moorings, having brought letters and newspapers, with parcels of clean
+linen, etc., for the workmen, who were also made happy by the arrival of
+three of their comrades from the workyard ashore.  From these men they
+not only received all the news of the workyard, but seemed themselves to
+enjoy great pleasure in communicating whatever they considered to be
+interesting with regard to the rock.  Some also got letters from their
+friends at a distance, the postage of which for the men afloat was always
+free, so that they corresponded the more readily.
+
+The site of the building having already been carefully traced out with
+the pick-axe, the artificers this day commenced the excavation of the
+rock for the foundation or first course of the lighthouse.  Four men only
+were employed at this work, while twelve continued at the site of the
+beacon-house, at which every possible opportunity was embraced, till this
+essential art of the operations should be completed.
+
+                                                    [Wednesday, 2nd Sept.]
+
+The floating light's bell rung this morning at half-past four o'clock, as
+a signal for the boats to be got ready, and the landing took place at
+half-past five.  In passing the _Smeaton_ at her moorings near the rock,
+her boat followed with eight additional artificers who had come from
+Arbroath with her at last trip, but there being no room for them in the
+floating light's boats, they had continued on board.  The weather did not
+look very promising in the morning, the wind blowing pretty fresh from
+W.S.W.: and had it not been that the writer calculated upon having a
+vessel so much at command, in all probability he would not have ventured
+to land.  The _Smeaton_ rode at what sailors call a _salvagee_, with a
+cross-head made fast to the floating buoy.  This kind of attachment was
+found to be more convenient than the mode of passing the hawser through
+the ring of the buoy when the vessel was to be made fast.  She had then
+only to be steered very close to the buoy, when the salvagee was laid
+hold of with a boat-hook, and the _bite_ of the hawser thrown over the
+cross-head.  But the salvagee, by this method, was always left at the
+buoy, and was, of course, more liable to chafe and wear than a hawser
+passed through the ring, which could be wattled with canvas, and shifted
+at pleasure.  The salvagee and cross method is, however, much practised;
+but the experience of this morning showed it to be very unsuitable for
+vessels riding in an exposed situation for any length of time.
+
+Soon after the artificers landed they commenced work; but the wind coming
+to blow hard, the _Smeaton's_ boat and crew, who had brought their
+complement of eight men to the rock, went off to examine her riding
+ropes, and see that they were in proper order.  The boat had no sooner
+reached the vessel than she went adrift, carrying the boat along with
+her.  By the time that she was got round to make a tack towards the rock,
+she had drifted at least three miles to leeward, with the praam-boat
+astern; and, having both the wind and a tide against her, the writer
+perceived, with no little anxiety, that she could not possibly return to
+the rock till long after its being overflowed; for, owing to the anomaly
+of the tides formerly noticed, the Bell Rock is completely under water
+when the ebb abates to the offing.
+
+In this perilous predicament, indeed, he found himself placed between
+hope and despair--but certainly the latter was by much the most
+predominant feeling of his mind--situate upon a sunken rock in the middle
+of the ocean, which, in the progress of the flood-tide, was to be laid
+under water to the depth of at least twelve feet in a stormy sea.  There
+were this morning thirty-two persons in all upon the rock, with only two
+boats, whose complement, even in good weather, did not exceed twenty-four
+sitters; but to row to the floating light with so much wind, and in so
+heavy a sea, a complement of eight men for each boat was as much as
+could, with propriety, be attempted, so that, in this way, about one-half
+of our number was unprovided for.  Under these circumstances, had the
+writer ventured to despatch one of the boats in expectation of either
+working the _Smeaton_ sooner up towards the rock, or in hopes of getting
+her boat brought to our assistance, this must have given an immediate
+alarm to the artificers, each of whom would have insisted upon taking to
+his own boat, and leaving the eight artificers belonging to the _Smeaton_
+to their chance.  Of course a scuffle might have ensued, and it is hard
+to say, in the ardour of men contending for life, where it might have
+ended.  It has even been hinted to the writer that a party of the
+_pickmen_ were determined to keep exclusively to their own boat against
+all hazards.
+
+The unfortunate circumstance of the _Smeaton_ and her boat having drifted
+was, for a considerable time, only known to the writer and to the
+landing-master, who removed to the farther point of the rock, where he
+kept his eye steadily upon the progress of the vessel.  While the
+artificers were at work, chiefly in sitting or kneeling postures,
+excavating the rock, or boring with the jumpers, and while their numerous
+hammers, with the sound of the smith's anvil, continued, the situation of
+things did not appear so awful.  In this state of suspense, with almost
+certain destruction at hand, the water began to rise upon those who were
+at work on the lower parts of the sites of the beacon and lighthouse.
+From the run of sea upon the rock, the forge fire was also sooner
+extinguished this morning than usual, and the volumes of smoke having
+ceased, objects in every direction became visible from all parts of the
+rock.  After having had about three 'hours' work, the men began, pretty
+generally, to make towards their respective boats for their jackets and
+stockings, when, to their astonishment, instead of three, they found only
+two boats, the third being adrift with the _Smeaton_.  Not a word was
+uttered by any one, but all appeared to be silently calculating their
+numbers, and looking to each other with evident marks of perplexity
+depicted in their countenances.  The landing-master, conceiving that
+blame might be attached to him for allowing the boat to leave the rock,
+still kept at a distance.  At this critical moment the author was
+standing upon an elevated part of Smith's Ledge, where he endeavoured to
+mark the progress of the _Smeaton_, not a little surprised that her crew
+did not cut the praam adrift, which greatly retarded her way, and amazed
+that some effort was not making to bring at least the boat, and attempt
+our relief.  The workmen looked steadfastly upon the writer, and turned
+occasionally towards the vessel, still far to leeward. {122a}  All this
+passed in the most perfect silence, and the melancholy solemnity of the
+group made an impression never to be effaced from his mind.
+
+The writer had all along been considering of various schemes--providing
+the men could be kept under command--which might be put in practice for
+the general safety, in hopes that the _Smeaton_ might be able to pick up
+the boats to leeward, when they were obliged to leave the rock.  He was,
+accordingly, about to address the artificers on the perilous nature of
+their circumstances, and to propose that all hands should unstrip their
+upper clothing when the higher parts of the rock were laid under water;
+that the seamen should remove every unnecessary weight and encumbrance
+from the boats; that a specified number of men should go into each boat,
+and that the remainder should hang by the gunwales, while the boats were
+to be rowed gently towards the _Smeaton_, as the course to the _Pharos_,
+or floating light, lay rather to windward of the rock.  But when he
+attempted to speak his mouth was so parched that his tongue refused
+utterance, and he now learned by experience that the saliva is as
+necessary as the tongue itself for speech.  He turned to one of the pools
+on the rock and lapped a little water, which produced immediate relief.
+But what was his happiness, when on rising from this unpleasant beverage,
+some one called out, 'A boat! a boat!' and, on looking around, at no
+great distance, a large boat was seen through the haze making towards the
+rock.  This at once enlivened and rejoiced every heart.  The timeous
+visitor proved to be James Spink, the Bell Rock pilot, who had come
+express from Arbroath with letters.  Spink had for some time seen the
+_Smeaton_, and had even supposed, from the state of the weather, that all
+hands were on board of her till he approached more nearly and observed
+people upon the rock; but not supposing that the assistance of his boat
+was necessary to carry the artificers off the rock, he anchored on the
+lee-side and began to fish, waiting, as usual, till the letters were sent
+for, as the pilot-boat was too large and unwieldy for approaching the
+rock when there was any roughness or run of the sea at the entrance of
+the landing creeks.
+
+Upon this fortunate change of circumstances, sixteen of the artificers
+were sent, at two trips, in one of the boats, with instructions for Spink
+to proceed with them to the floating light.  This being accomplished, the
+remaining sixteen followed in the two boats belonging to the service of
+the rock.  Every one felt the most perfect happiness at leaving the Bell
+Rock this morning, though a very hard and even dangerous passage to the
+floating light still awaited us, as the wind by this time had increased
+to a pretty hard gale, accompanied with a considerable swell of sea.
+Every one was as completely drenched in water as if he had been dragged
+astern of the boats.  The writer, in particular, being at the helm,
+found, on getting on board, that his face and ears were completely coated
+with a thin film of salt from the sea spray, which broke constantly over
+the bows of the boat.  After much baling of water and severe work at the
+oars, the three boats reached the floating light, where some new
+difficulties occurred in getting on board in safety, owing partly to the
+exhausted state of the men, and partly to the violent rolling of the
+vessel.
+
+As the tide flowed, it was expected that the _Smeaton_ would have got to
+windward; but, seeing that all was safe, after tacking for several hours
+and making little progress, she bore away for Arbroath, with the
+praam-boat.  As there was now too much wind for the pilot-boat to return
+to Arbroath, she was made fast astern of the floating light, and the crew
+remained on board till next day, when the weather moderated.  There can
+be very little doubt that the appearance of James Spink with his boat on
+this critical occasion was the means of preventing the loss of lives at
+the rock this morning.  When these circumstances, some years afterwards,
+came to the knowledge of the Board, a small pension was ordered to our
+faithful pilot, then in his seventieth year; and he still continues to
+wear the uniform clothes and badge of the Lighthouse service.  Spink is a
+remarkably strong man, whose _tout ensemble_ is highly characteristic of
+a North-country fisherman.  He usually dresses in a _pe-jacket_, cut
+after a particular fashion, and wears a large, flat, blue bonnet.  A
+striking likeness of Spink in his pilot-dress, with the badge or insignia
+on his left arm which is characteristic of the boatmen in the service of
+the Northern Lights, has been taken by Howe, and is in the writer's
+possession.
+
+                                                     [Thursday, 3rd Sept.]
+
+The bell rung this morning at five o'clock, but the writer must
+acknowledge, from the circumstances of yesterday, that its sound was
+extremely unwelcome.  This appears also to have been the feelings of the
+artificers, for when they came to be mustered, out of twenty-six, only
+eight, besides the foreman and seamen, appeared upon deck to accompany
+the writer to the rock.  Such are the baneful effects of anything like
+misfortune or accident connected with a work of this description.  The
+use of argument to persuade the men to embark in cases of this kind would
+have been out of place, as it is not only discomfort, or even the risk of
+the loss of a limb, but life itself that becomes the question.  The
+boats, notwithstanding the thinness of our ranks, left the vessel at
+half-past five.  The rough weather of yesterday having proved but a
+summer's gale, the wind came to-day in gentle breezes; yet, the
+atmosphere being cloudy, it a not a very favourable appearance.  The
+boats reached the rock at six a.m., and the eight artificers who landed
+were employed in clearing out the bat-holes for the beacon-house, and had
+a very prosperous tide of four hours' work, being the longest yet
+experienced by half an hour.
+
+The boats left the rock again at ten o'clock, and the weather having
+cleared up as we drew near the vessel, the eighteen artificers who had
+remained on board were observed upon deck, but as the boats approached
+they sought their way below, being quite ashamed of their conduct.  This
+was the only instance of refusal to go to the rock which occurred during
+the whole progress of the work, excepting that of the four men who
+declined working upon Sunday, a case which the writer did not conceive to
+be at all analogous to the present.  It may here be mentioned, much to
+the credit of these four men, that they stood foremost in embarking for
+the rock this morning.
+
+                                                     [Saturday, 5th Sept.]
+
+It was fortunate that a landing was not attempted this evening, for at
+eight o'clock the wind shifted to E.S.E., and at ten it had become a hard
+gale, when fifty fathoms of the floating light's hempen cable were veered
+out.  The gale still increasing, the ship rolled and laboured
+excessively, and at midnight eighty fathoms of cable were veered out;
+while the sea continued to strike the vessel with a degree of force which
+had not before been experienced.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 6th Sept.]
+
+During the last night there was little rest on board of the _Pharos_, and
+daylight, though anxiously wished for, brought no relief, as the gale
+continued with unabated violence.  The sea struck so hard upon the
+vessel's bows that it rose in great quantities, or in 'green seas,' as
+the sailors termed it, which were carried by the wind as far aft as the
+quarter-deck, and not infrequently over the stern of the ship altogether.
+It fell occasionally so heavily on the skylight of the writer's cabin,
+though so far aft as to be within five feet of the helm, that the glass
+was broken to pieces before the dead-light could be got into its place,
+so that the water poured down in great quantities.  In shutting out the
+water, the admission of light was prevented, and in the morning all
+continued in the most comfortless state of darkness.  About ten o'clock
+a.m. the wind shifted to N.E., and blew, if possible, harder than before,
+and it was accompanied by a much heavier swell of sea.  In the course of
+the gale, the part of the cable in the hause-hole had been so often
+shifted that nearly the whole length of one of her hempen cables, of 120
+fathoms, had been veered out, besides the chain-moorings.  The cable, for
+its preservation, was also carefully served or wattled with pieces of
+canvas round the windlass, and with leather well greased in the
+hause-hole.  In this state things remained during the whole day, every
+sea which struck the vessel--and the seas followed each other in close
+succession--causing her to shake, and all on board occasionally to
+tremble.  At each of these strokes of the sea the rolling and pitching of
+the vessel ceased for a time, and her motion was felt as if she had
+either broke adrift before the wind or were in the act of sinking; but,
+when another sea came, she ranged up against it with great force, and
+this became the regular intimation of our being still riding at anchor.
+
+About eleven o'clock, the writer with some difficulty got out of bed,
+but, in attempting to dress, he was thrown twice upon the floor at the
+opposite end of the cabin.  In an undressed state he made shift to get
+about half-way up the companion-stairs, with an intention to observe the
+state of the sea and of the ship upon deck; but he no sooner looked over
+the companion than a heavy sea struck the vessel, which fell on the
+quarter-deck, and rushed downstairs in the officers' cabin in so
+considerable a quantity that it was found necessary to lift one of the
+scuttles in the floor, to let the water into the limbers of the ship, as
+it dashed from side to side in such a manner as to run into the lower
+tier of beds.  Having been foiled in this attempt, and being completely
+wetted, he again got below and went to bed.  In this state of the weather
+the seamen had to move about the necessary or indispensable duties of the
+ship with the most cautious use both of hands and feet, while it required
+all the art of the landsman to keep within the precincts of his bed.  The
+writer even found himself so much tossed about that it became necessary,
+in some measure, to shut himself in bed, in order to avoid being thrown
+upon the floor.  Indeed, such was the motion of the ship that it seemed
+wholly impracticable to remain in any other than a lying posture.  On
+deck the most stormy aspect presented itself, while below all was wet and
+comfortless.
+
+ About two o'clock p.m. a great alarm was given throughout the ship from
+the effects of a very heavy sea which struck her, and almost filled the
+waist, pouring down into the berths below, through every chink and
+crevice of the hatches and skylights.  From the motion of the vessel
+being thus suddenly deadened or checked, and from the flowing in of the
+water above, it is believed there was not an individual on board who did
+not think, at the moment, that the vessel had foundered, and was in the
+act of sinking.  The writer could withstand this no longer, and as soon
+as she again began to range to the sea he determined to make another
+effort to get upon deck.  In the first instance, however, he groped his
+way in darkness from his own cabin through the berths of the officers,
+where all was quietness.  He next entered the galley and other
+compartments occupied by the artificers.  Here also all was shut up in
+darkness, the fire having been drowned out in the early part of the gale.
+Several of the artificers were employed in prayer, repeating psalms and
+other devotional exercises in a full tone of voice; others protesting
+that, if they should fortunately get once more on shore, no one should
+ever see them afloat again.  With the assistance of the landing-master,
+the writer made his way, holding on step by step, among the numerous
+impediments which lay in the way.  Such was the creaking noise of the
+bulk-heads or partitions, the dashing of the water, and the whistling
+noise of the winds, that it was hardly possible to break in upon such a
+confusion of sounds.  In one or two instances, anxious and repeated
+inquiries were made by the artificers as to the state of things upon
+deck, to which the captain made the usual answer, that it could not blow
+long in this way, and that we must soon have better weather.  The next
+berth in succession, moving forward in the ship, was that allotted for
+the seamen.  Here the scene was considerably different.  Having reached
+the middle of this darksome berth without its inmates being aware of any
+intrusion, the writer had the consolation of remarking that, although
+they talked of bad weather and the cross accidents of the sea, yet the
+conversation was carried on in that sort of tone and manner which bespoke
+an ease and composure of mind highly creditable to them and pleasing to
+him.  The writer immediately accosted the seamen about the state of the
+ship.  To these inquiries they replied that the vessel being light, and
+having but little hold of the water, no top-rigging, with excellent
+ground-tackle, and everything being fresh and new, they felt perfect
+confidence in their situation.
+
+It being impossible to open any of the hatches in the fore part of the
+ship in communicating with the deck, the watch was changed by passing
+through the several berths to the companion-stair leading to the
+quarter-deck.  The writer, therefore, made the best of his way aft, and,
+on a second attempt to look out, he succeeded, and saw indeed an
+astonishing sight.  The sea or waves appeared to be ten or fifteen feet
+in height of unbroken water, and every approaching billow seemed as if it
+would overwhelm our vessel, but she continued to rise upon the waves and
+to fall between the seas in a very wonderful manner.  It seemed to be
+only those seas which caught her in the act of rising which struck her
+with so much violence and threw such quantities of water aft.  On deck
+there was only one solitary individual looking out, to give the alarm in
+the event of the ship breaking from her moorings.  The seaman on watch
+continued only two hours; he who kept watch at this time was a tall,
+slender man of a black complexion; he had no greatcoat nor over-all of
+any kind, but was simply dressed in his ordinary jacket and trousers; his
+hat was tied under his chin with a napkin, and he stood aft the foremast,
+to which he had lashed himself with a gasket or small rope round his
+waist, to prevent his falling upon deck or being washed overboard.  When
+the writer looked up, he appeared to smile, which afforded a further
+symptom of the confidence of the crew in their ship.  This person on
+watch was as completely wetted as if he had been drawn through the sea,
+which was given as a reason for his not putting on a greatcoat, that he
+might wet as few of his clothes as possible, and have a dry shift when he
+went below.  Upon deck everything that was movable was out of sight,
+having either been stowed below, previous to the gale, or been washed
+overboard.  Some trifling parts of the quarter boards were damaged by the
+breach of the sea; and one of the boats upon deck was about one-third
+full of water, the oyle-hole or drain having been accidently stopped up,
+and part of her gunwale had received considerable injury.  These
+observations were hastily made, and not without occasionally shutting the
+companion, to avoid being wetted by the successive seas which broke over
+the bows and fell upon different parts of the deck according to the
+impetus with which the waves struck the vessel.  By this time it was
+about three o'clock in the afternoon, and the gale, which had now
+continued with unabated force for twenty-seven hours, had not the least
+appearance of going off.
+
+In the dismal prospect of undergoing another night like the last, and
+being in imminent hazard of parting from our cable, the writer thought it
+necessary to advise with the master and officers of the ship as to the
+probable event of the vessel's drifting from her moorings.  They
+severally gave it as their opinion that we had now every chance of riding
+out the gale, which, in all probability, could not continue with the same
+fury many hours longer; and that even if she should part from her anchor,
+the storm-sails had been laid to hand, and could be bent in a very short
+time.  They further stated that from the direction of the wind being
+N.E., she would sail up the Firth of Forth to Leith Roads.  But if this
+should appear doubtful, after passing the Island and Light of May, it
+might be advisable at once to steer for Tyningham Sands, on the western
+side of Dunbar, and there run the vessel ashore.  If this should happen
+at the time of high-water, or during the ebbing of the tide, they were of
+opinion, from the flatness and strength of the floating light, that no
+danger would attend her taking the ground, even with a very heavy sea.
+The writer, seeing the confidence which these gentlemen possessed with
+regard to the situation of things, found himself as much relieved with
+this conversation as he had previously been with the seeming indifference
+of the forecastle men, and the smile of the watch upon deck, though
+literally lashed to the foremast.  From this time he felt himself almost
+perfectly at ease; at any rate, he was entirely resigned to the ultimate
+result.
+
+About six o'clock in the evening the ship's company was heard moving upon
+deck, which on the present occasion was rather the cause of alarm.  The
+writer accordingly rang his bell to know what was the matter, when he was
+informed by the steward that the weather looked considerably better, and
+that the men upon deck were endeavouring to ship the smoke-funnel of the
+galley that the people might get some meat.  This was a more favourable
+account than had been anticipated.  During the last twenty-one hours he
+himself had not only had nothing to eat, but he had almost never passed a
+thought on the subject.  Upon the mention of a change of weather, he sent
+the steward to learn how the artificers felt, and on his return he stated
+that they now seemed to be all very happy, since the cook had begun to
+light the galley-fire and make preparations for the suet-pudding of
+Sunday, which was the only dish to be attempted for the mess, from the
+ease with which it could both be cooked and served up.
+
+The principal change felt upon the ship as the wind abated was her
+increased rolling motion, but the pitching was much diminished, and now
+hardly any sea came farther aft than the foremast: but she rolled so
+extremely hard as frequently to dip and take in water over the gunwales
+and rails in the waist.  By nine o'clock all hands had been refreshed by
+the exertions of the cook and steward, and were happy in the prospect of
+the worst of the gale being over.  The usual complement of men was also
+now set on watch, and more quietness was experienced throughout the ship.
+Although the previous night had been a very restless one, it had not the
+effect of inducing repose in the writer's berth on the succeeding night;
+for having been so much tossed about in bed during the last thirty hours,
+he found no easy spot to turn to, and his body was all sore to the touch,
+which ill accorded with the unyielding materials with which his bed-place
+was surrounded.
+
+                                                       [Monday, 7th Sept.]
+
+This morning, about eight o'clock, the writer was agreeably surprised to
+see the scuttle of his cabin sky-light removed, and the bright rays of
+the sun admitted.  Although the ship continued to roll excessively, and
+the sea was still running very high, yet the ordinary business on board
+seemed to be going forward on deck.  It was impossible to steady a
+telescope, so as to look minutely at the progress of the waves and trace
+their breach upon the Bell Rock; but the height to which the
+cross-running waves rose in sprays when they met each other was truly
+grand, and the continued roar and noise of the sea was very perceptible
+to the ear.  To estimate the height of the sprays at forty or fifty feet
+would surely be within the mark.  Those of the workmen who were not much
+afflicted with sea-sickness, came upon deck, and the wetness below being
+dried up, the cabins were again brought into a habitable state.  Every
+one seemed to meet as if after a long absence, congratulating his
+neighbour upon the return of good weather.  Little could be said as to
+the comfort of the vessel, but after riding out such a gale, no one felt
+the least doubt or hesitation as to the safety and good condition of her
+moorings.  The master and mate were extremely anxious, however, to heave
+in the hempen cable, and see the state of the clinch or iron ring of the
+chain-cable.  But the vessel rolled at such a rate that the seamen could
+not possibly keep their feet at the windlass nor work the hand-spikes,
+though it had been several times attempted since the gale took off.
+
+About twelve noon, however, the vessel's motion was observed to be
+considerably less, and the sailors were enabled to walk upon deck with
+some degree of freedom.  But, to the astonishment of every one, it was
+soon discovered that the floating light was adrift!  The windlass was
+instantly manned, and the men soon gave out that there was no strain upon
+the cable.  The mizzen sail, which was bent for the occasional purpose of
+making the vessel ride more easily to the tide, was immediately set, and
+the other sails were also hoisted in a short time, when, in no small
+consternation, we bore away about one mile to the south-westward of the
+former station, and there let go the best bower anchor and cable in
+twenty fathoms water, to ride until the swell of the sea should fall,
+when it might be practicable to grapple for the moorings, and find a
+better anchorage for the ship.
+
+                                                     [Tuesday, 15th Sept.]
+
+This morning, at five a.m., the bell rung as a signal for landing upon
+the rock, a sound which, after a lapse of ten days, it is believed was
+welcomed by every one on board.  There being a heavy breach of sea at the
+eastern creek, we landed, though not without difficulty, on the western
+side, every one seeming more eager than another to get upon the rock; and
+never did hungry men sit down to a hearty meal with more appetite than
+the artificers began to pick the dulse from the rocks.  This marine plant
+had the effect of reviving the sickly, and seemed to be no less relished
+by those who were more hardy.
+
+While the water was ebbing, and the men were roaming in quest of their
+favourite morsel, the writer was examining the effects of the storm upon
+the forge and loose apparatus left upon the rock.  Six large blocks of
+granite which had been landed, by way of experiment, on the 1st instant,
+were now removed from their places and, by the force of the sea, thrown
+over a rising ledge into a hole at the distance of twelve or fifteen
+paces from the place on which they had been landed.  This was a pretty
+good evidence both of the violence of the storm and the agitation of the
+sea upon the rock.  The safety of the smith's forge was always an object
+of essential regard.  The ash-pan of the hearth or fireplace, with its
+weighty cast-iron back, had been washed from their places of supposed
+security; the chains of attachment had been broken, and these ponderous
+articles were found at a very considerable distance in a hole on the
+western side of the rock; while the tools and picks of the Aberdeen
+masons were scattered about in every direction.  It is, however,
+remarkable that not a single article was ultimately lost.
+
+This being the night on which the floating light was advertised to be
+lighted, it was accordingly exhibited, to the great joy of every one.
+
+                                                   [Wednesday, 16th Sept.]
+
+The writer was made happy to-day by the return of the Lighthouse yacht
+from a voyage to the Northern Lighthouses.  Having immediately removed on
+board of this fine vessel of eighty-one tons register, the artificers
+gladly followed; for, though they found themselves more pinched for
+accommodation on board of the yacht, and still more so in the _Smeaton_,
+yet they greatly preferred either of these to the _Pharos_, or floating
+light, on account of her rolling motion, though in all respects fitted up
+for their conveniency.
+
+The writer called them to the quarter-deck and informed them that, having
+been one mouth afloat, in terms of their agreement they were now at
+liberty to return to the workyard at Arbroath if they preferred this to
+continuing at the Bell Rock.  But they replied that, in the prospect of
+soon getting the beacon erected upon the rock, and having made a change
+from the floating light, they were now perfectly reconciled to their
+situation, and would remain afloat till the end of the working season.
+
+                                                    [Thursday, 17th Sept.]
+
+The wind was at N.E. this morning, and though they were only light airs,
+yet there was a pretty heavy swell coming ashore upon the rock.  The
+boats landed at half-past seven o'clock a.m., at the creek on the
+southern side of the rock, marked Port Hamilton.  But as one of the boats
+was in the act of entering this creek, the seaman at the bow-oar, who had
+just entered the service, having inadvertently expressed some fear from a
+heavy sea which came rolling towards the boat, and one of the artificers
+having at the same time looked round and missed a stroke with his oar,
+such a preponderance was thus given to the rowers upon the opposite side
+that when the wave struck the boat it threw her upon a ledge of shelving
+rocks, where the water left her, and she having _kanted_ to seaward, the
+next wave completely filled her with water.  After making considerable
+efforts the boat was again got afloat in the proper track of the creek,
+so that we landed without any other accident than a complete ducking.
+There being no possibility of getting a shift of clothes, the artificers
+began with all speed to work, so as to bring themselves into heat, while
+the writer and his assistants kept as much as possible in motion.  Having
+remained more than an hour upon the rock, the boats left it at half-past
+nine; and, after getting on board, the writer recommended to the
+artificers, as the best mode of getting into a state of comfort, to strip
+off their wet clothes and go to bed for an hour or two.  No further
+inconveniency was felt, and no one seemed to complain of the affection
+called 'catching cold.'
+
+                                                      [Friday, 18th Sept.]
+
+An important occurrence connected with the operations of this season was
+the arrival of the _Smeaton_ at four p.m., having in tow the six
+principal beams of the beacon-house, together with all the stanchions and
+other work on board for fixing it on the rock.  The mooring of the
+floating light was a great point gained, but in the erection of the
+beacon at this late period of the season new difficulties presented
+themselves.  The success of such an undertaking at any season was
+precarious, because a single day of bad weather occurring before the
+necessary fixtures could be made might sweep the whole apparatus from the
+rock.  Notwithstanding these difficulties, the writer had determined to
+make the trial, although he could almost have wished, upon looking at the
+state of the clouds and the direction of the wind, that the apparatus for
+the beacon had been still in the workyard.
+
+                                                    [Saturday, 19th Sept.]
+
+The main beams of the beacon were made up in two separate rafts, fixed
+with bars and bolts of iron.  One of these rafts, not being immediately
+wanted, was left astern of the floating light, and the other was kept in
+tow by the _Smeaton_, at the buoy nearest to the rock.  The Lighthouse
+yacht rode at another buoy with all hands on board that could possibly be
+spared out of the floating light.  The party of artificers and seamen
+which landed on the rock counted altogether forty in number.  At
+half-past eight o'clock a derrick, or mast of thirty feet in height, was
+erected and properly supported with guy-ropes, for suspending the block
+for raising the first principal beam of the beacon; and a winch machine
+was also bolted down to the rock for working the purchase-tackle.
+
+Upon raising the derrick, all hands on the rock spontaneously gave three
+hearty cheers, as a favourable omen of our future exertions in pointing
+out more permanently the position of the rock.  Even to this single spar
+of timber, could it be preserved, a drowning man might lay hold.  When
+the _Smeaton_ drifted on the 2nd of this month such a spar would have
+been sufficient to save us till she could have come to our relief.
+
+                                                      [Sunday, 20th Sept.]
+
+The wind this morning was variable, but the weather continued extremely
+favourable for the operations throughout the whole day.  At six a.m. the
+boats were in motion, and the raft, consisting of four of the six
+principal beams of the beacon-house, each measuring about sixteen inches
+square, and fifty feet in length, was towed to the rock, where it was
+anchored, that it might ground upon it as the water ebbed.  The sailors
+and artificers, including all hands, to-day counted no fewer than
+fifty-two, being perhaps the greatest number of persons ever collected
+upon the Bell Rock.  It was early in the tide when the boats reached the
+rock, and the men worked a considerable time up to their middle in water,
+every one being more eager than his neighbour to be useful.  Even the
+four artificers who had hitherto declined working on Sunday were to-day
+most zealous in their exertions.  They had indeed become so convinced of
+the precarious nature and necessity of the work that they never
+afterwards absented themselves from the rock on Sunday when a landing was
+practicable.
+
+Having made fast a piece of very good new line, at about two-thirds from
+the lower end of one of the beams, the purchase-tackle of the derrick was
+hooked into the turns of the line, and it was speedily raised by the
+number of men on the rock and the power of the winch tackle.  When this
+log was lifted to a sufficient height, its foot, or lower end, was
+_stepped_ into the spot which had been previously prepared for it.  Two
+of the great iron stanchions were then set in their respective holes on
+each side of the beam, when a rope was passed round them and the beam, to
+prevent it from slipping till it could be more permanently fixed.  The
+derrick, or upright spar used for carrying the tackle to raise the first
+beam, was placed in such a position as to become useful for supporting
+the upper end of it, which now became, in its turn, the prop of the
+tackle for raising the second beam.  The whole difficulty of this
+operation was in the raising and propping of the first beam, which became
+a convenient derrick for raising the second, these again a pair of shears
+for lifting the third, and the shears a triangle for raising the fourth.
+Having thus got four of the six principal beams set on end, it required a
+considerable degree of trouble to get their upper ends to fit.  Here they
+formed the apex of a cone, and were all together mortised into a large
+piece of beechwood, and secured, for the present, with ropes, in a
+temporary manner.  During the short period of one tide all that could
+further be done for their security was to put a single screw-bolt through
+the great kneed bats or stanchions on each side of the beams, and screw
+the nut home.
+
+In this manner these four principal beams were erected, and left in a
+pretty secure state.  The men had commenced while there was about two or
+three feet of water upon the side of the beacon, and as the sea was
+smooth they continued the work equally long during flood-tide.  Two of
+the boats being left at the rock to take off the joiners, who were busily
+employed on the upper parts till two o'clock p.m., this tide's work may
+be said to have continued for about seven hours, which was the longest
+that had hitherto been got upon the rock by at least three hours.
+
+When the first boats left the rock with the artificers employed on the
+lower part of the work during the flood-tide, the beacon had quite a
+novel appearance.  The beams erected formed a common base of about
+thirty-three feet, meeting at the top, which was about forty-five feet
+above the rock, and here half a dozen of the artificers were still at
+work.  After clearing the rock the boats made a stop, when three hearty
+cheers were given, which were returned with equal goodwill by those upon
+the beacon, from the personal interest which every one felt in the
+prosperity of this work, so intimately connected with his safety.
+
+All hands having returned to their respective ships, they got a shift of
+dry clothes and some refreshment.  Being Sunday, they were afterwards
+convened by signal on board of the Lighthouse yacht, when prayers were
+read; for every heart upon this occasion felt gladness, and every mind
+was disposed to be thankful for the happy and successful termination of
+the operations of this day.
+
+                                                      [Monday, 21st Sept.]
+
+The remaining two principal beams were erected in the course of this
+tide, which, with the assistance of those set up yesterday, was found to
+be a very simple operation.
+
+The six principal beams of the beacon were thus secured, at least in a
+temporary manner, in the course of two tides, or in the short space of
+about eleven hours and a half.  Such is the progress that may be made
+when active hands and willing minds set properly to work in operations of
+this kind.
+
+                                                     [Tuesday 22nd, Sept.]
+
+Having now got the weighty part of this work over, and being thereby
+relieved of the difficulty both of landing and victualling such a number
+of men, the _Smeaton_ could now be spared, and she was accordingly
+despatched to Arbroath for a supply of water and provisions, and carried
+with her six of the artificers who could best be spared.
+
+                                                   [Wednesday, 23rd Sept.]
+
+In going out of the eastern harbour, the boat which the writer steered
+shipped a sea, that filled her about one-third with water.  She had also
+been hid for a short time, by the waves breaking upon the rock, from the
+sight of the crew of the preceding boat, who were much alarmed for our
+safety, imagining for a time that she had gone down.
+
+The _Smeaton_ returned from Arbroath this afternoon, but there was so
+much sea that she could not be made fast to her moorings, and the vessel
+was obliged to return to Arbroath without being able either to deliver
+the provisions or take the artificers on board.  The Lighthouse yacht was
+also soon obliged to follow her example, as the sea was breaking heavily
+over her bows.  After getting two reefs in the mainsail, and the third or
+storm-jib set, the wind being S.W., she bent to windward, though blowing
+a hard gale, and got into St. Andrews Bay, where we passed the night
+under the lee of Fifeness.
+
+                                                    [Thursday, 24th Sept.]
+
+At two o'clock this morning we were in St. Andrews Bay, standing off and
+on shore, with strong gales of wind at S.W.; at seven we were off the
+entrance of the Tay; at eight stood towards the rock, and at ten passed
+to leeward of it, but could not attempt a landing.  The beacon, however,
+appeared to remain in good order, and by six p.m. the vessel had again
+beaten up to St. Andrews Bay, and got into somewhat smoother water for
+the night.
+
+                                                      [Friday, 25th Sept.]
+
+At seven o'clock bore away for the Bell Rock, but finding a heavy sea
+running on it were unable to land.  The writer, however, had the
+satisfaction to observe, with his telescope, that everything about the
+beacon appeared entire: and although the sea had a most frightful
+appearance, yet it was the opinion of every one that, since the erection
+of the beacon, the Bell Rock was divested of many of its terrors, and had
+it been possible to have got the boats hoisted out and manned, it might
+have even been found practicable to land.  At six it blew so hard that it
+was found necessary to strike the topmast and take in a third reef of the
+mainsail, and under this low canvas we soon reached St. Andrews Bay, and
+got again under the lee of the land for the night.  The artificers, being
+sea-hardy, were quite reconciled to their quarters on board of the
+Lighthouse yacht; but it is believed that hardly any consideration would
+have induced them again to take up their abode in the floating light.
+
+                                                    [Saturday, 26th Sept.]
+
+At daylight the yacht steered towards the Bell Rock, and at eight a.m.
+made fast to her moorings; at ten, all hands, to the amount of thirty,
+landed, when the writer had the happiness to find that the beacon had
+withstood the violence of the gale and the heavy breach of sea,
+everything being found in the same state in which it had been left on the
+21st.  The artificers were now enabled to work upon the rock throughout
+the whole day, both at low and high water, but it required the strictest
+attention to the state of the weather, in case of their being overtaken
+with a gale, which might prevent the possibility of getting them off the
+rock.
+
+Two somewhat memorable circumstances in the annals of the Bell Rock
+attended the operations of this day: one was the removal of Mr. James
+Dove, the foreman smith, with his apparatus, from the rock to the upper
+part of the beacon, where the forge was now erected on a temporary
+platform, laid on the cross beams or upper framing.  The other was the
+artificers having dined for the first time upon the rock, their dinner
+being cooked on board of the yacht, and sent to them by one of the boats.
+But what afforded the greatest happiness and relief was the removal of
+the large bellows, which had all along been a source of much trouble and
+perplexity, by their hampering and incommoding the boat which carried the
+smiths and their apparatus.
+
+                                                      [Saturday, 3rd Oct.]
+
+The wind being west to-day, the weather was very favourable for
+operations at the rock, and during the morning and evening tides, with
+the aid of torchlight, the masons had seven hours' work upon the site of
+the building.  The smiths and joiners, who landed at half-past six a.m.,
+did not leave the rock till a quarter-past eleven p.m., having been at
+work, with little intermission, for sixteen hours and three-quarters.
+When the water left the rock, they were employed at the lower parts of
+the beacon, and as the tide rose or fell, they shifted the place of their
+operations.  From these exertions, the fixing and securing of the beacon
+made rapid advancement, as the men were now landed in the morning and
+remained throughout the day.  But, as a sudden change of weather might
+have prevented their being taken off at the proper time of tide, a
+quantity of bread and water was always kept on the beacon.
+
+During this period of working at the beacon all the day, and often a
+great part of the night, the writer was much on board of the tender; but,
+while the masons could work on the rock, and frequently also while it was
+covered by the tide, he remained on the beacon; especially during the
+night, as he made a point of being on the rock to the latest hour, and
+was generally the last person who stepped into the boat.  He had laid
+this down as part of his plan of procedure; and in this way had acquired,
+in the course of the first season, a pretty complete knowledge and
+experience of what could actually be done at the Bell Rock, under all
+circumstances of the weather.  By this means also his assistants, and the
+artificers and mariners, got into a systematic habit of proceeding at the
+commencement of the work, which, it is believed, continued throughout the
+whole of the operations.
+
+                                                        [Sunday, 4th Oct.]
+
+The external part of the beacon was now finished, with its supports and
+bracing-chains, and whatever else was considered necessary for its
+stability in so far as the season would permit; and although much was
+still wanting to complete this fabric, yet it was in such a state that it
+could be left without much fear of the consequences of a storm.  The
+painting of the upper part was nearly finished this afternoon; and the
+_Smeaton_ had brought off a quantity of brushwood and other articles, for
+the purpose of heating or charring the lower part of the principal beams,
+before being laid over with successive coats of boiling pitch, to the
+height of from eight to twelve feet, or as high as the rise of
+spring-tides.  A small flagstaff having also been erected to-day, a flag
+was displayed for the first time from the beacon, by which its
+perspective effect was greatly improved.  On this, as on all like
+occasions at the Bell Rock, three hearty cheers were given; and the
+steward served out a dram of rum to all hands, while the Lighthouse
+yacht, _Smeaton_, and floating light, hoisted their colours in compliment
+to the erection.
+
+                                                        [Monday, 5th Oct.]
+
+In the afternoon, and just as the tide's work was over, Mr. John Rennie,
+engineer, accompanied by his son Mr. George, on their way to the harbour
+works of Fraserburgh, in Aberdeenshire, paid a visit to the Bell Rock, in
+a boat from Arbroath.  It being then too late in the tide for landing,
+they remained on board of the Lighthouse yacht all night, when the
+writer, who had now been secluded from society for several weeks, enjoyed
+much of Mr. Rennie's interesting conversation, both on general topics,
+and professionally upon the progress of the Bell Rock works, on which he
+was consulted as chief engineer.
+
+                                                       [Tuesday, 6th Oct.]
+
+The artificers landed this morning at nine, after which one of the boats
+returned to the ship for the writer and Messrs. Rennie, who, upon
+landing, were saluted with a display of the colours from the beacon and
+by three cheers from the workmen.  Everything was now in a prepared state
+for leaving the rock, and giving up the works afloat for this season,
+excepting some small articles, which would still occupy the smiths and
+joiners for a few days longer.  They accordingly shifted on board of the
+_Smeaton_, while the yacht left the rock for Arbroath, with Messrs.
+Rennie, the writer, and the remainder of the artificers.  But, before
+taking leave, the steward served out a farewell glass, when three hearty
+cheers were given, and an earnest wish expressed that everything, in the
+spring of 1808, might be found in the same state of good order as it was
+now about to be left.
+
+
+
+II--OPERATIONS OF 1808
+
+
+                                                       [Monday, 29th Feb.]
+
+The writer sailed from Arbroath at one a.m. in the Lighthouse yacht.  At
+seven the floating light was hailed, and all on board found to be well.
+The crew were observed to have a very healthy-like appearance, and looked
+better than at the close of the works upon the rock.  They seemed only to
+regret one thing, which was the secession of their cook, Thomas
+Elliot--not on account of his professional skill, but for his facetious
+and curious manner.  Elliot had something peculiar in his history, and
+was reported by his comrades to have seen better days.  He was, however,
+happy with his situation on board of the floating light, and, having a
+taste for music, dancing, and acting plays, he contributed much to the
+amusement of the ship's company in their dreary abode during the winter
+months.  He had also recommended himself to their notice as a good
+shipkeeper, for as it did not answer Elliot to go often ashore, he had
+always given up his turn of leave to his neighbours.  At his own desire
+he was at length paid off, when he had a considerable balance of wages to
+receive, which he said would be sufficient to carry him to the West
+Indies, and he accordingly took leave of the Lighthouse service.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 1st March]
+
+At daybreak the Lighthouse yacht, attended by a boat from the floating
+light, again stood towards the Bell Rock.  The weather felt extremely
+cold this morning, the thermometer being at 34 degrees, with the wind at
+east, accompanied by occasional showers of snow, and the marine barometer
+indicated 29.80.  At half-past seven the sea ran with such force upon the
+rock that it seemed doubtful if a landing could be effected.  At
+half-past eight, when it was fairly above water, the writer took his
+place in the floating light's boat with the artificers, while the yacht's
+boat followed, according to the general rule of having two boats afloat
+in landing expeditions of this kind, that, in case of accident to one
+boat, the other might assist.  In several unsuccessful attempts the boats
+were beat back by the breach of the sea upon the rock.  On the eastern
+side it separated into two distinct waves, which came with a sweep round
+to the western side, where they met; and at the instance of their
+confluence the water rose in spray to a considerable height.  Watching
+what the sailors term a _smooth_, we caught a favourable opportunity, and
+in a very dexterous manner the boats were rowed between the two seas, and
+made a favourable landing at the western creek.
+
+At the latter end of last season, as was formerly noticed, the beacon was
+painted white, and from the bleaching of the weather and the sprays of
+the sea the upper parts were kept clean; but within the range of the tide
+the principal beams were observed to be thickly coated with a green
+stuff, the _conferva_ of botanists.  Notwithstanding the intrusion of
+these works, which had formerly banished the numerous seals that played
+about the rock, they were now seen in great numbers, having been in an
+almost undisturbed state for six months.  It had now also, for the first
+time, got some inhabitants of the feathered tribe: in particular the
+scarth or cormorant, and the large herring-gull, had made the beacon a
+resting-place, from its vicinity to their fishing-grounds.  About a dozen
+of these birds had rested upon the cross-beams, which, in some places,
+were coated with their dung; and their flight, as the boats approached,
+was a very unlooked-for indication of life and habitation on the Bell
+Rock, conveying the momentary idea of the conversion of this fatal rock,
+from being a terror to the mariner, into a residence of man and a
+safeguard to shipping.
+
+Upon narrowly examining the great iron stanchions with which the beams
+were fixed to the rock, the writer had the satisfaction of finding that
+there was not the least appearance of working or shifting at any of the
+joints or places of connection; and, excepting the loosening of the
+bracing-chains, everything was found in the same entire state in which it
+had been left in the month of October.  This, in the estimation of the
+writer, was a matter of no small importance to the future success of the
+work.  He from that moment saw the practicability and propriety of
+fitting up the beacon, not only as a place of refuge in case of accident
+to the boats in landing, but as a residence for the artificers during the
+working months.
+
+While upon the top of the beacon the writer was reminded by the
+landing-master that the sea was running high, and that it would be
+necessary to set off while the rock afforded anything like shelter to the
+boats, which by this time had been made fast by a long line to the
+beacon, and rode with much agitation, each requiring two men with
+boat-hooks to keep them from striking each other, or from ranging up
+against the beacon.  But even under these circumstances the greatest
+confidence was felt by every one, from the security afforded by this
+temporary erection.  For, supposing the wind had suddenly increased to a
+gale, and that it had been found unadvisable to go into the boats; or,
+supposing they had drifted or sprung a leak from striking upon the rocks;
+in any of these possible and not at all improbable cases, those who might
+thus have been left upon the rock had now something to lay hold of, and,
+though occupying this dreary habitation of the sea-gull and the
+cormorant, affording only bread and water, yet _life_, would be
+preserved, and the mind would still be supported by the hope of being
+ultimately relieved.
+
+                                                     [Wednesday, 25th May]
+
+On the 25th of May the writer embarked at Arbroath, on board of the _Sir
+Joseph Banks_, for the Bell Rock, accompanied by Mr. Logan senior,
+foreman builder, with twelve masons and two smiths, together with
+thirteen seamen, including the master, mate, and steward.
+
+                                                      [Thursday, 26th May]
+
+Mr. James Wilson, now commander of the _Pharos_, floating light, and
+landing-master, in the room of Mr. Sinclair, who had left the service,
+came into the writer's cabin this morning at six o'clock, and intimated
+that there was a good appearance of landing on the rock.  Everything
+being arranged, both boats proceeded in company, and at eight a.m. they
+reached the rock.  The lighthouse colours were immediately hoisted upon
+the flagstaff of the beacon, a compliment which was duly returned by the
+tender and floating light, when three hearty cheers were given, and a
+glass of rum was served out to all hands to drink success to the
+operations of 1808.
+
+                                                        [Friday, 27th May]
+
+This morning the wind was at east, blowing a fresh gale, the weather
+being hazy, with a considerable breach of sea setting in upon the rock.
+The morning bell was therefore rung, in some doubt as to the
+practicability of making a landing.  After allowing the rock to get fully
+up, or to be sufficiently left by the tide, that the boats might have
+some shelter from the range of the sea, they proceeded at 8 a.m., and
+upon the whole made a pretty good landing; and after two hours and
+three-quarters' work returned to the ship in safety.
+
+In the afternoon the wind considerably increased, and, as a pretty heavy
+sea was still running, the tender rode very hard, when Mr. Taylor, the
+commander, found it necessary to take in the bowsprit, and strike the
+fore and main topmasts, that she might ride more easily.  After
+consulting about the state of the weather, it was resolved to leave the
+artificers on board this evening, and carry only the smiths to the rock,
+as the sharpening of the irons was rather behind, from their being so
+much broken and blunted by the hard and tough nature of the rock, which
+became much more compact and hard as the depth of excavation was
+increased.  Besides avoiding the risk of encumbering the boats with a
+number of men who had not yet got the full command of the oar in a breach
+of sea, the writer had another motive for leaving them behind.  He wanted
+to examine the site of the building without interruption, and to take the
+comparative levels of the different inequalities of its area; and as it
+would have been painful to have seen men standing idle upon the Bell
+Rock, where all moved with activity, it was judged better to leave them
+on board.  The boats landed at half-past seven p.m., and the
+landing-master, with the seamen, was employed during this tide in cutting
+the seaweeds from the several paths leading to the landing-places, to
+render walking more safe, for, from the slippery state of the surface of
+the rock, many severe tumbles had taken place.  In the meantime the
+writer took the necessary levels, and having carefully examined the site
+of the building and considered all its parts, it still appeared to be
+necessary to excavate to the average depth of fourteen inches over the
+whole area of the foundation.
+
+                                                      [Saturday, 28th May]
+
+The wind still continued from the eastward with a heavy swell; and to-day
+it was accompanied with foggy weather and occasional showers of rain.
+Notwithstanding this, such was the confidence which the erection of the
+beacon had inspired that the boats landed the artificers on the rock
+under very unpromising circumstances, at half-past eight, and they
+continued at work till half-past eleven, being a period of three hours,
+which was considered a great tide's work in the present low state of the
+foundation.  Three of the masons on board were so afflicted with
+sea-sickness that they had not been able to take any food for almost
+three days, and they were literally assisted into the boats this morning
+by their companions.  It was, however, not a little surprising to see how
+speedily these men revived upon landing on the rock and eating a little
+dulse.  Two of them afterwards assisted the sailors in collecting the
+chips of stone and carrying them out of the way of the pickmen; but the
+third complained of a pain in his head, and was still unable to do
+anything.  Instead of returning to the tender with the boats, these three
+men remained on the beacon all day, and had their victuals sent to them
+along with the smiths'.  From Mr. Dove, the foreman smith, they had much
+sympathy, for he preferred remaining on the beacon at all hazards, to be
+himself relieved from the malady of sea-sickness.  The wind continuing
+high, with a heavy sea, and the tide falling late, it was not judged
+proper to land the artificers this evening, but in the twilight the boats
+were sent to fetch the people on board who had been left on the rock.
+
+                                                        [Sunday, 29th May]
+
+The wind was from the S.W. to-day, and the signal-bell rung, as usual,
+about an hour before the period for landing on the rock.  The writer was
+rather surprised, however, to hear the landing-master repeatedly call,
+'All hands for the rock!' and, coming on deck, he was disappointed to
+find the seamen only in the boats.  Upon inquiry, it appeared that some
+misunderstanding had taken place about the wages of the artificers for
+Sundays.  They had preferred wages for seven days statedly to the former
+mode of allowing a day for each tide's work on Sunday, as they did not
+like the appearance of working for double or even treble wages on Sunday,
+and would rather have it understood that their work on that day arose
+more from the urgency of the case than with a view to emolument.  This
+having been judged creditable to their religious feelings, and readily
+adjusted to their wish, the boats proceeded to the rock, and the work
+commenced at nine a.m.
+
+                                                        [Monday, 30th May]
+
+Mr. Francis Watt commenced, with five joiners, to fit up a temporary
+platform upon the beacon, about twenty-five feet above the highest part
+of the rock.  This platform was to be used as the site of the smith's
+forge, after the beacon should be fitted up as a barrack; and here also
+the mortar was to be mixed and prepared for the building, and it was
+accordingly termed the Mortar Gallery.
+
+The landing-master's crew completed the discharging from the _Smeaton_ of
+her cargo of the cast-iron rails and timber.  It must not here be omitted
+to notice that the _Smeaton_ took in ballast from the Bell Rock,
+consisting of the shivers or chips of stone produced by the workmen in
+preparing the site of the building, which were now accumulating in great
+quantities on the rock.  These the boats loaded, after discharging the
+iron.  The object in carrying off these chips, besides ballasting the
+vessel, was to get them permanently out of the way, as they were apt to
+shift about from place to place with every gale of wind; and it often
+required a considerable time to clear the foundation a second time of
+this rubbish.  The circumstance of ballasting a ship at the Bell Rock
+afforded great entertainment, especially to the sailors; and it was
+perhaps with truth remarked that the _Smeaton_ was the first vessel that
+had ever taken on board ballast at the Bell Rock.  Mr. Pool, the
+commander of this vessel, afterwards acquainted the writer that, when the
+ballast was landed upon the quay at Leith, many persons carried away
+specimens of it, as part of a cargo from the Bell Rock; when he added,
+that such was the interest excited, from the number of specimens carried
+away, that some of his friends suggested that he should have sent the
+whole to the Cross of Edinburgh, where each piece might have sold for a
+penny.
+
+                                                       [Tuesday, 31st May]
+
+In the evening the boats went to the rock, and brought the joiners and
+smiths, and their sickly companions, on board of the tender.  These also
+brought with them two baskets full of fish, which they had caught at
+high-water from the beacon, reporting, at the same time, to their
+comrades, that the fish were swimming in such numbers over the rock at
+high-water that it was completely hid from their sight, and nothing seen
+but the movement of thousands of fish.  They were almost exclusively of
+the species called the podlie, or young coal-fish.  This discovery, made
+for the first time to-day by the workmen, was considered fortunate, as an
+additional circumstance likely to produce an inclination among the
+artificers to take up their residence in the beacon, when it came to be
+fitted up as a barrack.
+
+                                                       [Tuesday, 7th June]
+
+At three o'clock in the morning the ship's bell was rung as the signal
+for landing at the rock.  When the landing was to be made before
+breakfast, it was customary to give each of the artificers and seamen a
+dram and a biscuit, and coffee was prepared by the steward for the
+cabins.  Exactly at four o'clock the whole party landed from three boats,
+including one of those belonging to the floating light, with a part of
+that ship's crew, which always attended the works in moderate weather.
+The landing-master's boat, called the _Seaman_, but more commonly called
+the _Lifeboat_, took the lead.  The next boat, called the _Mason_, was
+generally steered by the writer; while the floating light's boat,
+_Pharos_, was under the management of the boatswain of that ship.
+
+Having now so considerable a party of workmen and sailors on the rock, it
+may be proper here to notice how their labours were directed.
+Preparations having been made last month for the erection of a second
+forge upon the beacon, the smiths commenced their operations both upon
+the lower and higher platforms.  They were employed in sharpening the
+picks and irons for the masons, and in making bats and other apparatus of
+various descriptions connected with the fitting of the railways.  The
+landing-master's crew were occupied in assisting the millwrights in
+laying the railways to hand.  Sailors, of all other descriptions of men,
+are the most accommodating in the use of their hands.  They worked freely
+with the boring-irons, and assisted in all the operations of the
+railways, acting by turns as boatmen, seamen, and artificers.  We had no
+such character on the Bell Rock as the common labourer.  All the
+operations of this department were cheerfully undertaken by the seamen,
+who, both on the rock and on shipboard, were the inseparable companions
+of every work connected with the erection of the Bell Rock Lighthouse.
+It will naturally be supposed that about twenty-five masons, occupied
+with their picks in executing and preparing the foundation of the
+lighthouse, in the course of a tide of about three hours, would make a
+considerable impression upon an area even of forty-two feet in diameter.
+But in proportion as the foundation was deepened, the rock was found to
+be much more hard and difficult to work, while the baling and pumping of
+water became much more troublesome.  A joiner was kept almost constantly
+employed in fitting the picks to their handles, which, as well as the
+points to the irons, were very frequently broken.
+
+The Bell Rock this morning presented by far the most busy and active
+appearance it had exhibited since the erection of the principal beams of
+the beacon.  The surface of the rock was crowded with men, the two forges
+flaming, the one above the other, upon the beacon, while the anvils
+thundered with the rebounding noise of their wooden supports, and formed
+a curious contrast with the occasional clamour of the surges.  The wind
+was westerly, and the weather being extremely agreeable, as soon after
+breakfast as the tide had sufficiently overflowed the rock to float the
+boats over it, the smiths, with a number of the artificers, returned to
+the beacon, carrying their fishing-tackle along with them.  In the course
+of the forenoon, the beacon exhibited a still more extraordinary
+appearance than the rock had done in the morning.  The sea being smooth,
+it seemed to be afloat upon the water, with a number of men supporting
+themselves in all the variety of attitude and position: while, from the
+upper part of this wooden house, the volumes of smoke which ascended from
+the forges gave the whole a very curious and fanciful appearance.
+
+In the course of this tide it was observed that a heavy swell was setting
+in from the eastward, and the appearance of the sky indicated a change of
+weather, while the wind was shifting about.  The barometer also had
+fallen from 30 in. to 29.6.  It was, therefore, judged prudent to shift
+the vessel to the S.W. or more distant buoy.  Her bowsprit was also soon
+afterwards taken in, the topmasts struck, and everything made _snug_, as
+seamen term it, for a gale.  During the course of the night the wind
+increased and shifted to the eastward, when the vessel rolled very hard,
+and the sea often broke over her bows with great force.
+
+                                                     [Wednesday, 8th June]
+
+Although the motion of the tender was much less than that of the floating
+light--at least, in regard to the rolling motion--yet she _sended_, or
+pitched, much.  Being also of a very handsome build, and what seamen term
+very _clean aft_, the sea often struck the counter with such force that
+the writer, who possessed the aftermost cabin, being unaccustomed to this
+new vessel, could not divest himself of uneasiness; for when her stern
+fell into the sea, it struck with so much violence as to be more like the
+resistance of a rock than the sea.  The water, at the same time, often
+rushed with great force up the rudder-case, and, forcing up the valve of
+the water-closet, the floor of his cabin was at times laid under water.
+The gale continued to increase, and the vessel rolled and pitched in such
+a manner that the hawser by which the tender was made fast to the buoy
+snapped, and she went adrift.  In the act of swinging round to the wind
+she shipped a very heavy sea, which greatly alarmed the artificers, who
+imagined that we had got upon the rock; but this, from the direction of
+the wind, was impossible.  The writer, however, sprung upon deck, where
+he found the sailors busily employed in rigging out the bowsprit and in
+setting sail.  From the easterly direction of the wind, it was considered
+most advisable to steer for the Firth of Forth, and there wait a change
+of weather.  At two p.m. we accordingly passed the Isle of May, at six
+anchored in Leith Roads, and at eight the writer landed, when he came in
+upon his friends, who were not a little surprised at his unexpected
+appearance, which gave an instantaneous alarm for the safety of things at
+the Bell Rock.
+
+                                                      [Thursday, 9th June]
+
+The wind still continued to blow very hard at E. by N., and the _Sir
+Joseph Banks_ rode heavily, and even drifted with both anchors ahead, in
+Leith Roads.  The artificers did not attempt to leave the ship last
+night; but there being upwards of fifty people on board, and the decks
+greatly lumbered with the two large boats, they were in a very crowded
+and impatient state on board.  But to-day they got ashore, and amused
+themselves by walking about the streets of Edinburgh, some in very humble
+apparel, from having only the worst of their jackets with them, which,
+though quite suitable for their work, were hardly fit for public
+inspection, being not only tattered, but greatly stained with the red
+colour of the rock.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 10th June]
+
+To-day the wind was at S.E., with light breezes and foggy weather.  At
+six a.m. the writer again embarked for the Bell Rock, when the vessel
+immediately sailed.  At eleven p.m., there being no wind, the
+kedge-anchor was _let go_ off Anstruther, one of the numerous towns on
+the coast of Fife, where we waited the return of the tide.
+
+                                                     [Saturday, 11th June]
+
+At six a.m. the _Sir Joseph_ got under weigh, and at eleven was again
+made fast to the southern buoy at the Bell Rock.  Though it was now late
+in the tide, the writer, being anxious to ascertain the state of things
+after the gale, landed with the artificers to the number of forty-four.
+Everything was found in an entire state; but, as the tide was nearly
+gone, only half an hour's work had been got when the site of the building
+was overflowed.  In the evening the boats again landed at nine, and after
+a good tide's work of three hours with torchlight, the work was left off
+at midnight.  To the distant shipping the appearance of things under
+night on the Bell Rock, when the work was going forward, must have been
+very remarkable, especially to those who were strangers to the
+operations.  Mr. John Reid, principal lightkeeper, who also acted as
+master of the floating light during the working months at the rock,
+described the appearance of numerous lights situated so low in the water,
+when seen at the distance of two or three miles, as putting him in mind
+of Milton's description of the fiends in the lower regions, adding, 'for
+it seems greatly to surpass Will-o'-the-Wisp, or any of those earthly
+spectres of which we have so often heard.'
+
+                                                       [Monday, 13th June]
+
+From the difficulties attending the landing on the rock, owing to the
+breach of sea which had for days past been around it, the artificers
+showed some backwardness at getting into the boats this morning; but
+after a little explanation this was got over.  It was always observable
+that for some time after anything like danger had occurred at the rock,
+the workmen became much more cautious, and on some occasions their
+timidity was rather troublesome.  It fortunately happened, however, that
+along with the writer's assistants and the sailors there were also some
+of the artificers themselves who felt no such scruples, and in this way
+these difficulties were the more easily surmounted.  In matters where
+life is in danger it becomes necessary to treat even unfounded prejudices
+with tenderness, as an accident, under certain circumstances, would not
+only have been particularly painful to those giving directions, but have
+proved highly detrimental to the work, especially in the early stages of
+its advancement.
+
+At four o'clock fifty-eight persons landed; but the tides being extremely
+languid, the water only left the higher parts of the rock, and no work
+could be done at the site of the building.  A third forge was, however,
+put in operation during a short time, for the greater conveniency of
+sharpening the picks and irons, and for purposes connected with the
+preparations for fixing the railways on the rock.  The weather towards
+the evening became thick and foggy, and there was hardly a breath of wind
+to ruffle the surface of the water.  Had it not, therefore, been for the
+noise from the anvils of the smiths who had been left on the beacon
+throughout the day, which afforded a guide for the boats, a landing could
+not have been attempted this evening, especially with such a company of
+artificers.  This circumstance confirmed the writer's opinion with regard
+to the propriety of connecting large bells to be rung with machinery in
+the lighthouse, to be tolled day and night during the continuance of
+foggy weather.
+
+                                                     [Thursday, 23rd June]
+
+The boats landed this evening, when the artificers had again two hours'
+work.  The weather still continuing very thick and foggy, more difficulty
+was experienced in getting on board of the vessels to-night than had
+occurred on any previous occasion, owing to a light breeze of wind which
+carried the sound of the bell, and the other signals made on board of the
+vessels, away from the rock.  Having fortunately made out the position of
+the sloop _Smeaton_ at the N.E. buoy--to which we were much assisted by
+the barking of the ship's dog,--we parted with the _Smeaton's_ boat, when
+the boats of the tender took a fresh departure for that vessel, which lay
+about half a mile to the south-westward.  Yet such is the very deceiving
+state of the tides, that, although there was a small binnacle and compass
+in the landing-master's boat, we had, nevertheless, passed the _Sir
+Joseph_ a good way, when, fortunately, one of the sailors catched the
+sound of a blowing-horn.  The only fire-arms on board were a pair of
+swivels of one-inch calibre; but it is quite surprising how much the
+sound is lost in foggy weather, as the report was heard but at a very
+short distance.  The sound from the explosion of gunpowder is so
+instantaneous that the effect of the small guns was not so good as either
+the blowing of a horn or the tolling of a bell, which afforded a more
+constant and steady direction for the pilot.
+
+                                                     [Wednesday, 6th July]
+
+Landed on the rock with the three boats belonging to the tender at five
+p.m., and began immediately to bale the water out of the foundation-pit
+with a number of buckets, while the pumps were also kept in action with
+relays of artificers and seamen.  The work commenced upon the higher
+parts of the foundation as the water left them, but it was now pretty
+generally reduced to a level.  About twenty men could be conveniently
+employed at each pump, and it is quite astonishing in how short a time so
+great a body of water could be drawn off.  The water in the
+foundation-pit at this time measured about two feet in depth, on an area
+of forty-two feet in diameter, and yet it was drawn off in the course of
+about half an hour.  After this the artificers commenced with their picks
+and continued at work for two hours and a half, some of the sailors being
+at the same time busily employed in clearing the foundation of chips and
+in conveying the irons to and from the smiths on the beacon, where they
+were sharped.  At eight o'clock the sea broke in upon us and overflowed
+the foundation-pit, when the boats returned to the tender.
+
+                                                      [Thursday, 7th July]
+
+The landing-master's bell rung this morning about four o'clock, and at
+half-past five, the foundation being cleared, the work commenced on the
+site of the building.  But from the moment of landing, the squad of
+joiners and millwrights was at work upon the higher parts of the rock in
+laying the railways, while the anvils of the smith resounded on the
+beacon, and such columns of smoke ascended from the forges that they were
+often mistaken by strangers at a distance for a ship on fire.  After
+continuing three hours at work the foundation of the building was again
+overflowed, and the boats returned to the ship at half-past eight
+o'clock. the masons and pickmen had, at this period, a pretty long day on
+board of the tender, but the smiths and joiners were kept constantly at
+work upon the beacon, the stability and great conveniency of which had
+now been so fully shown that no doubt remained as to the propriety of
+fitting it up as a barrack.  The workmen were accordingly employed,
+during the period of high-water, in making preparations for this purpose.
+
+The foundation-pit now assumed the appearance of a great platform, and
+the late tides had been so favourable that it became apparent that the
+first course, consisting of a few irregular and detached stones for
+making up certain inequalities in the interior parts of the site of the
+building, might be laid in the course of the present spring-tides.
+Having been enabled to-day to get the dimensions of the foundation, or
+first stone, accurately taken, a mould was made of its figure, when the
+writer left the rock, after the tide's work of this morning, in a fast
+rowing-boat for Arbroath; and, upon landing, two men were immediately set
+to work upon one of the blocks from Mylnefield quarry, which was prepared
+in the course of the following day, as the stone-cutters relieved each
+other, and worked both night and day, so that it was sent off in one of
+the stone-lighters without delay.
+
+                                                      [Saturday, 9th July]
+
+The site of the foundation-stone was very difficult to work, from its
+depth in the rock; but being now nearly prepared, it formed a very
+agreeable kind of pastime at high-water for all hands to land the stone
+itself upon the rock.  The landing-master's crew and artificers
+accordingly entered with great spirit into this operation.  The stone was
+placed upon the deck of the _Hedderwick_ praam-boat, which had just been
+brought from Leith, and was decorated with colours for the occasion.
+Flags were also displayed from the shipping in the offing, and upon the
+beacon.  Here the writer took his station with the greater part of the
+artificers, who supported themselves in every possible position while the
+boats towed the praam from her moorings and brought her immediately over
+the site of the building, where her grappling anchors were let go.  The
+stone was then lifted off the deck by a tackle hooked into a Lewis bat
+inserted into it, when it was gently lowered into the water and grounded
+on the site of the building, amidst the cheering acclamations of about
+sixty persons.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 10th July]
+
+At eleven o'clock the foundation-stone was laid to hand.  It was of a
+square form, containing about twenty cubic feet, and had the figures, or
+date, of 1808 simply cut upon it with a chisel.  A derrick, or spar of
+timber, having been erected at the edge of the hole and guyed with ropes,
+the stone was then hooked to the tackle and lowered into its place, when
+the writer, attended by his assistants--Mr. Peter Logan, Mr. Francis
+Watt, and Mr. James Wilson,--applied the square, the level, and the
+mallet, and pronounced the following benediction: 'May the great
+Architect of the Universe complete and bless this building,' on which
+three hearty cheers were given, and success to the future operations was
+drunk with the greatest enthusiasm.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 26th July]
+
+The wind being at S.E. this evening, we had a pretty heavy swell of sea
+upon the rock, and some difficulty attended our getting off in safety, as
+the boats got aground in the creek and were in danger of being upset.
+Upon extinguishing the torchlights, about twelve in number, the darkness
+of the night seemed quite horrible; the water being also much charged
+with the phosphorescent appearance which is familiar to every one on
+shipboard, the waves, as they dashed upon the rock, were in some degree
+like so much liquid flame.  The scene, upon the whole, was truly awful!
+
+                                                    [Wednesday, 27th July]
+
+In leaving the rock this evening everything, after the torches were
+extinguished, had the same dismal appearance as last night, but so
+perfectly acquainted were the landing-master and his crew with the
+position of things at the rock, that comparatively little inconveniency
+was experienced on these occasions when the weather was moderate; such is
+the effect of habit, even in the most unpleasant situations.  If, for
+example, it had been proposed to a person accustomed to a city life, at
+once to take up his quarters off a sunken reef and land upon it in boats
+at all hours of the night, the proposition must have appeared quite
+impracticable and extravagant; but this practice coming progressively
+upon the artificers, it was ultimately undertaken with the greatest
+alacrity.  Notwithstanding this, however, it must be acknowledged that it
+was not till after much labour and peril, and many an anxious hour, that
+the writer is enabled to state that the site of the Bell Rock Lighthouse
+is fully prepared for the first entire course of the building.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 12th Aug.]
+
+The artificers landed this morning at half-past ten, and after an hour
+and a half's work eight stones were laid, which completed the first
+entire course of the building, consisting of 123 blocks, the last of
+which was laid with three hearty cheers.
+
+                                                    [Saturday, 10th Sept.]
+
+Landed at nine a.m., and by a quarter-past twelve noon twenty-three
+stones had been laid.  The works being now somewhat elevated by the lower
+courses, we got quit of the very serious inconvenience of pumping water
+to clear the foundation-pit.  This gave much facility to the operations,
+and was noticed with expressions of as much happiness by the artificers
+as the seamen had shown when relieved of the continual trouble of
+carrying the smith's bellows off the rock prior to the erection of the
+beacon.
+
+                                                   [Wednesday, 21st Sept.]
+
+Mr. Thomas Macurich, mate of the _Smeaton_, and James Scott, one of the
+crew, a young man about eighteen years of age, immediately went into
+their boat to make fast a hawser to the ring in the top of the floating
+buoy of the moorings, and were forthwith to proceed to land their cargo,
+so much wanted, at the rock.  The tides at this period were very strong,
+and the mooring-chain, when sweeping the ground, had caught hold of a
+rock or piece of wreck by which the chain was so shortened that when the
+tide flowed the buoy got almost under water, and little more than the
+ring appeared at the surface.  When Macurich and Scott were in the act of
+making the hawser fast to the ring, the chain got suddenly disentangled
+at the bottom, and this large buoy, measuring about seven feet in height
+and three feet in diameter at the middle, tapering to both ends, being
+what seamen term a _Nun-buoy_, vaulted or sprung up with such force that
+it upset the boat, which instantly filled with water.  Mr. Macurich, with
+much exertion, succeeded in getting hold of the boat's gunwale, still
+above the surface of the water, and by this means was saved; but the
+young man Scott was unfortunately drowned.  He had in all probability
+been struck about the head by the ring of the buoy, for although
+surrounded with the oars and the thwarts of the boat which floated near
+him, yet he seemed entirely to want the power of availing himself of such
+assistance, and appeared to be quite insensible, while Pool, the master
+of the _Smeaton_, called loudly to him; and before assistance could be
+got from the tender, he was carried away by the strength of the current
+and disappeared.
+
+The young man Scott was a great favourite in the service, having had
+something uncommonly mild and complaisant in his manner; and his loss was
+therefore universally regretted.  The circumstances of his case were also
+peculiarly distressing to his mother, as her husband, who was a seaman,
+had for three years past been confined to a French prison, and the
+deceased was the chief support of the family.  In order in some measure
+to make up the loss to the poor woman for the monthly aliment regularly
+allowed her by her late son, it was suggested that a younger boy, a
+brother of the deceased, might be taken into the service.  This appeared
+to be rather a delicate proposition, but it was left to the
+landing-master to arrange according to circumstances; such was the
+resignation, and at the same time the spirit, of the poor woman, that she
+readily accepted the proposal, and in a few days the younger Scott was
+actually afloat in the place of his brother.  On representing this
+distressing case to the Board, the Commissioners were pleased to grant an
+annuity of 5 pounds to Scott's mother.
+
+The _Smeaton_, not having been made fast to the buoy, had, with the
+ebb-tide, drifted to leeward a considerable way eastward of the rock, and
+could not, till the return of the flood-tide, be worked up to her
+moorings, so that the present tide was lost, notwithstanding all
+exertions which had been made both ashore and afloat with this cargo.
+The artificers landed at six a.m.; but, as no materials could be got upon
+the rock this morning, they were employed in boring trenail holes and in
+various other operations, and after four hours' work they returned on
+board the tender.  When the _Smeaton_ got up to her moorings, the
+landing-master's crew immediately began to unload her.  There being too
+much wind for towing the praams in the usual way, they were warped to the
+rock in the most laborious manner by their windlasses, with successive
+grapplings and hawsers laid out for this purpose.  At six p.m. the
+artificers landed, and continued at work till half-past ten, when the
+remaining seventeen stones were laid which completed the third entire
+course, or fourth of the lighthouse, with which the building operations
+were closed for the season.
+
+
+
+III--OPERATIONS OF 1809
+
+
+                                                     [Wednesday, 24th May]
+
+The last night was the first that the writer, had passed in his old
+quarters on board of the floating light for about twelve months, when the
+weather was so fine and the sea so smooth that even here he felt but
+little or no motion, excepting at the turn of the tide, when the vessel
+gets into what the seamen term the _trough of the sea_.  At six a.m. Mr.
+Watt, who conducted the operations of the railways and beacon-house, had
+landed with nine artificers.  At half-past one p.m. Mr. Peter Logan had
+also landed with fifteen masons, and immediately proceeded to set up the
+crane.  The sheer-crane or apparatus for lifting the stones out of the
+praam-boats at the eastern creek had been already erected, and the
+railways now formed about two-thirds of an entire circle round the
+building: some progress had likewise been made with the reach towards the
+western landing-place.  The floors being laid, the beacon now assumed the
+appearance of a habitation.  The _Smeaton_ was at her moorings, with the
+_Fernie_ praam-boat astern, for which she was laying down moorings, and
+the tender being also at her station, the Bell Rock had again put on its
+former busy aspect.
+
+                                                     [Wednesday, 31st May]
+
+The landing-master's bell, often no very favourite sound, rung at six
+this morning; but on this occasion, it is believed, it was gladly
+received by all on board, as the welcome signal of the return of better
+weather.  The masons laid thirteen stones to-day, which the seamen had
+landed, together with other building materials.  During these twenty-four
+hours the wind was from the south, blowing fresh breezes, accompanied
+with showers of snow.  In the morning the snow showers were so thick that
+it was with difficulty the landing-master, who always steered the leading
+boat, could make his way to the rock through the drift.  But at the Bell
+Rock neither snow nor rain, nor fog nor wind, retarded the progress of
+the work, if unaccompanied by a heavy swell or breach of the sea.
+
+The weather during the months of April and May had been uncommonly
+boisterous, and so cold that the thermometer seldom exceeded 40 degrees,
+while the barometer was generally about 29.50.  We had not only hail and
+sleet, but the snow on the last day of May lay on the decks and rigging
+of the ship to the depth of about three inches; and, although now
+entering upon the month of June, the length of the day was the chief
+indication of summer.  Yet such is the effect of habit, and such was the
+expertness of the landing-master's crew, that, even in this description
+of weather, seldom a tide's work was lost.  Such was the ardour and zeal
+of the heads of the several departments at the rock, including Mr. Peter
+Logan, foreman builder, Mr. Francis Watt, foreman millwright, and Captain
+Wilson, landing-master, that it was on no occasion necessary to address
+them, excepting in the way of precaution or restraint.  Under these
+circumstances, however, the writer not unfrequently felt considerable
+anxiety, of which this day's experience will afford an example.
+
+                                                      [Thursday, 1st June]
+
+This morning, at a quarter-past eight, the artificers were landed as
+usual, and, after three hours and three-quarters' work, five stones were
+laid, the greater part of this tide having been taken up in completing
+the boring and trenailing of the stones formerly laid.  At noon the
+writer, with the seamen and artificers, proceeded to the tender, leaving
+on the beacon the joiners, and several of those who were troubled with
+sea-sickness--among whom was Mr. Logan, who remained with Mr.
+Watt--counting altogether eleven persons.  During the first and middle
+parts of these twenty-four hours the wind was from the east, blowing what
+the seamen term 'fresh breezes'; but in the afternoon it shifted to
+E.N.E., accompanied with so heavy a swell of sea that the _Smeaton_ and
+tender struck their topmasts, launched in their bolt-sprits, and 'made
+all snug' for a gale.  At four p.m. the _Smeaton_ was obliged to slip her
+moorings, and passed the tender, drifting before the wind, with only the
+foresail set.  In passing, Mr. Pool hailed that he must run for the Firth
+of Forth to prevent the vessel from 'riding under.'
+
+On board of the tender the writer's chief concern was about the eleven
+men left upon the beacon.  Directions were accordingly given that
+everything about the vessel should be put in the best possible state, to
+present as little resistance to the wind as possible, that she might have
+the better chance of riding out the gale.  Among these preparations the
+best bower cable was bent, so as to have a second anchor in readiness in
+case the mooring-hawser should give way, that every means might be used
+for keeping the vessel within sight of the prisoners on the beacon, and
+thereby keep them in as good spirits as possible.  From the same motive
+the boats were kept afloat that they might be less in fear of the vessel
+leaving her station.  The landing-master had, however, repeatedly
+expressed his anxiety for the safety of the boats, and wished much to
+have them hoisted on board.  At seven p.m. one of the boats, as he
+feared, was unluckily filled with sea from a wave breaking into her, and
+it was with great difficulty that she could be baled out and got on
+board, with the loss of her oars, rudder, and loose thwarts.  Such was
+the motion of the ship that in taking this boat on board her gunwale was
+stove in, and she otherwise received considerable damage.  Night
+approached, but it was still found quite impossible to go near the rock.
+Consulting, therefore, the safety of the second boat, she also was
+hoisted on board of the tender.
+
+At this time the cabins of the beacon were only partially covered, and
+had neither been provided with bedding nor a proper fireplace, while the
+stock of provisions was but slender.  In these uncomfortable
+circumstances the people on the beacon were left for the night, nor was
+the situation of those on board of the tender much better.  The rolling
+and pitching motion of the ship was excessive; and, excepting to those
+who had been accustomed to a residence in the floating light, it seemed
+quite intolerable.  Nothing was heard but the hissing of the winds and
+the creaking of the bulkheads or partitions of the ship; the night was,
+therefore, spent in the most unpleasant reflections upon the condition of
+the people on the beacon, especially in the prospect of the tender being
+driven from her moorings.  But, even in such a case, it afforded some
+consolation that the stability of the fabric was never doubted, and that
+the boats of the floating light were at no great distance, and ready to
+render the people on the rock the earliest assistance which the weather
+would permit.  The writer's cabin being in the sternmost part of the
+ship, which had what sailors term a good entry, or was sharp built, the
+sea, as before noticed, struck her counter with so much violence that the
+water, with a rushing noise, continually forced its way up the
+rudder-case, lifted the valve of the water-closet, and overran the cabin
+floor.  In these circumstances daylight was eagerly looked for, and
+hailed with delight, as well by those afloat as by the artificers upon
+the rock.
+
+                                                        [Friday, 2nd June]
+
+In the course of the night the writer held repeated conversations with
+the officer on watch, who reported that the weather continued much in the
+same state, and that the barometer still indicated 29.20 inches.  At six
+a.m. the landing-master considered the weather to have somewhat
+moderated; and, from certain appearances of the sky, he was of opinion
+that a change for the better would soon take place.  He accordingly
+proposed to attempt a landing at low-water, and either get the people off
+the rock, or at least ascertain what state they were in.  At nine a.m. he
+left the vessel with a boat well manned, carrying with him a supply of
+cooked provisions and a tea-kettle full of mulled port wine for the
+people on the beacon, who had not had any regular diet for about thirty
+hours, while they were exposed during that period, in a great measure,
+both to the winds and the sprays of the sea.  The boat having succeeded
+in landing, she returned at eleven a.m. with the artificers, who had got
+off with considerable difficulty, and who were heartily welcomed by all
+on board.
+
+Upon inquiry it appeared that three of the stones last laid upon the
+building had been partially lifted from their beds by the force of the
+sea, and were now held only by the trenails, and that the cast-iron
+sheer-crane had again been thrown down and completely broken.  With
+regard to the beacon, the sea at high-water had lifted part of the mortar
+gallery or lowest floor, and washed away all the lime-casks and other
+movable articles from it; but the principal parts of this fabric had
+sustained no damage.  On pressing Messrs. Logan and Watt on the situation
+of things in the course of the night, Mr. Logan emphatically said: 'That
+the beacon had an _ill-faured_ {171a} _twist_ when the sea broke upon it
+at high-water, but that they were not very apprehensive of danger.'  On
+inquiring as to how they spent the night, it appeared that they had made
+shift to keep a small fire burning, and by means of some old sails
+defended themselves pretty well from the sea sprays.
+
+It was particularly mentioned that by the exertions of James Glen, one of
+the joiners, a number of articles were saved from being washed off the
+mortar gallery.  Glen was also very useful in keeping up the spirits of
+the forlorn party.  In the early part of life he had undergone many
+curious adventures at sea, which he now recounted somewhat after the
+manner of the tales of the _Arabian Nights_.  When one observed that the
+beacon was a most comfortless lodging, Glen would presently introduce
+some of his exploits and hardships, in comparison with which the state of
+things at the beacon bore an aspect of comfort and happiness.  Looking to
+their slender stock of provisions, and their perilous and uncertain
+chance of speedy relief, he would launch out into an account of one of
+his expeditions in the North Sea, when the vessel, being much disabled in
+a storm, was driven before the wind with the loss of almost all their
+provisions; and the ship being much infested with rats, the crew hunted
+these vermin with great eagerness to help their scanty allowance.  By
+such means Glen had the address to make his companions, in some measure,
+satisfied, or at least passive, with regard to their miserable prospects
+upon this half-tide rock in the middle of the ocean.  This incident is
+noticed, more particularly, to show the effects of such a happy turn of
+mind, even under the most distressing and ill-fated circumstances.
+
+                                                     [Saturday, 17th June]
+
+At eight a.m. the artificers and sailors, forty-five in number, landed on
+the rock, and after four hours' work seven stones were laid.  The
+remainder of this tide, from the threatening appearance of the weather,
+was occupied in trenailing and making all things as secure as possible.
+At twelve noon the rock and building were again overflowed, when the
+masons and seamen went on board of the tender, but Mr. Watt, with his
+squad of ten men, remained on the beacon throughout the day.  As it blew
+fresh from the N.W. in the evening, it was found impracticable either to
+land the building artificers or to take the artificers off the beacon,
+and they were accordingly left there all night, but in circumstances very
+different from those of the 1st of this month.  The house, being now in a
+more complete state, was provided with bedding, and they spent the night
+pretty well, though they complained of having been much disturbed at the
+time of high-water by the shaking and tremulous motion of their house and
+by the plashing noise of the sea upon mortar gallery.  Here James Glen's
+versatile powers were again at work in cheering up those who seemed to be
+alarmed, and in securing everything as far as possible.  On this occasion
+he had only to recall to the recollections of some of them the former
+night which they had spent on the beacon, the wind and sea being then
+much higher, and their habitation in a far less comfortable state.
+
+The wind still continuing to blow fresh from the N.W., at five p.m. the
+writer caused a signal to be made from the tender for the _Smeaton and
+Patriot_ to slip their moorings, when they ran for Lunan Bay, an
+anchorage on the east side of the Redhead.  Those on board of the tender
+spent but a very rough night, and perhaps slept less soundly than their
+companions on the beacon, especially as the wind was at N.W., which
+caused the vessel to ride with her stern towards the Bell Rock; so that,
+in the event of anything giving way, she could hardly have escaped being
+stranded upon it.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 18th June]
+
+The weather having moderated to-day, the wind shifted to the westward.
+At a quarter-past nine a.m. the artificers landed from the tender and had
+the pleasure to find their friends who had been left on the rock quite
+hearty, alleging that the beacon was the preferable quarters of the two.
+
+                                                     [Saturday, 24th June]
+
+Mr. Peter Logan, the foreman builder, and his squad, twenty-one in
+number, landed this morning at three o'clock, and continued at work four
+hours and a quarter, and after laying seventeen stones returned to the
+tender.  At six a.m. Mr. Francis Watt and his squad of twelve men landed,
+and proceeded with their respective operations at the beacon and
+railways, and were left on the rock during the whole day without the
+necessity of having any communication with the tender, the kitchen of the
+beacon-house being now fitted up.  It was to-day, also, that Peter
+Fortune--a most obliging and well-known character in the Lighthouse
+service--was removed from the tender to the beacon as cook and steward,
+with a stock of provisions as ample as his limited store-room would
+admit.
+
+When as many stones were built as comprised this day's work, the demand
+for mortar was proportionally increased, and the task of the
+mortar-makers on these occasions was both laborious and severe.  This
+operation was chiefly performed by John Watt--a strong, active quarrier
+by profession,--who was a perfect character in his way, and extremely
+zealous in his department.  While the operations of the mortar-makers
+continued, the forge upon the gallery was not generally in use; but, as
+the working hours of the builders extended with the height of the
+building, the forge could not be so long wanted, and then a sad confusion
+often ensued upon the circumscribed floor of the mortar gallery, as the
+operations of Watt and his assistants trenched greatly upon those of the
+smiths.  Under these circumstances the boundary of the smiths was much
+circumscribed, and they were personally annoyed, especially in blowy
+weather, with the dust of the lime in its powdered state.  The
+mortar-makers, on the other hand, were often not a little distressed with
+the heat of the fire and the sparks elicited on the anvil, and not
+unaptly complained that they were placed between the 'devil and the deep
+sea.'
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 25th June]
+
+The work being now about ten feet in height, admitted of a rope-ladder
+being distended {174a} between the beacon and the building.  By this
+'Jacob's Ladder,' as the seamen termed it, a communication was kept up
+with the beacon while the rock was considerably under water.  One end of
+it being furnished with tackle-blocks, was fixed to the beams of the
+beacon, at the level of the mortar gallery, while the further end was
+connected with the upper course of the building by means of two Lewis
+bats which were lifted from course to course as the work advanced.  In
+the same manner a rope furnished with a travelling pulley was distended
+for the purpose of transporting the mortar-buckets, and other light
+articles between the beacon and the building, which also proved a great
+conveniency to the work.  At this period the rope-ladder and tackle for
+the mortar had a descent from the beacon to the building; by and by they
+were on a level, and towards the end of the season, when the solid part
+had attained its full height, the ascent was from the mortar gallery to
+the building.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 30th June]
+
+The artificers landed on the rock this morning at a quarter-past six, and
+remained at work five hours.  The cooking apparatus being now in full
+operation, all hands had breakfast on the beacon at the usual hour, and
+remained there throughout the day.  The crane upon the building had to be
+raised to-day from the eighth to the ninth course, an operation which now
+required all the strength that could be mustered for working the
+guy-tackles; for as the top of the crane was at this time about
+thirty-five feet above the rock, it became much more unmanageable.  While
+the beam was in the act of swinging round from one guy to another, a
+great strain was suddenly brought upon the opposite tackle, with the end
+of which the artificers had very improperly neglected to take a turn
+round some stationary object, which would have given them the complete
+command of the tackle.  Owing to this simple omission, the crane got a
+preponderancy to one side, and fell upon the building with a terrible
+crash.  The surrounding artificers immediately flew in every direction to
+get out of its way; but Michael Wishart, the principal builder, having
+unluckily stumbled upon one of the uncut trenails, fell upon his back.
+His body fortunately got between the movable beam and the upright shaft
+of the crane, and was thus saved; but his feet got entangled with the
+wheels of the crane and were severely injured.  Wishart, being a robust
+young man, endured his misfortune with wonderful firmness; he was laid
+upon one of the narrow framed beds of the beacon and despatched in a boat
+to the tender, where the writer was when this accident happened, not a
+little alarmed on missing the crane from the top of the building, and at
+the same time seeing a boat rowing towards the vessel with great speed.
+When the boat came alongside with poor Wishart, stretched upon a bed
+covered with blankets, a moment of great anxiety followed, which was,
+however, much relieved when, on stepping into the boat, he was accosted
+by Wishart, though in a feeble voice, and with an aspect pale as death
+from excessive bleeding.  Directions having been immediately given to the
+coxswain to apply to Mr. Kennedy at the workyard to procure the best
+surgical aid, the boat was sent off without delay to Arbroath.  The
+writer then landed at the rock, when the crane was in a very short time
+got into its place and again put in a working state.
+
+                                                        [Monday, 3rd July]
+
+The writer having come to Arbroath with the yacht, had an opportunity of
+visiting Michael Wishart, the artificer who had met with so severe an
+accident at the rock on the 30th ult., and had the pleasure to find him
+in a state of recovery.  From Dr. Stevenson's account, under whose charge
+he had been placed, hopes were entertained that amputation would not be
+necessary, as his patient still kept free of fever or any appearance of
+mortification; and Wishart expressed a hope that he might, at least, be
+ultimately capable of keeping the light at the Bell Rock, as it was not
+now likely that he would assist further in building the house.
+
+                                                      [Saturday, 8th July]
+
+It was remarked to-day, with no small demonstration of joy, that the
+tide, being neap, did not, for the first time, overflow the building at
+high-water.  Flags were accordingly hoisted on the beacon-house, and
+crane on the top of the building, which were repeated from the floating
+light, Lighthouse yacht, tender, _Smeaton_, _Patriot_, and the two
+praams.  A salute of three guns was also fired from the yacht at
+high-water, when, all the artificers being collected on the top of the
+building, three cheers were given in testimony of this important
+circumstance.  A glass of rum was then served out to all hands on the
+rock and on board of the respective ships.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 16th July]
+
+Besides laying, boring, trenailing, wedging, and grouting thirty-two
+stones, several other operations were proceeded with on the rock at
+low-water, when some of the artificers were employed at the railways, and
+at high-water at the beacon-house.  The seamen having prepared a quantity
+of tarpaulin, or cloth laid over with successive coats of hot tar, the
+joiners had just completed the covering of the roof with it.  This sort
+of covering was lighter and more easily managed than sheet-lead in such a
+situation.  As a further defence against the weather the whole exterior
+of this temporary residence was painted with three coats of white-lead
+paint.  Between the timber framing of the habitable part of the beacon
+the interstices were to be stuffed with moss, as a light substance that
+would resist dampness and check sifting winds; the whole interior was
+then to be lined with green baize cloth, so that both without and within
+the cabins were to have a very comfortable appearance.
+
+Although the building artificers generally remained on the rock
+throughout the day, and the millwrights, joiners, and smiths, while their
+number was considerable, remained also during the night, yet the tender
+had hitherto been considered as their night quarters.  But the wind
+having in the course of the day shifted to the N.W., and as the passage
+to the tender, in the boats, was likely to be attended with difficulty,
+the whole of the artificers, with Mr. Logan, the foreman, preferred
+remaining all night on the beacon, which had of late become the solitary
+abode of George-Forsyth, a jobbing upholsterer, who had been employed in
+lining the beacon-house with cloth and in fitting up the bedding.
+Forsyth was a tall, thin, and rather loose-made man, who had an utter
+aversion at climbing upon the trap-ladders of the beacon, but especially
+at the process of boating, and the motion of the ship, which he said 'was
+death itself.'  He therefore pertinaciously insisted with the
+landing-master in being left upon the beacon, with a small black dog as
+his only companion.  The writer, however, felt some delicacy in leaving a
+single individual upon the rock, who must have been so very helpless in
+case of accident.  This fabric had, from the beginning, been rather
+intended by the writer to guard against accident from the loss or damage
+of a boat, and as a place for making mortar, a smith's shop, and a store
+for tools during the working months, than as permanent quarters; nor was
+it at all meant to be possessed until tile joiner-work was completely
+finished, and his own cabin, and that for the foreman, in readiness, when
+it was still to be left to the choice of the artificers to occupy the
+tender or the beacon.  He, however, considered Forsyth's partiality and
+confidence in the latter as rather a fortunate occurrence.
+
+                                                    [Wednesday, 19th July]
+
+The whole of the artificers, twenty-three in number, now removed of their
+own accord from the tender, to lodge in the beacon, together with Peter
+Fortune, a person singularly adapted for a residence of this kind, both
+from the urbanity of his manners and the versatility of his talents.
+Fortune, in his person, was of small stature, and rather corpulent.
+Besides being a good Scots cook, he had acted both as groom and
+house-servant; he had been a soldier, a sutler, a writer's clerk, and an
+apothecary, from which he possessed the art of writing and suggesting
+recipes, and had hence, also, perhaps, acquired a turn for making
+collections in natural history.  But in his practice in surgery on the
+Bell Rock, for which he received an annual fee of three guineas, he is
+supposed to have been rather partial to the use of the lancet.  In short,
+Peter was the _factotum_ of the beacon-house, where he ostensibly acted
+in the several capacities of cook, steward, surgeon, and barber, and kept
+a statement of the rations or expenditure of the provisions with the
+strictest integrity.
+
+In the present important state of the building, when it had just attained
+the height of sixteen feet, and the upper courses, and especially the
+imperfect one, were in the wash of the heaviest seas, an express boat
+arrived at the rock with a letter from Mr. Kennedy, of the workyard,
+stating that in consequence of the intended expedition to Walcheren, an
+embargo had been laid on shipping at all the ports of Great Britain: that
+both the _Smeaton_ and _Patriot_ were detained at Arbroath, and that but
+for the proper view which Mr. Ramsey, the port officer, had taken of his
+orders, neither the express boat nor one which had been sent with
+provisions and necessaries for the floating light would have been
+permitted to leave the harbour.  The writer set off without delay for
+Arbroath, and on landing used every possible means with the official
+people, but their orders were deemed so peremptory that even boats were
+not permitted to sail from any port upon the coast.  In the meantime, the
+collector of the Customs at Montrose applied to the Board at Edinburgh,
+but could, of himself, grant no relief to the Bell Rock shipping.
+
+At this critical period Mr. Adam Duff, then Sheriff of Forfarshire, now
+of the county of Edinburgh, and _ex officio_ one of the Commissioners of
+the Northern Lighthouses, happened to be at Arbroath.  Mr. Duff took an
+immediate interest in representing the circumstances of the case to the
+Board of Customs at Edinburgh.  But such were the doubts entertained on
+the subject that, on having previously received the appeal from the
+collector at Montrose, the case had been submitted to the consideration
+of the Lords of the Treasury, whose decision was now waited for.
+
+In this state of things the writer felt particularly desirous to get the
+thirteenth course finished, that the building might be in a more secure
+state in the event of bad weather.  An opportunity was therefore embraced
+on the 25th, in sailing with provisions for the floating light, to carry
+the necessary stones to the rock for this purpose, which were landed and
+built on the 26th and 27th.  But so closely was the watch kept up that a
+Custom-house officer was always placed on board of the _Smeaton_ and
+_Patriot_ while they were afloat, till the embargo was especially removed
+from the lighthouse vessels.  The artificers at the Bell Rock had been
+reduced to fifteen, who were regularly supplied with provisions, along
+with the crew of the floating light, mainly through the port officer's
+liberal interpretation of his orders.
+
+                                                       [Tuesday, 1st Aug.]
+
+There being a considerable swell and breach of sea upon the rock
+yesterday, the stones could not be got landed till the day following,
+when the wind shifted to the southward and the weather improved.  But
+to-day no less than seventy-eight blocks of stone were landed, of which
+forty were built, which completed the fourteenth and part of the
+fifteenth courses.  The number of workmen now resident in the
+beacon-house was augmented to twenty-four, including the landing-master's
+crew from the tender and the boat's crew from the floating light, who
+assisted at landing the stones.  Those daily at work upon the rock at
+this period amounted to forty-six.  A cabin had been laid out for the
+writer on the beacon, but his apartment had been the last which was
+finished, and he had not yet taken possession of it; for though he
+generally spent the greater part of the day, at this time, upon the rock,
+yet he always slept on board of the tender.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 11th Aug.]
+
+The wind was at S. E. on the 11th, and there was so very heavy a swell of
+sea upon the rock that no boat could approach it.
+
+                                                     [Saturday, 12th Aug.]
+
+The gale still continuing from the S.E., the sea broke with great
+violence both upon the building and the beacon.  The former being
+twenty-three feet in height, the upper part of the crane erected on it
+having been lifted from course to course as the building advanced, was
+now about thirty-six feet above the rock.  From observations made on the
+rise of the sea by this crane, the artificers were enabled to estimate
+its height to be about fifty feet above the rock, while the sprays fell
+with a most alarming noise upon their cabins.  At low-water, in the
+evening, a signal was made from the beacon, at the earnest desire of some
+of the artificers, for the boats to come to the rock; and although this
+could not be effected without considerable hazard, it was, however,
+accomplished, when twelve of their number, being much afraid, applied to
+the foreman to be relieved, and went on board of the tender.  But the
+remaining fourteen continued on the rock, with Mr. Peter Logan, the
+foreman builder.  Although this rule of allowing an option to every man
+either to remain on the rock or return to the tender was strictly adhered
+to, yet, as it would have been extremely inconvenient to have the men
+parcelled out in this manner, it became necessary to embrace the first
+opportunity of sending those who had left the beacon to the workyard,
+with as little appearance of intention as possible, lest it should hurt
+their feelings, or prevent others from acting according to their wishes,
+either in landing on the rock or remaining on the beacon.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 15th Aug.]
+
+The wind had fortunately shifted to the S.W. this morning, and though a
+considerable breach was still upon the rock, yet the landing-master's
+crew were enabled to get one praam-boat, lightly loaded with five stones,
+brought in safety to the western creek; these stones were immediately
+laid by the artificers, who gladly embraced the return of good weather to
+proceed with their operations.  The writer had this day taken possession
+of his cabin in the beacon-house.  It was small, but commodious, and was
+found particularly convenient in coarse and blowing weather, instead of
+being obliged to make a passage to the tender in an open boat at all
+times, both during the day and the night, which was often attended with
+much difficulty and danger.
+
+                                                     [Saturday, 19th Aug.]
+
+For some days past the weather had been occasionally so thick and foggy
+that no small difficulty was experienced in going even between the rock
+and the tender, though quite at hand.  But the floating light's boat lost
+her way so far in returning on board that the first land she made, after
+rowing all night, was Fifeness, a distance of about fourteen miles.  The
+weather having cleared in the morning, the crew stood off again for the
+floating light, and got on board in a half-famished and much exhausted
+state, having been constantly rowing for about sixteen hours.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 20th Aug.]
+
+The weather being very favourable to-day, fifty-three stones were landed,
+and the builders were not a little gratified in having built the
+twenty-second course, consisting of fifty-one stones, being the first
+course which had been completed in one day.  This, as a matter of course,
+produced three hearty cheers.  At twelve noon prayers were read for the
+first time on the Bell Rock; those present, counting thirty, were crowded
+into the upper apartment of the beacon, where the writer took a central
+position, while two of the artificers, joining hands, supported the
+Bible.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 25th Aug.]
+
+To-day the artificers laid forty-five stones, which completed the
+twenty-fourth course, reckoning above the first entire one, and the
+twenty-sixth above the rock.  This finished the solid part of the
+building, and terminated the height of the outward casing of granite,
+which is thirty-one feet six inches above the rock or site of the
+foundation-stone, and about seventeen feet above high-water of
+spring-tides.  Being a particular crisis in the progress of the
+lighthouse, the landing and laying of the last stone for the season was
+observed with the usual ceremonies.
+
+From observations often made by the writer, in so far as such can be
+ascertained, it appears that no wave in the open seas, in an unbroken
+state, rises more than from seven to nine feet above the general surface
+of the ocean.  The Bell Rock Lighthouse may therefore now be considered
+at from eight to ten feet above the height of the waves; and, although
+the sprays and heavy seas have often been observed, in the present state
+of the building, to rise to the height of fifty feet, and fall with a
+tremendous noise on the beacon-house, yet such seas were not likely to
+make any impression on a mass of solid masonry, containing about 1400
+tons,
+
+                                                    [Wednesday, 30th Aug.]
+
+The whole of the artificers left the rock at mid-day, when the tender
+made sail for Arbroath, which she reached about six p.m.  The vessel
+being decorated with colours, and having fired a salute of three guns on
+approaching the harbour, the workyard artificers, with a multitude of
+people, assembled at the harbour, when mutual cheering and
+congratulations took place between those afloat and those on the quays.
+The tender had now, with little exception, been six months on the station
+at the Bell Rock, and during the last four months few of the squad of
+builders had been ashore.  In particular, Mr. Peter Logan, the foreman,
+and Mr. Robert Selkirk, principal builder, had never once left the rock.
+The artificers, having made good wages during their stay, like seamen
+upon a return voyage, were extremely happy, and spent the evening with
+much innocent mirth and jollity.
+
+In reflecting upon the state of the matters at the Bell Rock during the
+working months, when the writer was much with the artificers, nothing can
+equal the happy manner in which these excellent workmen spent their time.
+They always went from Arbroath to their arduous task cheering and they
+generally returned in the same hearty state.  While at the rock, between
+the tides, they amused themselves in reading, fishing, music, playing
+cards, draughts, etc., or in sporting with one another.  In the workyard
+at Arbroath the young men were almost, without exception, employed in the
+evening at school, in writing and arithmetic, and not a few were learning
+architectural drawing, for which they had every convenience and facility,
+and were, in a very obliging manner, assisted in their studies by Mr.
+David Logan, clerk of the works.  It therefore affords the most pleasing
+reflections to look back upon the pursuits of about sixty individuals who
+for years conducted themselves, on all occasions, in a sober and rational
+manner.
+
+
+
+IV--OPERATIONS OF 1810
+
+
+                                                      [Thursday, 10th May]
+
+The wind had shifted to-day to W.N.W., when the writer, with considerable
+difficulty, was enabled to land upon the rock for the first time this
+season, at ten a.m.  Upon examining the state of the building, and
+apparatus in general, he had the satisfaction to find everything in good
+order.  The mortar in all the joints was perfectly entire.  The building,
+now thirty feet in height, was thickly coated with _fuci_ to the height
+of about fifteen feet, calculating from the rock: on the eastern side,
+indeed, the growth of seaweed was observable to the full height of thirty
+feet, and even on the top or upper bed of the last-laid course,
+especially towards the eastern side, it had germinated, so as to render
+walking upon it somewhat difficult.
+
+The beacon-house was in a perfectly sound state, and apparently just as
+it had been left in the month of November.  But the tides being neap, the
+lower parts, particularly where the beams rested on the rock, could not
+now be seen.  The floor of the mortar gallery having been already laid
+down by Mr. Watt and his men on a former visit, was merely soaked with
+the sprays; but the joisting-beams which supported it had, in the course
+of the winter, been covered with a fine downy conferva produced by the
+range of the sea.  They were also a good deal whitened with the mute of
+the cormorant and other sea-fowls, which had roosted upon the beacon in
+winter.  Upon ascending to the apartments, it was found that the motion
+of the sea had thrown open the door of the cook-house: this was only shut
+with a single latch, that in case of shipwreck at the Bell Rock the
+mariner might find ready access to the shelter of this forlorn
+habitation, where a supply of provisions was kept; and being within two
+miles and a half of the floating light, a signal could readily be
+observed, when a boat might be sent to his relief as the weather
+permitted.  An arrangement for this purpose formed one of the
+instructions on board of the floating light, but happily no instance
+occurred for putting it in practice.  The hearth or fireplace of the
+cook-house was built of brick in as secure a manner as possible, to
+prevent accident from fire; but some of the plaster-work had shaken
+loose, from its damp state and the tremulous motion of the beacon in
+stormy weather.  The writer next ascended to the floor which was occupied
+by the cabins of himself and his assistants, which were in tolerably good
+order, having only a damp and musty smell.  The barrack for the
+artificers, over all, was next visited; it had now a very dreary and
+deserted appearance when its former thronged state was recollected.  In
+some parts the water had come through the boarding, and had discoloured
+the lining of green cloth, but it was, nevertheless, in a good habitable
+condition.  While the seamen were employed in landing a stock of
+provisions, a few of the artificers set to work with great eagerness to
+sweep and clean the several apartments.  The exterior of the beacon was,
+in the meantime, examined, and found in perfect order.  The painting,
+though it had a somewhat blanched appearance, adhered firmly both on the
+sides and roof, and only two or three panes of glass were broken in the
+cupola, which had either been blown out by the force of the wind, or
+perhaps broken by sea-fowl.
+
+Having on this occasion continued upon the building and beacon a
+considerable time after the tide had begun to flow, the artificers were
+occupied in removing the forge from the top of the building, to which the
+gangway or wooden bridge gave great facility; and, although it stretched
+or had a span of forty-two feet, its construction was extremely simple,
+while the road-way was perfectly firm and steady.  In returning from this
+visit to the rock every one was pretty well soused in spray before
+reaching the tender at two o'clock p.m., where things awaited the landing
+party in as comfortable a way as such a situation would admit.
+
+                                                        [Friday, 11th May]
+
+The wind was still easterly, accompanied with rather a heavy swell of sea
+for the operations in hand.  A landing was, however, made this morning,
+when the artificers were immediately employed in scraping the seaweed off
+the upper course of the building, in order to apply the moulds of the
+first course of the staircase, that the joggle-holes might be marked off
+in the upper course of the solid.  This was also necessary previously to
+the writer's fixing the position of the entrance door, which was
+regulated chiefly by the appearance of the growth of the seaweed on the
+building, indicating the direction of the heaviest seas, on the opposite
+side of which the door was placed.  The landing-master's crew succeeded
+in towing into the creek on the western side of the rock the praam-boat
+with the balance-crane, which had now been on board of the praam for five
+days.  The several pieces of this machine, having been conveyed along the
+railways upon the waggons to a position immediately under the bridge,
+were elevated to its level, or thirty feet above the rock, in the
+following manner.  A chain-tackle was suspended over a pulley from the
+cross-beam connecting the tops of the kingposts of the bridge, which was
+worked by a winch-machine with wheel, pinion, and barrel, round which
+last the chain was wound.  This apparatus was placed on the beacon side
+of the bridge, at the distance of about twelve feet from the cross-beam
+and pulley in the middle of the bridge.  Immediately under the cross-beam
+a hatch was formed in the roadway of the bridge, measuring seven feet in
+length and five feet in breadth, made to shut with folding boards like a
+double door, through which stones and other articles were raised; the
+folding doors were then let down, and the stone or load was gently
+lowered upon a waggon which was wheeled on railway trucks towards the
+lighthouse.  In this manner the several castings of the balance-crane
+were got up to the top of the solid of the building.
+
+The several apartments of the beacon-house having been cleaned out and
+supplied with bedding, a sufficient stock of provisions was put into the
+store, when Peter Fortune, formerly noticed, lighted his fire in the
+beacon for the first time this season.  Sixteen artificers at the same
+time mounted to their barrack-room, and all the foremen of the works also
+took possession of their cabin, all heartily rejoiced at getting rid of
+the trouble of boating and the sickly motion of the tender.
+
+                                                      [Saturday, 12th May]
+
+The wind was at E.N.E., blowing so fresh, and accompanied with so much
+sea, that no stones could be landed to-day.  The people on the rock,
+however, were busily employed in screwing together the balance-crane,
+cutting out the joggle-holes in the upper course, and preparing all
+things for commencing the building operations.
+
+                                                        [Sunday, 13th May]
+
+The weather still continues boisterous, although the barometer has all
+the while stood at about 30 inches.  Towards evening the wind blew so
+fresh at E. by S. that the boats both of the _Smeaton_ and tender were
+obliged to be hoisted in, and it was feared that the _Smeaton_ would have
+to slip her moorings.  The people on the rock were seen busily employed,
+and had the balance-crane apparently ready for use, but no communication
+could be had with them to-day.
+
+                                                        [Monday, 14th May]
+
+The wind continued to blow so fresh, and the _Smeaton_ rode so heavily
+with her cargo, that at noon a signal was made for her getting under
+weigh, when she stood towards Arbroath; and on board of the tender we are
+still without any communication with the people on the rock, where the
+sea was seen breaking over the top of the building in great sprays, and
+raging with much agitation among the beams of the beacon.
+
+                                                      [Thursday, 17th May]
+
+The wind, in the course of the day, had shifted from north to west; the
+sea being also considerably less, a boat landed on the rock at six p.m.,
+for the first time since the 11th, with the provisions and water brought
+off by the _Patriot_.  The inhabitants of the beacon were all well, but
+tired above measure for want of employment, as the balance-crane and
+apparatus was all in readiness.  Under these circumstances they felt no
+less desirous of the return of good weather than those afloat, who were
+continually tossed with the agitation of the sea.  The writer, in
+particular, felt himself almost as much fatigued and worn-out as he had
+been at any period since the commencement of the work.  The very backward
+state of the weather at so advanced a period of the season unavoidably
+created some alarm, lest he should be overtaken with bad weather at a
+late period of the season, with the building operations in an unfinished
+state.  These apprehensions were, no doubt, rather increased by the
+inconveniences of his situation afloat, as the tender rolled and pitched
+excessively at times.  This being also his first off-set for the season,
+every bone of his body felt sore with preserving a sitting posture while
+he endeavoured to pass away the time in reading; as for writing, it was
+wholly impracticable.  He had several times entertained thoughts of
+leaving the station for a few days and going into Arbroath with the
+tender till the weather should improve; but as the artificers had been
+landed on the rock he was averse to this at the commencement of the
+season, knowing also that he would be equally uneasy in every situation
+till the first cargo was landed: and he therefore resolved to continue at
+his post until this should be effected.
+
+                                                        [Friday, 18th May]
+
+The wind being now N.W., the sea was considerably run down, and this
+morning at five o'clock the landing-master's crew, thirteen in number,
+left the tender; and having now no detention with the landing of
+artificers, they proceeded to unmoor the _Hedderwick_ praam-boat, and
+towed her alongside of the _Smeaton_: and in the course of the day
+twenty-three blocks of stone, three casks of pozzolano, three of sand,
+three of lime, and one of Roman cement, together with three bundles of
+trenails and three of wedges, were all landed on the rock and raised the
+top of the building by means of the tackle suspended from the cross-beam
+on the middle of the bridge.  The stones were then moved along the bridge
+on the waggon to the building within reach of the balance-crane, with
+which they were laid in their respective places on the building.  The
+masons immediately thereafter proceeded to bore the trenail-holes into
+the course below, and otherwise to complete the one in hand.  When the
+first stone was to be suspended by the balance-crane, the bell on the
+beacon was rung, and all the artificers and seamen were collected on the
+building.  Three hearty cheers were given while it was lowered into its
+place, and the steward served round a glass of rum, when success was
+drunk to the further progress of the building.
+
+                                                        [Sunday, 20th May]
+
+The wind was southerly to-day, but there was much less sea than
+yesterday, and the landing-master's crew were enabled to discharge and
+land twenty-three pieces of stone and other articles for the work.  The
+artificers had completed the laying of the twenty-seventh or first course
+of the staircase this morning, and in the evening they finished the
+boring, trenailing, wedging, and grouting it with mortar.  At twelve
+o'clock noon the beacon-house bell was rung, and all hands were collected
+on the top of the building, where prayers were read for the first time on
+the lighthouse, which forcibly struck every one, and had, upon the whole,
+a very impressive effect.
+
+From the hazardous situation of the beacon-house with regard to fire,
+being composed wholly of timber, there was no small risk from accident:
+and on this account one of the most steady of the artificers was
+appointed to see that the fire of the cooking-house, and the lights in
+general, were carefully extinguished at stated hours.
+
+                                                        [Monday, 4th June]
+
+This being the birthday of our much-revered Sovereign King George III,
+now in the fiftieth year of his reign, the shipping of the Lighthouse
+service were this morning decorated with colours according to the taste
+of their respective captains.  Flags were also hoisted upon the
+beacon-house and balance-crane on the top of the building.  At twelve
+noon a salute was fired from the tender, when the King's health was
+drunk, with all the honours, both on the rock and on board of the
+shipping.
+
+                                                       [Tuesday, 5th June]
+
+As the lighthouse advanced in height, the cubical contents of the stones
+were less, but they had to be raised to a greater height; and the walls,
+being thinner, were less commodious for the necessary machinery and the
+artificers employed, which considerably retarded the work.  Inconvenience
+was also occasionally experienced from the men dropping their coats,
+hats, mallets, and other tools, at high-water, which were carried away by
+the tide; and the danger to the people themselves was now greatly
+increased.  Had any of them fallen from the beacon or building at
+high-water, while the landing-master's crew were generally engaged with
+the craft at a distance, it must have rendered the accident doubly
+painful to those on the rock, who at this time had no boat, and
+consequently no means of rendering immediate and prompt assistance.  In
+such cases it would have been too late to have got a boat by signal from
+the tender.  A small boat, which could be lowered at pleasure, was
+therefore suspended by a pair of davits projected from the cook-house,
+the keel being about thirty feet from the rock.  This boat, with its
+tackle was put under the charge of James Glen, of whose exertions on the
+beacon mention has already been made, and who, having in early life been
+a seaman, was also very expert in the management of a boat.  A life-buoy
+was likewise suspended from the bridge, to which a coil of line two
+hundred fathoms in length was attached, which could be let out to a
+person falling into the water, or to the people in the boat, should they
+not be able to work her with the oars.
+
+                                                       [Tuesday, 7th June]
+
+To-day twelve stones were landed on the rock, being the remainder of the
+_Patriot's_ cargo; and the artificers built the thirty-ninth course,
+consisting of fourteen stones.  The Bell Rock works had now a very busy
+appearance, as the lighthouse was daily getting more into form.  Besides
+the artificers and their cook, the writer and his servant were also
+lodged on the beacon, counting in all twenty-nine; and at low-water the
+landing-master's crew, consisting of from twelve to fifteen seamen, were
+employed in transporting the building materials, working the landing
+apparatus on the rock, and dragging the stone waggons along the railways.
+
+                                                        [Friday, 8th June]
+
+In the course of this day the weather varied much.  In the morning it was
+calm, in the middle part of the day there were light airs of wind from
+the south, and in the evening fresh breezes from the east.  The barometer
+in the writer's cabin in the beacon-house oscillated from 30 inches to
+30.42, and the weather was extremely pleasant.  This, in any situation,
+forms one of the chief comforts of life; but, as may easily be conceived,
+it was doubly so to people stuck, as it were, upon a pinnacle in the
+middle of the ocean.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 10th June]
+
+One of the praam-boats had been brought to the rock with eleven stones,
+notwithstanding the perplexity which attended the getting of those
+formerly landed taken up to the building.  Mr. Peter Logan, the foreman
+builder, interposed, and prevented this cargo from being delivered; but
+the landing-master's crew were exceedingly averse to this arrangement,
+from an idea that "ill luck" would in future attend the praam, her cargo,
+and those who navigated her, from thus reversing her voyage.  It may be
+noticed that this was the first instance of a praam-boat having been sent
+from the Bell Rock with any part of her cargo on board, and was
+considered so uncommon an occurrence that it became a topic of
+conversation among the seamen and artificers.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 12th June]
+
+To-day the stones formerly sent from the rock were safely landed,
+notwithstanding the augury of the seamen in consequence of their being
+sent away two days before.
+
+                                                     [Thursday, 14th June]
+
+To-day twenty-seven stones and eleven joggle-pieces were landed, part of
+which consisted of the forty-seventh course, forming the storeroom floor.
+The builders were at work this morning by four o'clock, in the hopes of
+being able to accomplish the laying of the eighteen stones of this
+course.  But at eight o'clock in the evening they had still two to lay,
+and as the stones of this course were very unwieldy, being six feet in
+length, they required much precaution and care both in lifting and laying
+them.  It was only on the writer's suggestion to Mr. Logan that the
+artificers were induced to leave off, as they had intended to complete
+this floor before going to bed.  The two remaining stones were, however,
+laid in their places without mortar when the bell on the beacon was rung,
+and, all hands being collected on the top of the building, three hearty
+cheers were given on covering the first apartment.  The steward then
+served out a dram to each, when the whole retired to their barrack much
+fatigued, but with the anticipation of the most perfect repose even in
+the "hurricane-house," amidst the dashing seas on the Bell Rock.
+
+While the workmen were at breakfast and dinner it was the writer's usual
+practice to spend his time on the walls of the building, which,
+notwithstanding the narrowness of the track, nevertheless formed his
+principal walk when the rock was under water.  But this afternoon he had
+his writing-desk set upon the storeroom floor, when he wrote to Mrs.
+Stevenson--certainly the first letter dated from the Bell Rock
+_Lighthouse_--giving a detail of the fortunate progress of the work with
+an assurance that the lighthouse would soon be completed at the rate at
+which it now proceeded; and, the _Patriot_ having sailed for Arbroath in
+the evening, he felt no small degree of pleasure in despatching this
+communication to his family.
+
+The weather still continuing favourable for the operations at the rock,
+the work proceeded with much energy, through the exertions both of the
+seamen and artificers.  For the more speedy and effectual working of the
+several tackles in raising the materials as the building advanced in
+height, and there being a great extent of railway to attend to, which
+required constant repairs, two additional millwrights were added to the
+complement on the rock, which, including the writer, now counted
+thirty-one in all.  So crowded was the men's barrack that the beds were
+ranged five tier in height, allowing only about one foot eight inches for
+each bed.  The artificers commenced this morning at five o'clock, and, in
+the course of the day, they laid the forty-eighth and forty-ninth
+courses, consisting each of sixteen blocks.  From the favourable state of
+the weather, and the regular manner in which the work now proceeded, the
+artificers had generally from four to seven extra hours' work, which,
+including their stated wages of 3s. 4d., yielded them from 5s. 4d. to
+about 6s. 10d. per day besides their board; even the postage of their
+letters was paid while they were at the Bell Rock.  In these advantages
+the foremen also shared, having about double the pay and amount of
+premiums of the artificers.  The seamen being less out of their element
+in the Bell Rock operations than the landsmen, their premiums consisted
+in a slump sum payable at the end of the season, which extended from
+three to ten guineas.
+
+As the laying of the floors was somewhat tedious, the landing-master and
+his crew had got considerably beforehand with the building artificers in
+bringing materials faster to the rock than they could be built.  The
+seamen having, therefore, some spare time, were occasionally employed
+during fine weather in dredging or grappling for the several mushroom
+anchors and mooring-chains which had been lost in the vicinity of the
+Bell Rock during the progress of the work by the breaking loose and
+drifting of the floating buoys.  To encourage their exertions in this
+search, five guineas were offered as a premium for each set they should
+find; and, after much patient application, they succeeded to-day in
+hooking one of these lost anchors with its chain.
+
+It was a general remark at the Bell Rock, as before noticed, that fish
+were never plenty in its neighbourhood excepting in good weather.
+Indeed, the seamen used to speculate about the state of the weather from
+their success in fishing.  When the fish disappeared at the rock, it was
+considered a sure indication that a gale was not far off, as the fish
+seemed to seek shelter in deeper water from the roughness of the sea
+during these changes in the weather.  At this time the rock, at
+high-water, was completely covered with podlies, or the fry of the
+coal-fish, about six or eight inches in length.  The artificers sometimes
+occupied half an hour after breakfast and dinner in catching these little
+fishes, but were more frequently supplied from the boats of the tender.
+
+                                                     [Saturday, 16th June]
+
+The landing-master having this day discharged the _Smeaton_ and loaded
+the _Hedderwick and Dickie_ praam-boats with nineteen stones, they were
+towed to their respective moorings, when Captain Wilson, in consequence
+of the heavy swell of sea, came in his boat to the beacon-house to
+consult with the writer as to the propriety of venturing the loaded
+praam-boats with their cargoes to the rock while so much sea was running.
+After some dubiety expressed on the subject, in which the ardent mind of
+the landing-master suggested many arguments in favour of his being able
+to convey the praams in perfect safety, it was acceded to.  In bad
+weather, and especially on occasions of difficulty like the present, Mr.
+Wilson, who was an extremely active seaman, measuring about five feet
+three inches in height, of a robust habit, generally dressed himself in
+what he called a _monkey jacket_, made of thick duffle cloth, with a pair
+of Dutchman's petticoat trousers, reaching only to his knees, where they
+were met with a pair of long water-tight boots; with this dress, his
+glazed hat, and his small brass speaking trumpet in his hand, he bade
+defiance to the weather.  When he made his appearance in this most
+suitable attire for the service his crew seemed to possess additional
+life, never failing to use their utmost exertions when the captain put on
+his _storm rigging_.  They had this morning commenced loading the
+praam-boats at four o'clock, and proceeded to tow them into the eastern
+landing-place, which was accomplished with much dexterity, though not
+without the risk of being thrown, by the force of the sea, on certain
+projecting ledges of the rock.  In such a case the loss even of a single
+stone would have greatly retarded the work.  For the greater safety in
+entering the creek it was necessary to put out several warps and
+guy-ropes to guide the boats into its narrow and intricate entrance; and
+it frequently happened that the sea made a clean breach over the praams,
+which not only washed their decks, but completely drenched the crew in
+water.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 17th June]
+
+It was fortunate, in the present state of the weather, that the fiftieth
+course was in a sheltered spot, within the reach of the tackle of the
+winch-machine upon the bridge; a few stones were stowed upon the bridge
+itself, and the remainder upon the building, which kept the artificers at
+work.  The stowing of the materials upon the rock was the department of
+Alexander Brebner, mason, who spared no pains in attending to the safety
+of the stones, and who, in the present state of the work, when the stones
+were landed faster than could be built, generally worked till the water
+rose to his middle.  At one o'clock to-day the bell rung for prayers, and
+all hands were collected into the upper barrack-room of the beacon-house,
+when the usual service was performed.
+
+The wind blew very hard in the course of last night from N.E., and to-day
+the sea ran so high that no boat could approach the rock.  During the
+dinner-hour, when the writer was going to the top of the building as
+usual, but just as he had entered the door and was about to ascend the
+ladder, a great noise was heard overhead, and in an instant he was soused
+in water from a sea which had most unexpectedly come over the walls,
+though now about fifty-eight feet in height.  On making his retreat he
+found himself completely whitened by the lime, which had mixed with the
+water while dashing down through the different floors; and, as nearly as
+he could guess, a quantity equal to about a hogshead had come over the
+walls, and now streamed out at the door.  After having shifted himself,
+he again sat down in his cabin, the sea continuing to run so high that
+the builders did not resume their operations on the walls this afternoon.
+The incident just noticed did not create more surprise in the mind of the
+writer than the sublime appearance of the waves as they rolled
+majestically over the rock.  This scene he greatly enjoyed while sitting
+at his cabin window; each wave approached the beacon like a vast scroll
+unfolding; and in passing discharged a quantity of air, which he not only
+distinctly felt, but was even sufficient to lift the leaves of a book
+which lay before him.  These waves might be ten or twelve feet in height,
+and about 250 feet in length, their smaller end being towards the north,
+where the water was deep, and they were opened or cut through by the
+interposition of the building and beacon.  The gradual manner in which
+the sea, upon these occasions, is observed to become calm or to subside,
+is a very remarkable feature of this phenomenon.  For example, when a
+gale is succeeded by a calm, every third or fourth wave forms one of
+these great seas, which occur in spaces of from three to five minutes, as
+noted by the writer's watch; but in the course of the next tide they
+become less frequent, and take off so as to occur only in ten or fifteen
+minutes; and, singular enough, at the third tide after such gales, the
+writer has remarked that only one or two of these great waves appear in
+the course of the whole tide.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 19th June]
+
+The 19th was a very unpleasant and disagreeable day, both for the seamen
+and artificers, as it rained throughout with little intermission from
+four a.m. till eleven p.m., accompanied with thunder and lightning,
+during which period the work nevertheless continued unremittingly, and
+the builders laid the fifty-first and fifty-second courses.  This state
+of weather was no less severe upon the mortar-makers, who required to
+temper or prepare the mortar of a thicker or thinner consistency, in some
+measure, according to the state of the weather.  From the elevated
+position of the building, the mortar gallery on the beacon was now much
+lower, and the lime-buckets were made to traverse upon a rope distended
+between it and the building.  On occasions like the present, however,
+there was often a difference of opinion between the builders and the
+mortar-makers.  John Watt, who had the principal charge of the mortar,
+was a most active worker, but, being somewhat of an irascible temper, the
+builders occasionally amused themselves at his expense; for while he was
+eagerly at work with his large iron-shod pestle in the mortar-tub, they
+often sent down contradictory orders, some crying, 'Make it a little
+stiffer, or thicker, John,' while others called out to make it 'thinner,'
+to which he generally returned very speedy and sharp replies, so that
+these conversations at times were rather amusing.
+
+During wet weather the situation of the artificers on the top of the
+building was extremely disagreeable; for although their work did not
+require great exertion, yet, as each man had his particular part to
+perform, either in working the crane or in laying the stones, it required
+the closest application and attention, not only on the part of Mr. Peter
+Logan, the foreman, who was constantly on the walls, but also of the
+chief workmen.  Robert Selkirk, the principal builder, for example, had
+every stone to lay in its place.  David Cumming, a mason, had the charge
+of working the tackle of the balance-weight, and James Scott, also a
+mason, took charge of the purchase with which the stones were laid; while
+the pointing the joints of the walls with cement was intrusted to William
+Reid and William Kennedy, who stood upon a scaffold suspended over the
+walls in rather a frightful manner.  The least act of carelessness or
+inattention on the part of any of these men might have been fatal, not
+only to themselves, but also to the surrounding workmen, especially if
+any accident had happened to the crane itself, while the material damage
+or loss of a single stone would have put an entire stop to the operations
+until another could have been brought from Arbroath.  The artificers,
+having wrought seven and a half hours of extra time to-day, had 3s. 9d.
+of extra pay, while the foremen had 7s. 6d. over and above their stated
+pay and board.  Although, therefore, the work was both hazardous and
+fatiguing, yet, the encouragement being considerable, they were always
+very cheerful, and perfectly reconciled to the confinement and other
+disadvantages of the place.
+
+During fine weather, and while the nights were short, the duty on board
+of the floating light was literally nothing but a waiting on, and
+therefore one of her boats, with a crew of five men, daily attended the
+rock, but always returned to the vessel at night.  The carpenter,
+however, was one of those who was left on board of the ship, as he also
+acted in the capacity of assistant lightkeeper, being, besides, a person
+who was apt to feel discontent and to be averse to changing his quarters,
+especially to work with the millwrights and joiners at the rock, who
+often, for hours together, wrought knee-deep, and not unfrequently up to
+the middle, in water.  Mr. Watt having about this time made a requisition
+for another hand, the carpenter was ordered to attend the rock in the
+floating light's boat.  This he did with great reluctance, and found so
+much fault that he soon got into discredit with his messmates.  On this
+occasion he left the Lighthouse service, and went as a sailor in a vessel
+bound for America--a step which, it is believed, he soon regretted, as,
+in the course of things, he would, in all probability, have accompanied
+Mr. John Reid, the principal lightkeeper of the floating light, to the
+Bell Rock Lighthouse as his principal assistant.  The writer had a wish
+to be of service to this man, as he was one of those who came off to the
+floating light in the month of September 1807, while she was riding at
+single anchor after the severe gale of the 7th, at a time when it was
+hardly possible to make up this vessel's crew; but the crossness of his
+manner prevented his reaping the benefit of such intentions.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 22nd June]
+
+The building operations had for some time proceeded more slowly, from the
+higher parts of the lighthouse requiring much longer time than an equal
+tonnage of the lower courses.  The duty of the landing-master's crew had,
+upon the whole, been easy of late; for though the work was occasionally
+irregular, yet the stones being lighter, they were more speedily lifted
+from the hold of the stone vessel to the deck of the praam-boat, and
+again to the waggons on the railway, after which they came properly under
+the charge of the foreman builder.  It is, however, a strange, though not
+an uncommon, feature in the human character, that, when people have least
+to complain of, they are most apt to become dissatisfied, as was now the
+case with the seamen employed in the Bell Rock service about their
+rations of beer.  Indeed, ever since the carpenter of the floating light,
+formerly noticed, had been brought to the rock, expressions of discontent
+had been manifested upon various occasions.  This being represented to
+the writer, he sent for Captain Wilson, the landing-master, and Mr.
+Taylor, commander of the tender, with whom he talked over the subject.
+They stated that they considered the daily allowance of the seamen in
+every respect ample, and that, the work being now much lighter than
+formerly, they had no just ground for complaint; Mr. Taylor adding that,
+if those who now complained 'were even to be fed upon soft bread and
+turkeys, they would not think themselves right.'  At twelve noon the work
+of the landing-master's crew was completed for the day; but at four
+o'clock, while the rock was under water, those on the beacon were
+surprised by the arrival of a boat from the tender without any signal
+having been made from the beacon.  It brought the following note to the
+writer from the landing-master's crew:--
+
+                                               '_Sir Joseph Banks Tender_.
+
+    'SIR,--We are informed by our masters that our allowance is to be as
+    before, and it is not sufficient to serve us, for we have been at
+    work since four o'clock this morning, and we have come on board to
+    dinner, and there is no beer for us before to-morrow morning, to
+    which a sufficient answer is required before we go from the beacon;
+    and we are, Sir, your most obedient servants.'
+
+On reading this, the writer returned a verbal message, intimating that an
+answer would be sent on board of the tender, at the same time ordering
+the boat instantly to quit the beacon.  He then addressed the following
+note to the landing-master:--
+
+                                      '_Beacon-house_, 22_nd_ _June_ 1810,
+                                                       _Five o'clock p.m_.
+
+    'SIR,--I have just now received a letter purporting to be from the
+    landing-master's crew and seamen on board of the _Sir Joseph Banks_,
+    though without either date or signature; in answer to which I enclose
+    a statement of the daily allowance of provisions for the seamen in
+    this service, which you will post up in the ship's galley, and at
+    seven o'clock this evening I will come on board to inquire into this
+    unexpected and most unnecessary demand for an additional allowance of
+    beer.  In the enclosed you will not find any alteration from the
+    original statement, fixed in the galley at the beginning of the
+    season.  I have, however, judged this mode of giving your people an
+    answer preferable to that of conversing with them on the beacon. --I
+    am, Sir, your most obedient servant,
+
+                                                         ROBERT STEVENSON.
+
+    'To CAPTAIN WILSON.'
+
+    '_Beacon House_, 22_nd_ _June_ 1810.--Schedule of the daily allowance
+    of provisions to be served out on board of the _Sir Joseph Banks_
+    tender: "1.5 lb. beef; 1 lb. bread; 8 oz. oatmeal; 2 oz. barley; 2
+    oz. butter; 3 quarts beer; vegetables and salt no stated allowance.
+    When the seamen are employed in unloading the _Smeaton_ and
+    _Patriot_, a draught of beer is, as formerly, to be allowed from the
+    stock of these vessels.  Further, in wet and stormy weather, or when
+    the work commences very early in the morning, or continues till a
+    late hour at night, a glass of spirits will also be served out to the
+    crew as heretofore, on the requisition of the landing-master."
+
+                                                        ROBERT STEVENSON.'
+
+On writing this letter and schedule, a signal was made on the beacon for
+the landing-master's boat, which immediately came to the rock, and the
+schedule was afterwards stuck up in the tender's galley.  When sufficient
+time had been allowed to the crew to consider of their conduct, a second
+signal was made for a boat, and at seven o'clock the writer left the Bell
+Rock, after a residence of four successive weeks in the beacon-house.
+The first thing which occupied his attention on board of the tender was
+to look round upon the lighthouse, which he saw, with some degree of
+emotion and surprise, now vying in height with the beacon-house; for
+although he had often viewed it from the extremity of the western railway
+on the rock, yet the scene, upon the whole, seemed far more interesting
+from the tender's moorings at the distance of about half a mile.
+
+The _Smeaton_ having just arrived at her moorings with a cargo, a signal
+was made for Captain Pool to come on board of the tender, that he might
+be at hand to remove from the service any of those who might persist in
+their discontented conduct.  One of the two principal leaders in this
+affair, the master of one of the praam-boats, who had also steered the
+boat which brought the letter to the beacon, was first called upon deck,
+and asked if he had read the statement fixed up in the galley this
+afternoon, and whether he was satisfied with it.  He replied that he had
+read the paper, but was not satisfied, as it held out no alteration in
+the allowance, on which he was immediately ordered into the _Smeaton's_
+boat.  The next man called had but lately entered the service, and, being
+also interrogated as to his resolution, he declared himself to be of the
+same mind with the praam-master, and was also forthwith ordered into the
+boat.  The writer, without calling any more of the seamen, went forward
+to the gangway, where they were collected and listening to what was
+passing upon deck.  He addressed them at the hatchway, and stated that
+two of their companions had just been dismissed the service and sent on
+board of the _Smeaton_ to be conveyed to Arbroath.  He therefore wished
+each man to consider for himself how far it would be proper, by any
+unreasonableness of conduct, to place themselves in a similar situation,
+especially as they were aware that it was optional in him either to
+dismiss them or send them on board a man-of-war.  It might appear that
+much inconveniency would be felt at the rock by a change of hands at this
+critical period, by checking for a time the progress of a building so
+intimately connected with the best interests of navigation; yet this
+would be but of a temporary nature, while the injury to themselves might
+be irreparable.  It was now therefore, required of any man who, in this
+disgraceful manner, chose to leave the service, that he should instantly
+make his appearance on deck while the _Smeaton's_ boat was alongside.
+But those below having expressed themselves satisfied with their
+situation-viz., William Brown, George Gibb, Alexander Scott, John Dick,
+Robert Couper, Alexander Shephard, James Grieve, David Carey, William
+Pearson, Stuart Eaton, Alexander Lawrence, and John Spink--were
+accordingly considered as having returned to their duty.  This
+disposition to mutiny, which had so strongly manifested itself, being now
+happily suppressed, Captain Pool got orders to proceed for Arbroath Bay,
+and land the two men he had on board, and to deliver the following letter
+at the office of the workyard:--
+
+                              '_On board of the Tender off the Bell Rock_,
+                                  22_nd_ _June_ 1810, _eight o'clock p.m._
+
+    'DEAR SIR,--A discontented and mutinous spirit having manifested
+    itself of late among the landing-master's crew, they struck work
+    to-day and demanded an additional allowance of beer, and I have found
+    it necessary to dismiss D---d and M---e, who are now sent on shore
+    with the _Smeaton_.  You will therefore be so good as to pay them
+    their wages, including this day only.  Nothing can be more
+    unreasonable than the conduct of the seamen on this occasion, as the
+    landing-master's crew not only had their allowance on board of the
+    tender, but, in the course of this day, they had drawn no fewer than
+    twenty-four quart pots of beer from the stock of the _Patriot_ while
+    unloading her. --I remain, yours truly,
+
+                                                         ROBERT STEVENSON.
+
+    'To Mr. LACHLAN KENNEDY,
+          Bell Rock Office, Arbroath.'
+
+On despatching this letter to Mr. Kennedy, the writer returned to the
+beacon about nine o'clock, where this afternoon's business had produced
+many conjectures, especially when the _Smeaton_ got under weigh, instead
+of proceeding to land her cargo.  The bell on the beacon being rung, the
+artificers were assembled on the bridge, when the affair was explained to
+them.  He, at the same time, congratulated them upon the first appearance
+of mutiny being happily set at rest by the dismissal of its two principal
+abettors.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 24th June]
+
+At the rock the landing of the materials and the building operations of
+the light-room store went on successfully, and in a way similar to those
+of the provision store.  To-day it blew fresh breezes; but the seamen
+nevertheless landed twenty-eight stones, and the artificers built the
+fifty-eighth and fifty-ninth courses.  The works were visited by Mr.
+Murdoch, junior, from Messrs. Boulton and Watt's works of Soho.  He
+landed just as the bell rung for prayers, after which the writer enjoyed
+much pleasure from his very intelligent conversation; and, having been
+almost the only stranger he had seen for some weeks, he parted with him,
+after a short interview, with much regret.
+
+                                                     [Thursday, 28th June]
+
+Last night the wind had shifted to north-east, and, blowing fresh, was
+accompanied with a heavy surf upon the rock.  Towards high-water it had a
+very grand and wonderful appearance.  Waves of considerable magnitude
+rose as high as the solid or level of the entrance-door, which, being
+open to the south-west, was fortunately to the leeward; but on the
+windward side the sprays flew like lightning up the sloping sides of the
+building; and although the walls were now elevated sixty-four feet above
+the rock, and about fifty-two feet from high-water mark, yet the
+artificers were nevertheless wetted, and occasionally interrupted, in
+their operations on the top of the walls.  These appearances were, in a
+great measure, new at the Bell Rock, there having till of late been no
+building to conduct the seas, or object to compare with them.  Although,
+from the description of the Eddystone Lighthouse, the mind was prepared
+for such effects, yet they were not expected to the present extent in the
+summer season; the sea being most awful to-day, whether observed from the
+beacon or the building.  To windward, the sprays fell from the height
+above noticed in the most wonderful cascades, and streamed down the walls
+of the building in froth as white as snow.  To leeward of the lighthouse
+the collision or meeting of the waves produced a pure white kind of
+_drift_; it rose about thirty feet in height, like a fine downy mist,
+which, in its fall, fell upon the face and hands more like a dry powder
+than a liquid substance.  The effect of these seas, as they raged among
+the beams and dashed upon the higher parts of the beacon, produced a
+temporary tremulous motion throughout the whole fabric, which to a
+stranger must have been frightful.
+
+                                                        [Sunday, 1st July]
+
+The writer had now been at the Bell Rock since the latter end of May, or
+about six weeks, during four of which he had been a constant inhabitant
+of the beacon without having been once off the rock.  After witnessing
+the laying of the sixty-seventh or second course of the bedroom
+apartment, he left the rock with the tender and went ashore, as some
+arrangements were to be made for the future conduct of the works at
+Arbroath, which were soon to be brought to a close; the landing-master's
+crew having, in the meantime, shifted on board of the _Patriot_.  In
+leaving the rock, the writer kept his eyes fixed upon the lighthouse,
+which had recently got into the form of a house, having several tiers or
+stories of windows.  Nor was he unmindful of his habitation in the
+beacon--now far overtopped by the masonry,--where he had spent several
+weeks in a kind of active retirement, making practical experiment of the
+fewness of the positive wants of man.  His cabin measured not more than
+four feet three inches in breadth on the floor; and though, from the
+oblique direction of the beams of the beacon, it widened towards the top,
+yet it did not admit of the full extension of his arms when he stood on
+the floor; while its length was little more than sufficient for
+suspending a cot-bed during the night, calculated for being triced up to
+the roof through the day, which left free room for the admission of
+occasional visitants.  His folding table was attached with hinges,
+immediately under the small window of the apartment, and his books,
+barometer, thermometer, portmanteau, and two or three camp-stools, formed
+the bulk of his movables.  His diet being plain, the paraphernalia of the
+table were proportionally simple; though everything had the appearance of
+comfort, and even of neatness, the walls being covered with green cloth
+formed into panels with red tape, and his bed festooned with curtains of
+yellow cotton-stuff.  If, in speculating upon the abstract wants of man
+in such a state of exclusion, one were reduced to a single book, the
+Sacred Volume--whether considered for the striking diversity of its
+story, the morality of its doctrine, or the important truths of its
+gospel--would have proved by far the greatest treasure.
+
+                                                        [Monday, 2nd July]
+
+In walking over the workyard at Arbroath this morning, the writer found
+that the stones of the course immediately under the cornice were all in
+hand, and that a week's work would now finish the whole, while the
+intermediate courses lay ready numbered and marked for shipping to the
+rock.  Among other subjects which had occupied his attention to-day was a
+visit from some of the relations of George Dall, a young man who had been
+impressed near Dundee in the month of February last; a dispute had arisen
+between the magistrates of that burgh and the Regulating Officer as to
+his right of impressing Dall, who was _bona fide_ one of the protected
+seamen in the Bell Rock service.  In the meantime, the poor lad was
+detained, and ultimately committed to the prison of Dundee, to remain
+until the question should be tried before the Court of Session.  His
+friends were naturally very desirous to have him relieved upon bail.
+But, as this was only to be done by the judgment of the Court, all that
+could be said was that his pay and allowances should be continued in the
+same manner as if he had been upon the sick-list.  The circumstances of
+Dall's case were briefly these:--He had gone to see some of his friends
+in the neighbourhood of Dundee, in winter, while the works were
+suspended, having got leave of absence from Mr. Taylor, who commanded the
+Bell Rock tender, and had in his possession one of the Protection Medals.
+Unfortunately, however, for Dall, the Regulating Officer thought proper
+to disregard these documents, as, according to the strict and literal
+interpretation of the Admiralty regulations, a seaman does not stand
+protected unless he is actually on board of his ship, or in a boat
+belonging to her, or has the Admiralty protection in his possession.
+This order of the Board, however, cannot be rigidly followed in practice;
+and therefore, when the matter is satisfactorily stated to the Regulating
+Officer, the impressed man is generally liberated.  But in Dall's case
+this was peremptorily refused, and he was retained at the instance of the
+magistrates.  The writer having brought the matter under the
+consideration of the Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouses, they
+authorised it to be tried on the part of the Lighthouse Board, as one of
+extreme hardship.  The Court, upon the first hearing, ordered Dall to be
+liberated from prison; and the proceedings never went further.
+
+                                                     [Wednesday, 4th July]
+
+Being now within twelve courses of being ready for building the cornice,
+measures were taken for getting the stones of it and the parapet-wall of
+the light-room brought from Edinburgh, where, as before noticed, they had
+been prepared and were in readiness for shipping.  The honour of
+conveying the upper part of the lighthouse, and of landing the last stone
+of the building on the rock, was considered to belong to Captain Pool of
+the _Smeaton_, who had been longer in the service than the master of the
+_Patriot_.  The _Smeaton_ was, therefore, now partly loaded with old
+iron, consisting of broken railways and other lumber which had been lying
+about the rock.  After landing these at Arbroath, she took on board James
+Craw, with his horse and cart, which could now be spared at the workyard,
+to be employed in carting the stones from Edinburgh to Leith.  Alexander
+Davidson and William Kennedy, two careful masons, were also sent to take
+charge of the loading of the stones at Greenside, and stowing them on
+board of the vessel at Leith.  The writer also went on board, with a view
+to call at the Bell Rock and to take his passage up the Firth of Forth.
+The wind, however, coming to blow very fresh from the eastward, with
+thick and foggy weather, it became necessary to reef the mainsail and set
+the second jib.  When in the act of making a tack towards the tender, the
+sailors who worked the head-sheets were, all of a sudden, alarmed with
+the sound of the smith's hammer and anvil on the beacon, and had just
+time to put the ship about to save her from running ashore on the
+northwestern point of the rock, marked 'James Craw's Horse.'  On looking
+towards the direction from whence the sound came, the building and
+beacon-house were seen, with consternation, while the ship was hailed by
+those on the rock, who were no less confounded at seeing the near
+approach of the _Smeaton_; and, just as the vessel cleared the danger,
+the smith and those in the mortar gallery made signs in token of their
+happiness at our fortunate escape.  From this occurrence the writer had
+an experimental proof of the utility of the large bells which were in
+preparation to be rung by the machinery of the revolving light; for, had
+it not been the sound of the smith's anvil, the _Smeaton_, in all
+probability, would have been wrecked upon the rock.  In case the vessel
+had struck, those on board might have been safe, having now the
+beacon-house, as a place of refuge; but the vessel, which was going at a
+great velocity, must have suffered severely, and it was more than
+probable that the horse would have been drowned, there being no means of
+getting him out of the vessel.  Of this valuable animal and his master we
+shall take an opportunity of saying more in another place.
+
+                                                      [Thursday, 5th July]
+
+The weather cleared up in the course of the night, but the wind shifted
+to the N.E. and blew very fresh.  From the force of the wind, being now
+the period of spring-tides, a very heavy swell was experienced at the
+rock.  At two o'clock on the following morning the people on the beacon
+were in a state of great alarm about their safety, as the sea had broke
+up part of the floor of the mortar gallery!, which was thus cleared of
+the lime-casks and other buoyant articles; and, the alarm-bell being
+rung, all hands were called to render what assistance was in their power
+for the safety of themselves and the materials.  At this time some would
+willingly have left the beacon and gone into the building: the sea,
+however, ran so high that there was no passage along the bridge of
+communication, and, when the interior of the lighthouse came to be
+examined in the morning, it appeared that great quantities of water had
+come over the walls--now eighty feet in height--and had run down through
+the several apartments and out at the entrance door.
+
+The upper course of the lighthouse at the workyard of Arbroath was
+completed on the 6th, and the whole of the stones were, therefore, now
+ready for being shipped to the rock.  From the present state of the works
+it was impossible that the two squads of artificers at Arbroath and the
+Bell Rock could meet together at this period; and as in public works of
+this kind, which had continued for a series of years, it is not customary
+to allow the men to separate without what is termed a "finishing-pint,"
+five guineas were for this purpose placed at the disposal of Mr. David
+Logan, clerk of works.  With this sum the stone-cutters at Arbroath had a
+merry meeting in their barrack, collected their sweethearts and friends,
+and concluded their labours with a dance.  It was remarked, however, that
+their happiness on this occasion was not without alloy.  The
+consideration of parting and leaving a steady and regular employment, to
+go in quest of work and mix with other society, after having been
+harmoniously lodged for years together in one large "guildhall or
+barrack," was rather painful.
+
+                                                        [Friday, 6th July]
+
+While the writer was at Edinburgh he was fortunate enough to meet with
+Mrs. Dickson, only daughter of the late celebrated Mr. Smeaton, whose
+works at the Eddystone Lighthouse had been of such essential consequence
+to the operations at the Bell Rock.  Even her own elegant accomplishments
+are identified with her father's work, she having herself made the
+drawing of the vignette on the title-page of the _Narrative of the
+Eddystone Lighthouse_.  Every admirer of the works of that singularly
+eminent man must also feel an obligation to her for the very
+comprehensive and distinct account given of his life, which is attached
+to his reports, published, in three volumes quarto, by the Society of
+Civil Engineers.  Mrs. Dickson, being at this time returning from a tour
+to the Hebrides and Western Highlands of Scotland, had heard of the Bell
+Rock works, and from their similarity to those of the Eddystone was
+strongly impressed with a desire of visiting the spot.  But on inquiring
+for the writer at Edinburgh, and finding from him that the upper part of
+the lighthouse, consisting of nine courses, might be seen in the
+immediate vicinity, and also that one of the vessels which, in compliment
+to her father's memory, had been named the _Smeaton_, might also now be
+seen in Leith, she considered herself extremely fortunate; and having
+first visited the works at Greenside, she afterwards went to Leith to see
+the _Smeaton_, then loading for the Bell Rock.  On stepping on board,
+Mrs. Dickson seemed to be quite overcome with so many concurrent
+circumstances, tending in a peculiar manner to revive and enliven the
+memory of her departed father, and, on leaving the vessel, she would not
+be restrained from presenting the crew with a piece of money.  The
+_Smeaton_ had been named spontaneously, from a sense of the obligation
+which a public work of the description of the Bell Rock owed to the
+labours and abilities of Mr. Smeaton.  The writer certainly never could
+have anticipated the satisfaction which he this day felt in witnessing
+the pleasure it afforded to the only representative of this great man's
+family.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 20th July]
+
+The gale from the N.E. still continued so strong, accompanied with a
+heavy sea, that the _Patriot_ could not approach her moorings; and
+although the tender still kept her station, no landing was made to-day at
+the rock.  At high-water it was remarked that the spray rose to the
+height of about sixty feet upon the building.  The _Smeaton_ now lay in
+Leith loaded, but, the wind and weather being so unfavourable for her
+getting down the Firth, she did not sail till this afternoon.  It may be
+here proper to notice that the loading of the centre of the light-room
+floor, or last principal stone of the building, did not fail, when put on
+board, to excite an interest among those connected with the work.  When
+the stone was laid upon the cart to be conveyed to Leith, the seamen
+fixed an ensign-staff and flag into the circular hole in the centre of
+the stone, and decorated their own hats, and that of James Craw, the Bell
+Rock carter, with ribbons; even his faithful and trusty horse Brassey was
+ornamented with bows and streamers of various colours.  The masons also
+provided themselves with new aprons, and in this manner the cart was
+attended in its progress to the ship.  When the cart came opposite the
+Trinity House of Leith, the officer of that corporation made his
+appearance dressed in his uniform, with his staff of office; and when it
+reached the harbour, the shipping in the different tiers where the
+_Smeaton_ lay hoisted their colours, manifesting by these trifling
+ceremonies the interest with which the progress of this work was regarded
+by the public, as ultimately tending to afford safety and protection to
+the mariner.  The wind had fortunately shifted to the S.W., and about
+five o'clock this afternoon the _Smeaton_ reached the Bell Rock.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 27th July]
+
+The artificers had finished the laying of the balcony course, excepting
+the centre-stone of the light-room floor, which, like the centres of the
+other floors, could not be laid in its place till after the removal of
+the foot and shaft of the balance-crane.  During the dinner-hour, when
+the men were off work the writer generally took some exercise by walking
+round the walls when the rock was under water; but to-day his boundary
+was greatly enlarged, for, instead of the narrow wall as a path, he felt
+no small degree of pleasure in walking round the balcony and passing out
+and in at the space allotted for the light-room door.  In the labours of
+this day both the artificers and seamen felt their work to be extremely
+easy compared with what it had been for some days past.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 29th July]
+
+Captain Wilson and his crew had made preparations for landing the last
+stone, and, as may well be supposed, this was a day of great interest at
+the Bell Rock.  'That it might lose none of its honours,' as he expressed
+himself, the _Hedderwick_ praam-boat, with which the first stone of the
+building had been landed, was appointed also to carry the last.  At seven
+o'clock this evening the seamen hoisted three flags upon the
+_Hedderwick_, when the colours of the _Dickie_ praam-boat, tender,
+_Smeaton_, floating light, beacon-house, and lighthouse were also
+displayed; and, the weather being remarkably fine, the whole presented a
+very gay appearance, and, in connection with the associations excited,
+the effect was very pleasing.  The praam which carried the stone was
+towed by the seamen in gallant style to the rock, and, on its arrival,
+cheers were given as a finale to the landing department.
+
+                                                       [Monday, 30th July]
+
+The ninetieth or last course of the building having been laid to-day,
+which brought the masonry to the height of one hundred and two feet six
+inches, the lintel of the light-room door, being the finishing-stone of
+the exterior walls, was laid with due formality by the writer, who, at
+the same time, pronounced the following benediction: "May the Great
+Architect of the Universe, under whose blessing this perilous work has
+prospered, preserve it as a guide to the mariner."
+
+                                                        [Friday, 3rd Aug.]
+
+At three p.m., the necessary preparations having been made, the
+artificers commenced the completing of the floors of the several
+apartments, and at seven o'clock the centre-stone of the light-room floor
+was laid, which may be held as finishing the masonry of this important
+national edifice.  After going through the usual ceremonies observed by
+the brotherhood on occasions of this kind, the writer, addressing himself
+to the artificers and seamen who were present, briefly alluded to the
+utility of the undertaking as a monument of the wealth of British
+commerce, erected through the spirited measures of the Commissioners of
+the Northern Lighthouses by means of the able assistance of those who now
+surrounded him.  He then took an opportunity of stating that toward those
+connected with this arduous work he would ever retain the most heartfelt
+regard in all their interests.
+
+                                                      [Saturday, 4th Aug.]
+
+When the bell was rung as usual on the beacon this morning, every one
+seemed as if he were at a loss what to make of himself.  At this period
+the artificers at the rock consisted of eighteen masons, two joiners, one
+millwright, one smith, and one mortar-maker, besides Messrs. Peter Logan
+and Francis Watt, foremen, counting in all twenty-five; and matters were
+arranged for proceeding to Arbroath this afternoon with all hands.  The
+_Sir Joseph Banks_ tender had by this time been afloat, with little
+intermission, for six months, during greater part of which the artificers
+had been almost constantly off at the rock, and were now much in want of
+necessaries of almost every description.  Not a few had lost different
+articles of clothing, which had dropped into the sea from the beacon and
+building.  Some wanted jackets; others, from want of hats, wore
+nightcaps; each was, in fact, more or less curtailed in his wardrobe, and
+it must be confessed that at best the party were but in a very tattered
+condition.  This morning was occupied in removing the artificers and
+their bedding on board of the tender; and although their personal luggage
+was easily shifted, the boats had, nevertheless, many articles to remove
+from the beacon-house, and were consequently employed in this service
+till eleven a.m.  All hands being collected and just ready to embark, as
+the water had nearly overflowed the rock, the writer, in taking leave,
+after alluding to the harmony which had ever marked the conduct of those
+employed on the Bell Rock, took occasion to compliment the great zeal,
+attention, and abilities of Mr. Peter Logan and Mr. Francis Watt,
+foremen; Captain James Wilson, landing-master; and Captain David Taylor,
+commander of the tender, who, in their several departments, had so
+faithfully discharged the duties assigned to them, often under
+circumstances the most difficult and trying.  The health of these
+gentlemen was drunk with much warmth of feeling by the artificers and
+seamen, who severally expressed the satisfaction they had experienced in
+acting under them; after which the whole party left the rock.
+
+In sailing past the floating light mutual compliments were made by a
+display of flags between that vessel and the tender; and at five p.m. the
+latter vessel entered the harbour of Arbroath, where the party were
+heartily welcomed by a numerous company of spectators, who had collected
+to see the artificers arrive after so long an absence from the port.  In
+the evening the writer invited the foremen and captains of the service,
+together with Mr. David Logan, clerk of works at Arbroath, and Mr.
+Lachlan Kennedy, engineer's clerk and book-keeper, and some of their
+friends, to the principal inn, where the evening was spent very happily;
+and after 'His Majesty's Health' and 'The Commissioners of the Northern
+Lighthouses' had been given, 'Stability to the Bell Rock Lighthouse' was
+hailed as a standing toast in the Lighthouse service.
+
+                                                        [Sunday, 5th Aug.]
+
+The author has formerly noticed the uniformly decent and orderly
+deportment of the artificers who were employed at the Bell Rock
+Lighthouse, and to-day, it is believed, they very generally attended
+church, no doubt with grateful hearts for the narrow escapes from
+personal danger which all of them had more or less experienced during
+their residence at the rock.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 14th Aug.]
+
+The _Smeaton_ sailed to-day at one p.m., having on board sixteen
+artificers, with Mr. Peter Logan, together with a supply of provisions
+and necessaries, who left the harbour pleased and happy to find
+themselves once more afloat in the Bell Rock service.  At seven o'clock
+the tender was made fast to her moorings, when the artificers landed on
+the rock and took possession of their old quarters in the beacon-house,
+with feelings very different from those of 1807, when the works
+commenced.
+
+The barometer for some days past had been falling from 29.90, and to-day
+it was 29.50, with the wind at N.E., which, in the course of this day,
+increased to a strong gale accompanied with a sea which broke with great
+violence upon the rock.  At twelve noon the tender rode very heavily at
+her moorings, when her chain broke at about ten fathoms from the ships
+bows. The kedge-anchor was immediately let go, to hold her till the
+floating buoy and broken chain should be got on board.  But while this
+was in operation the hawser of the kedge was chafed through on the rocky
+bottom and parted, when the vessel was again adrift.  Most fortunately,
+however, she cast off with her head from the rock, and narrowly cleared
+it, when she sailed up the Firth of Forth to wait the return of better
+weather.  The artificers were thus left upon the rock with so heavy a sea
+running that it was ascertained to have risen to a height of eighty feet
+on the building.  Under such perilous circumstances it would be difficult
+to describe the feelings of those who, at this time, were cooped up in
+the beacon in so forlorn a situation, with the sea not only raging under
+them, but occasionally falling from a great height upon the roof of their
+temporary lodging, without even the attending vessel in view to afford
+the least gleam of hope in the event of any accident.  It is true that
+they now had the masonry of the lighthouse to resort to, which, no doubt,
+lessened the actual danger of their situation; but the building was still
+without a roof, and the deadlights, or storm-shutters, not being yet
+fitted, the windows of the lower story were stove in and broken, and at
+high-water the sea ran in considerable quantities out at the entrance
+door.
+
+                                                     [Thursday, 16th Aug.]
+
+The gale continues with unabated violence to-day, and the sprays rise to
+a still greater height, having been carried over the masonry of the
+building, or about ninety feet above the level of the sea.  At four
+o'clock this morning it was breaking into the cook's berth, when he rang
+the alarm-bell, and all hands turned out to attend to their personal
+safety.  The floor of the smith's, or mortar gallery, was now completely
+burst up by the force of the sea, when the whole of the deals and the
+remaining articles upon the floor were swept away, such as the cast-iron
+mortar-tubs, the iron hearth of the forge, the smith's bellows, and even
+his anvil were thrown down upon the rock.  Before the tide rose to its
+full height to-day some of the artificers passed along the bridge into
+the lighthouse, to observe the effects of the sea upon it, and they
+reported that they had felt a slight tremulous motion in the building
+when great seas struck it in a certain direction, about high-water mark.
+On this occasion the sprays were again observed to wet the balcony, and
+even to come over the parapet wall into the interior of the light-room.
+
+                                                     [Thursday, 23rd Aug.]
+
+The wind being at W.S.W., and the weather more moderate, both the tender
+and the _Smeaton_ got to their moorings on the 23rd, when all hands were
+employed in transporting the sash-frames from on board of the _Smeaton_
+to the rock.  In the act of setting up one of these frames upon the
+bridge, it was unguardedly suffered to lose its balance, and in saving it
+from damage Captain Wilson met with a severe bruise in the groin, on the
+seat of a gun-shot wound received in the early part of his life.  This
+accident laid him aside for several days.
+
+                                                       [Monday, 27th Aug.]
+
+The sash-frames of the light-room, eight in number, and weighing each 254
+pounds, having been got safely up to the top of the building, were ranged
+on the balcony in the order in which they were numbered for their places
+on the top of the parapet-wall; and the balance-crane, that useful
+machine having now lifted all the heavier articles, was unscrewed and
+lowered, to use the landing-master's phrase, 'in mournful silence.'
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 2nd Sept.]
+
+The steps of the stair being landed, and all the weightier articles of
+the light-room got up to the balcony, the wooden bridge was now to be
+removed, as it had a very powerful effect upon the beacon when a heavy
+sea struck it, and could not possibly have withstood the storms of a
+winter.  Everything having been cleared from the bridge, and nothing left
+but the two principal beams with their horizontal braces, James Glen, at
+high-water, proceeded with a saw to cut through the beams at the end next
+the beacon, which likewise disengaged their opposite extremity, inserted
+a few inches into the building.  The frame was then gently lowered into
+the water, and floated off to the _Smeaton_ to be towed to Arbroath, to
+be applied as part of the materials in the erection of the lightkeepers'
+houses.  After the removal of the bridge, the aspect of things at the
+rock was much altered.  The beacon-house and building had both a naked
+look to those accustomed to their former appearance; a curious optical
+deception was also remarked, by which the lighthouse seemed to incline
+from the perpendicular towards the beacon.  The horizontal rope-ladder
+before noticed was again stretched to preserve the communication, and the
+artificers were once more obliged to practise the awkward and straddling
+manner of their passage between them during 1809.
+
+At twelve noon the bell rung for prayers, after which the artificers went
+to dinner, when the writer passed along the rope-ladder to the
+lighthouse, and went through the several apartments, which were now
+cleared of lumber.  In the afternoon all hands were summoned to the
+interior of the house, when he had the satisfaction of laying the upper
+step of the stair, or last stone of the building.  This ceremony
+concluded with three cheers, the sound of which had a very loud and
+strange effect within the walls of the lighthouse.  At six o'clock Mr.
+Peter Logan and eleven of the artificers embarked with the writer for
+Arbroath, leaving Mr. James Glen with the special charge of the beacon
+and railways, Mr. Robert Selkirk with the building, with a few artificers
+to fit the temporary windows to render the house habitable.
+
+                                                       [Sunday, 14th Oct.]
+
+On returning from his voyage to the Northern Lighthouses, the writer
+landed at the Bell Rock on Sunday, the 14th of October, and had the
+pleasure to find, from the very favourable state of the weather, that the
+artificers had been enabled to make great progress with the fitting-up of
+the light-room.
+
+                                                       [Friday, 19th Oct.]
+
+The light-room work had proceeded, as usual, to-day under the direction
+of Mr. Dove, assisted in the plumber-work by Mr. John Gibson, and in the
+brazier-work by Mr. Joseph Fraser; while Mr. James Slight, with the
+joiners, were fitting up the storm-shuttters of the windows.  In these
+several departments the artificers were at work till seven o'clock p.m.,
+and it being then dark, Mr. Dove gave orders to drop work in the
+light-room; and all hands proceeded from thence to the beacon-house, when
+Charles Henderson, smith, and Henry Dickson, brazier, left the work
+together.  Being both young men, who had been for several weeks upon the
+rock, they had become familiar, and even playful, on the most difficult
+parts about the beacon and building.  This evening they were trying to
+outrun each other in descending from the light-room, when Henderson led
+the way; but they were in conversation with each other till they came to
+the rope-ladder distended between the entrance-door of the lighthouse and
+the beacon.  Dickson, on reaching the cook-room, was surprised at not
+seeing his companion, and inquired hastily for Henderson.  Upon which the
+cook replied, 'Was he before you upon the rope-ladder?'  Dickson
+answered, 'Yes; and I thought I heard something fall.'  Upon this the
+alarm was given, and links were immediately lighted, with which the
+artificers descended on the legs of the beacon, as near the surface of
+the water as possible, it being then about full tide, and the sea
+breaking to a considerable height upon the building, with the wind at
+S.S.E.  But, after watching till low-water, and searching in every
+direction upon the rock, it appeared that poor Henderson must have
+unfortunately fallen through the rope-ladder, and been washed into the
+deep water.
+
+The deceased had passed along this rope-ladder many hundred times, both
+by day and night, and the operations in which he was employed being
+nearly finished, he was about to leave the rock when this melancholy
+catastrophe took place.  The unfortunate loss of Henderson cast a deep
+gloom upon the minds of all who were at the rock, and it required some
+management on the part of those who had charge to induce the people to
+remain patiently at their work; as the weather now became more
+boisterous, and the nights long, they found their habitation extremely
+cheerless, while the winds were howling about their ears, and the waves
+lashing with fury against the beams of their insulated habitation.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 23rd Oct.]
+
+The wind had shifted in the night to N.W., and blew a fresh gale, while
+the sea broke with violence upon the rock.  It was found impossible to
+land, but the writer, from the boat, hailed Mr. Dove, and directed the
+ball to be immediately fixed.  The necessary preparations were
+accordingly made, while the vessel made short tacks on the southern side
+of the rock, in comparatively smooth water.  At noon Mr. Dove, assisted
+by Mr. James Slight, Mr. Robert Selkirk, Mr. James Glen, and Mr. John
+Gibson, plumber, with considerable difficulty, from the boisterous state
+of the weather, got the gilded ball screwed on, measuring two feet in
+diameter, and forming the principal ventilator at the upper extremity of
+the cupola of the light-room.  At Mr. Hamilton's desire, a salute of
+seven guns was fired on this occasion, and, all hands being called to the
+quarter-deck, 'Stability to the Bell Rock Lighthouse' was not forgotten.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 30th Oct.]
+
+On reaching the rock it was found that a very heavy sea still ran upon
+it; but the writer having been disappointed on two former occasions, and,
+as the erection of the house might now be considered complete, there
+being nothing wanted externally, excepting some of the storm-shutters for
+the defence of the windows, he was the more anxious at this time to
+inspect it.  Two well-manned boats were therefore ordered to be in
+attendance; and, after some difficulty, the wind being at N.N.E., they
+got safely into the western creek, though not without encountering
+plentiful sprays.  It would have been impossible to have attempted a
+landing to-day, under any other circumstances than with boats perfectly
+adapted to the purpose, and with seamen who knew every ledge of the rock,
+and even the length of the sea-weeds at each particular spot, so as to
+dip their oars into the water accordingly, and thereby prevent them from
+getting entangled.  But what was of no less consequence to the safety of
+the party, Captain Wilson, who always steered the boat, had a perfect
+knowledge of the set of the different waves, while the crew never shifted
+their eyes from observing his motions, and the strictest silence was
+preserved by every individual except himself.
+
+On entering the house, the writer had the pleasure to find it in a
+somewhat habitable condition, the lower apartments being closed in with
+temporary windows, and fitted with proper storm-shutters.  The lowest
+apartment at the head of the staircase was occupied with water, fuel, and
+provisions, put up in a temporary way until the house could be furnished
+with proper utensils.  The second, or light-room store, was at present
+much encumbered with various tools and apparatus for the use of the
+workmen.  The kitchen immediately over this had, as yet, been supplied
+only with a common ship's caboose and plate-iron funnel, while the
+necessary cooking utensils had been taken from the beacon.  The bedroom
+was for the present used as the joiners' workshop, and the strangers'
+room, immediately under the light-room, was occupied by the artificers,
+the beds being ranged in tiers, as was done in the barrack of the beacon.
+The light-room, though unprovided with its machinery, being now covered
+over with the cupola, glazed and painted, had a very complete and cleanly
+appearance.  The balcony was only as yet fitted with a temporary rail,
+consisting of a few iron stanchions, connected with ropes; and in this
+state it was necessary to leave it during the winter.
+
+Having gone over the whole of the low-water works on the rock, the
+beacon, and lighthouse, and being satisfied that only the most untoward
+accident in the landing of the machinery could prevent the exhibition of
+the light in the course of the winter, Mr. John Reid, formerly of the
+floating light, was now put in charge of the lighthouse as principal
+keeper; Mr. James Slight had charge of the operations of the artificers,
+while Mr. James Dove and the smiths, having finished the frame of the
+light-room, left the rock for the present.  With these arrangements the
+writer bade adieu to the works for the season.  At eleven a.m. the tide
+was far advanced; and there being now little or no shelter for the boats
+at the rock, they had to be pulled through the breach of sea, which came
+on board in great quantities, and it was with extreme difficulty that
+they could be kept in the proper direction of the landing-creek.  On this
+occasion he may be permitted to look back with gratitude on the many
+escapes made in the course of this arduous undertaking, now brought so
+near to a successful conclusion.
+
+                                                        [Monday, 5th Nov.]
+
+On Monday, the 5th, the yacht again visited the rock, when Mr. Slight and
+the artificers returned with her to the workyard, where a number of
+things were still to prepare connected with the temporary fitting up of
+the accommodation for the lightkeepers.  Mr. John Reid and Peter Fortune
+were now the only inmates of the house.  This was the smallest number of
+persons hitherto left in the lighthouse.  As four lightkeepers were to be
+the complement, it was intended that three should always be at the rock.
+Its present inmates, however, could hardly have been better selected for
+such a situation; Mr. Reid being a person possessed of the strictest
+notions of duty and habits of regularity from long service on board of a
+man-of-war, while Mr. Fortune had one of the most happy and contented
+dispositions imaginable.
+
+                                                      [Tuesday, 13th Nov.]
+
+From Saturday the 10th till Tuesday the 13th, the wind had been from N.E.
+blowing a heavy gale; but to-day, the weather having greatly moderated,
+Captain Taylor, who now commanded the _Smeaton_, sailed at two o'clock
+a.m. for the Bell Rock.  At five the floating light was hailed and found
+to be all well.  Being a fine moonlight morning, the seamen were changed
+from the one ship to the other.  At eight, the _Smeaton_ being off the
+rock, the boats were manned, and taking a supply of water, fuel, and
+other necessaries, landed at the western side, when Mr. Reid and Mr.
+Fortune were found in good health and spirits.
+
+Mr. Reid stated that during the late gales, particularly on Friday, the
+30th, the wind veering from S.E. to N.E., both he and Mr. Fortune
+sensibly felt the house tremble when particular seas struck, about the
+time of high-water; the former observing that it was a tremor of that
+sort which rather tended to convince him that everything about the
+building was sound, and reminded him of the effect produced when a good
+log of timber is struck sharply with a mallet; but, with every confidence
+in the stability of the building, he nevertheless confessed that, in so
+forlorn a situation, they were not insensible to those emotions which, he
+emphatically observed, 'made a man look back upon his former life.'
+
+                                                   [1881 Friday, 1st Feb.]
+
+The day, long wished for, on which the mariner was to see a light
+exhibited on the Bell Rock at length arrived.  Captain Wilson, as usual,
+hoisted the float's lanterns to the topmast on the evening of the 1st of
+February; but the moment that the light appeared on the rock, the crew,
+giving three cheers, lowered them, and finally extinguished the lights.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+         Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
+                    at the Edinburgh University Press.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+
+{2a}  An error: Stevensons owned at this date the barony of Dolphingston
+in Haddingtonshire, Montgrennan in Ayrshire, and several other lesser
+places.
+
+{3a}  Pitcairn's _Criminal Trials_, at large.--[R. L. S.]
+
+{4a}  Fountainhall's _Decisions_, vol. i. pp. 56, 132, 186, 204,
+368.--[R. L. S.]
+
+{4b}  _Ibid._ pp. 158, 299.--[R. L. S.]
+
+{4c}  Working farmer:  Fr. _laboureur_.
+
+{7a}  This John Stevenson was not the only 'witness' of the name; other
+Stevensons were actually killed during the persecutions, in the Glen of
+Trool, on Pentland, etc.; and it is very possible that the author's own
+ancestor was one of the mounted party embodied by Muir of Caldwell, only
+a day too late for Pentland.
+
+{7b}  Wodrow Society's _Select Biographies_, vol. ii.--[R. L. S.]
+
+{9a}  Though the districts here named are those in which the name of
+Stevenson is most common, it is in point of fact far more wide-spread
+than the text indicates, and occurs from Dumfries and Berwickshire to
+Aberdeen and Orkney.
+
+{12a}  Mr. J. H. Stevenson is satisfied that these speculations as to a
+possible Norse, Highland, or French origin are vain.  All we know about
+the engineer family is that it was sprung from a stock of Westland Whigs
+settled in the latter part of the seventeenth century in the parish of
+Neilston, as mentioned at the beginning of the next chapter.  It may be
+noted that the Ayrshire parish of Stevenston, the lands of which are said
+to have received the name in the twelfth century, lies within thirteen
+miles south-west of this place.  The lands of Stevenson in Lanarkshire
+first mentioned in the next century, in the Ragman Roll, lie within
+twenty miles east.
+
+{54a}  This is only a probable hypothesis; I have tried to identify my
+father's anecdote in my grandfather's diary, and may very well have been
+deceived.--[R. L. S.]
+
+{91a}  This is, of course, the tradition commemorated by Southey in his
+ballad of 'The Inchcape Bell.'  Whether true or not, it points to the
+fact that from the infancy of Scottish navigation, the seafaring mind had
+been fully alive to the perils of this reef.  Repeated attempts had been
+made to mark the place with beacons, but all efforts were unavailing (one
+such beacon having been carried away within eight days of its erection)
+until Robert Stevenson conceived and carried out the idea of the stone
+tower.  But the number of vessels actually lost upon the reef was as
+nothing to those that were cast away in fruitless efforts to avoid it.
+Placed right in the fairway of two navigations, and one of these the
+entrance to the only harbour of refuge between the Downs and the Moray
+Firth, it breathed abroad along the whole coast an atmosphere of terror
+and perplexity; and no ship sailed that part of the North Sea at night,
+but what the ears of those on board would be strained to catch the
+roaring of the seas on the Bell Rock.
+
+{92a}  The particular event which concentrated Mr. Stevenson's attention
+on the problem of the Bell Rock was the memorable gale of December 1799,
+when, among many other vessels, H.M.S. _York_, a seventy-four-gun ship,
+went down with all hands on board.  Shortly after this disaster Mr.
+Stevenson made a careful survey, and prepared his models for a stone
+tower, the idea of which was at first received with pretty general
+scepticism, Smeaton's Eddystone tower could not be cited as affording a
+parallel, for there the rock is not submerged even at high-water, while
+the problem of the Bell Rock was to build a tower of masonry on a sunken
+reef far distant from land, covered at every tide to a depth of twelve
+feet or more, and having thirty-two fathoms' depth of water within a mile
+of its eastern edge.
+
+{94a}  The grounds for the rejection of the Bill by the House of Lords in
+1802-3 had been that the extent of coast over which dues were proposed to
+be levied would be too great.  Before going to Parliament again, the
+Board of Northern Lights, desiring to obtain support and corroboration
+for Mr. Stevenson's views, consulted first Telford, who was unable to
+give the matter his attention, and then (on Stevenson's suggestion)
+Rennie, who concurred in affirming the practicability of a stone tower,
+and supported the Bill when it came again before Parliament in 1806.
+Rennie was afterwards appointed by the Commissioners as advising
+engineer, whom Stevenson might consult in cases of emergency.  It seems
+certain that the title of chief engineer had in this instance no more
+meaning than the above.  Rennie, in point of fact, proposed certain
+modifications in Stevenson's plans, which the latter did not accept;
+nevertheless Rennie continued to take a kindly interest in the work, and
+the two engineers remained in friendly correspondence during its
+progress.  The official view taken by the Board as to the quarter in
+which lay both the merit and the responsibility of the work may be
+gathered from a minute of the Commissioners at their first meeting held
+after Stevenson died; in which they record their regret 'at the death of
+this zealous, faithful, and able officer, _to whom is due the honour of
+conceiving and executing the Bell Rock Lighthouse_.'  The matter is
+briefly summed up in the _Life_ of Robert Stevenson by his son David
+Stevenson (A. & C. Black, 1878), and fully discussed, on the basis of
+official facts and figures, by the same writer in a letter to the _Civil
+Engineers' and Architects' Journal_, 1862.
+
+{122a}  'Nothing was said, but I was _looked out of countenance_,' he
+says in a letter.
+
+{171a}  Ill-formed--ugly.--[R. L. S.]
+
+{174a}  This is an incurable illusion of my grandfather's; he always
+writes 'distended' for 'extended.'--[R. L. S.]
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECORDS OF A FAMILY OF ENGINEERS***
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Records of a Family of Engineers
+by Robert Louis Stevenson
+(#4 in our series by Robert Louis Stevenson)
+
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+Title: Records of a Family of Engineers
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Release Date: June, 1995  [EBook #280]
+[This file was first posted on July 9, 1995]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, RECORDS OF A FAMILY OF ENGINEERS ***
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1912 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk  Additional proofing by Peter Barnes.
+
+
+
+
+RECORDS OF A FAMILY OF ENGINEERS
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION:  THE SURNAME OF STEVENSON
+
+
+
+From the thirteenth century onwards, the name, under the various
+disguises of Stevinstoun, Stevensoun, Stevensonne, Stenesone, and
+Stewinsoune, spread across Scotland from the mouth of the Firth of
+Forth to the mouth of the Firth of Clyde.  Four times at least it
+occurs as a place-name.  There is a parish of Stevenston in
+Cunningham; a second place of the name in the Barony of Bothwell in
+Lanark; a third on Lyne, above Drochil Castle; the fourth on the
+Tyne, near Traprain Law.  Stevenson of Stevenson (co. Lanark) swore
+fealty to Edward I in 1296, and the last of that family died after
+the Restoration.  Stevensons of Hirdmanshiels, in Midlothian, rode
+in the Bishops' Raid of Aberlady, served as jurors, stood bail for
+neighbours--Hunter of Polwood, for instance--and became extinct
+about the same period, or possibly earlier.  A Stevenson of Luthrie
+and another of Pitroddie make their bows, give their names, and
+vanish.  And by the year 1700 it does not appear that any acre of
+Scots land was vested in any Stevenson. {2a}
+
+Here is, so far, a melancholy picture of backward progress, and a
+family posting towards extinction.  But the law (however
+administered, and I am bound to aver that, in Scotland, 'it couldna
+weel be waur') acts as a kind of dredge, and with dispassionate
+impartiality brings up into the light of day, and shows us for a
+moment, in the jury-box or on the gallows, the creeping things of
+the past.  By these broken glimpses we are able to trace the
+existence of many other and more inglorious Stevensons, picking a
+private way through the brawl that makes Scots history.  They were
+members of Parliament for Peebles, Stirling, Pittenweem, Kilrenny,
+and Inverurie.  We find them burgesses of Edinburgh; indwellers in
+Biggar, Perth, and Dalkeith.  Thomas was the forester of Newbattle
+Park, Gavin was a baker, John a maltman, Francis a chirurgeon, and
+'Schir William' a priest.  In the feuds of Humes and Heatleys,
+Cunninghams, Montgomeries, Mures, Ogilvies, and Turnbulls, we find
+them inconspicuously involved, and apparently getting rather better
+than they gave.  Schir William (reverend gentleman) was cruellie
+slaughtered on the Links of Kincraig in 1582; James ('in the mill-
+town of Roberton'), murdered in 1590; Archibald ('in
+Gallowfarren'), killed with shots of pistols and hagbuts in 1608.
+Three violent deaths in about seventy years, against which we can
+only put the case of Thomas, servant to Hume of Cowden Knowes, who
+was arraigned with his two young masters for the death of the
+Bastard of Mellerstanes in 1569.  John ('in Dalkeith') stood sentry
+without Holyrood while the banded lords were despatching Rizzio
+within.  William, at the ringing of Perth bell, ran before Gowrie
+House 'with ane sword, and, entering to the yearde, saw George
+Craiggingilt with ane twa-handit sword and utheris nychtbouris; at
+quilk time James Boig cryit ower ane wynds, "Awa hame! ye will all
+be hangit"'--a piece of advice which William took, and immediately
+'depairtit.'  John got a maid with child to him in Biggar, and
+seemingly deserted her; she was hanged on the Castle Hill for
+infanticide, June 1614; and Martin, elder in Dalkeith, eternally
+disgraced the name by signing witness in a witch trial, 1661.
+These are two of our black sheep. {3a}  Under the Restoration, one
+Stevenson was a bailie in Edinburgh, and another the lessee of the
+Canonmills.  There were at the same period two physicians of the
+name in Edinburgh, one of whom, Dr. Archibald, appears to have been
+a famous man in his day and generation.  The Court had continual
+need of him; it was he who reported, for instance, on the state of
+Rumbold; and he was for some time in the enjoyment of a pension of
+a thousand pounds Scots (about eighty pounds sterling) at a time
+when five hundred pounds is described as 'an opulent future.'  I do
+not know if I should be glad or sorry that he failed to keep
+favour; but on 6th January 1682 (rather a cheerless New Year's
+present) his pension was expunged. {4a}  There need be no doubt, at
+least, of my exultation at the fact that he was knighted and
+recorded arms.  Not quite so genteel, but still in public life,
+Hugh was Under-Clerk to the Privy Council, and liked being so
+extremely.  I gather this from his conduct in September 1681, when,
+with all the lords and their servants, he took the woful and soul-
+destroying Test, swearing it 'word by word upon his knees.'  And,
+behold! it was in vain, for Hugh was turned out of his small post
+in 1684. {4b}  Sir Archibald and Hugh were both plainly inclined to
+be trimmers; but there was one witness of the name of Stevenson who
+held high the banner of the Covenant--John, 'Land-Labourer, {4c} in
+the parish of Daily, in Carrick,' that 'eminently pious man.'  He
+seems to have been a poor sickly soul, and shows himself disabled
+with scrofula, and prostrate and groaning aloud with fever; but the
+enthusiasm of the martyr burned high within him.
+
+'I was made to take joyfully the spoiling of my goods, and with
+pleasure for His name's sake wandered in deserts and in mountains,
+in dens and caves of the earth.  I lay four months in the coldest
+season of the year in a haystack in my father's garden, and a whole
+February in the open fields not far from Camragen, and this I did
+without the least prejudice from the night air; one night, when
+lying in the fields near to the Carrick-Miln, I was all covered
+with snow in the morning.  Many nights have I lain with pleasure in
+the churchyard of Old Daily, and made a grave my pillow; frequently
+have I resorted to the old walls about the glen, near to Camragen,
+and there sweetly rested.'  The visible band of God protected and
+directed him.  Dragoons were turned aside from the bramble-bush
+where he lay hidden.  Miracles were performed for his behoof.  'I
+got a horse and a woman to carry the child, and came to the same
+mountain, where I wandered by the mist before; it is commonly known
+by the name of Kellsrhins:  when we came to go up the mountain,
+there came on a great rain, which we thought was the occasion of
+the child's weeping, and she wept so bitterly, that all we could do
+could not divert her from it, so that she was ready to burst.  When
+we got to the top of the mountain, where the Lord had been formerly
+kind to my soul in prayer, I looked round me for a stone, and
+espying one, I went and brought it.  When the woman with me saw me
+set down the stone, she smiled, and asked what I was going to do
+with it.  I told her I was going to set it up as my Ebenezer,
+because hitherto, and in that place, the Lord had formerly helped,
+and I hoped would yet help.  The rain still continuing, the child
+weeping bitterly, I went to prayer, and no sooner did I cry to God,
+but the child gave over weeping, and when we got up from prayer,
+the rain was pouring down on every side, but in the way where we
+were to go there fell not one drop; the place not rained on was as
+big as an ordinary avenue.'  And so great a saint was the natural
+butt of Satan's persecutions.  'I retired to the fields for secret
+prayer about mid-night.  When I went to pray I was much straitened,
+and could not get one request, but "Lord pity," "Lord help"; this I
+came over frequently; at length the terror of Satan fell on me in a
+high degree, and all I could say even then was--"Lord help."  I
+continued in the duty for some time, notwithstanding of this
+terror.  At length I got up to my feet, and the terror still
+increased; then the enemy took me by the arm-pits, and seemed to
+lift me up by my arms.  I saw a loch just before me, and I
+concluded he designed to throw me there by force; and had he got
+leave to do so, it might have brought a great reproach upon
+religion. {7a}  But it was otherwise ordered, and the cause of
+piety escaped that danger. {7b}
+
+On the whole, the Stevensons may be described as decent, reputable
+folk, following honest trades--millers, maltsters, and doctors,
+playing the character parts in the Waverley Novels with propriety,
+if without distinction; and to an orphan looking about him in the
+world for a potential ancestry, offering a plain and quite
+unadorned refuge, equally free from shame and glory.  John, the
+land-labourer, is the one living and memorable figure, and he,
+alas! cannot possibly be more near than a collateral.  It was on
+August 12, 1678, that he heard Mr. John Welsh on the Craigdowhill,
+and 'took the heavens, earth, and sun in the firmament that was
+shining on us, as also the ambassador who made the offer, and THE
+CLERK WHO RAISED THE PSALMS, to witness that I did give myself away
+to the Lord in a personal and perpetual covenant never to be
+forgotten'; and already, in 1675, the birth of my direct ascendant
+was registered in Glasgow.  So that I have been pursuing ancestors
+too far down; and John the land-labourer is debarred me, and I must
+relinquish from the trophies of my house his RARE SOUL-
+STRENGTHENING AND COMFORTING CORDIAL.  It is the same case with the
+Edinburgh bailie and the miller of the Canonmills, worthy man! and
+with that public character, Hugh the Under-Clerk, and, more than
+all, with Sir Archibald, the physician, who recorded arms.  And I
+am reduced to a family of inconspicuous maltsters in what was then
+the clean and handsome little city on the Clyde.
+
+The name has a certain air of being Norse.  But the story of
+Scottish nomenclature is confounded by a continual process of
+translation and half-translation from the Gaelic which in olden
+days may have been sometimes reversed.  Roy becomes Reid; Gow,
+Smith.  A great Highland clan uses the name of Robertson; a sept in
+Appin that of Livingstone; Maclean in Glencoe answers to Johnstone
+at Lockerby.  And we find such hybrids as Macalexander for
+Macallister.  There is but one rule to be deduced:  that however
+uncompromisingly Saxon a name may appear, you can never be sure it
+does not designate a Celt.  My great-grandfather wrote the name
+Stevenson but pronounced it Steenson, after the fashion of the
+immortal minstrel in Redgauntlet; and this elision of a medial
+consonant appears a Gaelic process; and, curiously enough, I have
+come across no less than two Gaelic forms:  John Macstophane
+cordinerius in Crossraguel, 1573, and William M'Steen in Dunskeith
+(co. Ross), 1605.  Stevenson, Steenson, Macstophane, M'Steen:
+which is the original? which the translation?  Or were these
+separate creations of the patronymic, some English, some Gaelic?
+The curiously compact territory in which we find them seated--Ayr,
+Lanark, Peebles, Stirling, Perth, Fife, and the Lothians--would
+seem to forbid the supposition. {9a}
+
+'STEVENSON--or according to tradition of one of the proscribed of
+the clan MacGregor, who was born among the willows or in a hill-
+side sheep-pen--"Son of my love," a heraldic bar sinister, but
+history reveals a reason for the birth among the willows far other
+than the sinister aspect of the name':  these are the dark words of
+Mr. Cosmo Innes; but history or tradition, being interrogated,
+tells a somewhat tangled tale.  The heir of Macgregor of Glenorchy,
+murdered about 1858 by the Argyll Campbells, appears to have been
+the original 'Son of my love'; and his more loyal clansmen took the
+name to fight under.  It may be supposed the story of their
+resistance became popular, and the name in some sort identified
+with the idea of opposition to the Campbells.  Twice afterwards, on
+some renewed aggression, in 1502 and 1552, we find the Macgregors
+again banding themselves into a sept of 'Sons of my love'; and when
+the great disaster fell on them in 1603, the whole original legend
+reappears, and we have the heir of Alaster of Glenstrae born 'among
+the willows' of a fugitive mother, and the more loyal clansmen
+again rallying under the name of Stevenson.  A story would not be
+told so often unless it had some base in fact; nor (if there were
+no bond at all between the Red Macgregors and the Stevensons) would
+that extraneous and somewhat uncouth name be so much repeated in
+the legends of the Children of the Mist.
+
+But I am enabled, by my very lively and obliging correspondent, Mr.
+George A. Macgregor Stevenson of New York, to give an actual
+instance.  His grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-
+grandfather, and great-great-great-grandfather, all used the names
+of Macgregor and Stevenson as occasion served; being perhaps
+Macgregor by night and Stevenson by day.  The great-great-great-
+grandfather was a mighty man of his hands, marched with the clan in
+the 'Forty-five, and returned with spolia opima in the shape of a
+sword, which he had wrested from an officer in the retreat, and
+which is in the possession of my correspondent to this day.  His
+great-grandson (the grandfather of my correspondent), being
+converted to Methodism by some wayside preacher, discarded in a
+moment his name, his old nature, and his political principles, and
+with the zeal of a proselyte sealed his adherence to the Protestant
+Succession by baptising his next son George.  This George became
+the publisher and editor of the Wesleyan Times.  His children were
+brought up in ignorance of their Highland pedigree; and my
+correspondent was puzzled to overhear his father speak of him as a
+true Macgregor, and amazed to find, in rummaging about that
+peaceful and pious house, the sword of the Hanoverian officer.
+After he was grown up and was better informed of his descent, 'I
+frequently asked my father,' he writes, 'why he did not use the
+name of Macgregor; his replies were significant, and give a picture
+of the man:  "It isn't a good METHODIST name.  You can use it, but
+it will do you no GOOD."  Yet the old gentleman, by way of
+pleasantry, used to announce himself to friends as "Colonel
+Macgregor."'
+
+Here, then, are certain Macgregors habitually using the name of
+Stevenson, and at last, under the influence of Methodism, adopting
+it entirely.  Doubtless a proscribed clan could not be particular;
+they took a name as a man takes an umbrella against a shower; as
+Rob Roy took Campbell, and his son took Drummond.  But this case is
+different; Stevenson was not taken and left--it was consistently
+adhered to.  It does not in the least follow that all Stevensons
+are of the clan Alpin; but it does follow that some may be.  And I
+cannot conceal from myself the possibility that James Stevenson in
+Glasgow, my first authentic ancestor, may have had a Highland alias
+upon his conscience and a claymore in his back parlour.
+
+To one more tradition I may allude, that we are somehow descended
+from a French barber-surgeon who came to St. Andrews in the service
+of one of the Cardinal Beatons.  No details were added.  But the
+very name of France was so detested in my family for three
+generations, that I am tempted to suppose there may be something in
+it. {12a}
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I:  DOMESTIC ANNALS
+
+
+
+It is believed that in 1665, James Stevenson in Nether Carsewell,
+parish of Neilston, county of Renfrew, and presumably a tenant
+farmer, married one Jean Keir; and in 1675, without doubt, there
+was born to these two a son Robert, possibly a maltster in Glasgow.
+In 1710, Robert married, for a second time, Elizabeth Cumming, and
+there was born to them, in 1720, another Robert, certainly a
+maltster in Glasgow.  In 1742, Robert the second married Margaret
+Fulton (Margret, she called herself), by whom he had ten children,
+among whom were Hugh, born February 1749, and Alan, born June 1752.
+
+With these two brothers my story begins.  Their deaths were
+simultaneous; their lives unusually brief and full.  Tradition
+whispered me in childhood they were the owners of an islet near St.
+Kitts; and it is certain they had risen to be at the head of
+considerable interests in the West Indies, which Hugh managed
+abroad and Alan at home, at an age when others are still curveting
+a clerk's stool.  My kinsman, Mr. Stevenson of Stirling, has heard
+his father mention that there had been 'something romantic' about
+Alan's marriage:  and, alas! he has forgotten what.  It was early
+at least.  His wife was Jean, daughter of David Lillie, a builder
+in Glasgow, and several times 'Deacon of the Wrights':  the date of
+the marriage has not reached me; but on 8th June 1772, when Robert,
+the only child of the union, was born, the husband and father had
+scarce passed, or had not yet attained, his twentieth year.  Here
+was a youth making haste to give hostages to fortune.  But this
+early scene of prosperity in love and business was on the point of
+closing.
+
+There hung in the house of this young family, and successively in
+those of my grandfather and father, an oil painting of a ship of
+many tons burthen.  Doubtless the brothers had an interest in the
+vessel; I was told she had belonged to them outright; and the
+picture was preserved through years of hardship, and remains to
+this day in the possession of the family, the only memorial of my
+great-grandsire Alan.  It was on this ship that he sailed on his
+last adventure, summoned to the West Indies by Hugh.  An agent had
+proved unfaithful on a serious scale; and it used to be told me in
+my childhood how the brothers pursued him from one island to
+another in an open boat, were exposed to the pernicious dews of the
+tropics, and simultaneously struck down.  The dates and places of
+their deaths (now before me) would seem to indicate a more
+scattered and prolonged pursuit:  Hugh, on the 16th April 1774, in
+Tobago, within sight of Trinidad; Alan, so late as 26th May, and so
+far away as 'Santt Kittes,' in the Leeward Islands--both, says the
+family Bible, 'of a fiver'(!).  The death of Hugh was probably
+announced by Alan in a letter, to which we may refer the details of
+the open boat and the dew.  Thus, at least, in something like the
+course of post, both were called away, the one twenty-five, the
+other twenty-two; their brief generation became extinct, their
+short-lived house fell with them; and 'in these lawless parts and
+lawless times'--the words are my grandfather's--their property was
+stolen or became involved.  Many years later, I understand some
+small recovery to have been made; but at the moment almost the
+whole means of the family seem to have perished with the young
+merchants.  On the 27th April, eleven days after Hugh Stevenson,
+twenty-nine before Alan, died David Lillie, the Deacon of the
+Wrights; so that mother and son were orphaned in one month.  Thus,
+from a few scraps of paper bearing little beyond dates, we
+construct the outlines of the tragedy that shadowed the cradle of
+Robert Stevenson.
+
+Jean Lillie was a young woman of strong sense, well fitted to
+contend with poverty, and of a pious disposition, which it is like
+that these misfortunes heated.  Like so many other widowed Scots-
+women, she vowed her son should wag his head in a pulpit; but her
+means were inadequate to her ambition.  A charity school, and some
+time under a Mr. M'Intyre, 'a famous linguist,' were all she could
+afford in the way of education to the would-be minister.  He
+learned no Greek; in one place he mentions that the Orations of
+Cicero were his highest book in Latin; in another that he had
+'delighted' in Virgil and Horace; but his delight could never have
+been scholarly.  This appears to have been the whole of his
+training previous to an event which changed his own destiny and
+moulded that of his descendants--the second marriage of his mother.
+
+There was a Merchant-Burgess of Edinburgh of the name of Thomas
+Smith.  The Smith pedigree has been traced a little more
+particularly than the Stevensons', with a similar dearth of
+illustrious names.  One character seems to have appeared, indeed,
+for a moment at the wings of history:  a skipper of Dundee who
+smuggled over some Jacobite big-wig at the time of the 'Fifteen,
+and was afterwards drowned in Dundee harbour while going on board
+his ship.  With this exception, the generations of the Smiths
+present no conceivable interest even to a descendant; and Thomas,
+of Edinburgh, was the first to issue from respectable obscurity.
+His father, a skipper out of Broughty Ferry, was drowned at sea
+while Thomas was still young.  He seems to have owned a ship or
+two--whalers, I suppose, or coasters--and to have been a member of
+the Dundee Trinity House, whatever that implies.  On his death the
+widow remained in Broughty, and the son came to push his future in
+Edinburgh.  There is a story told of him in the family which I
+repeat here because I shall have to tell later on a similar, but
+more perfectly authenticated, experience of his stepson, Robert
+Stevenson.  Word reached Thomas that his mother was unwell, and he
+prepared to leave for Broughty on the morrow.  It was between two
+and three in the morning, and the early northern daylight was
+already clear, when he awoke and beheld the curtains at the bed-
+foot drawn aside and his mother appear in the interval, smile upon
+him for a moment, and then vanish.  The sequel is stereo-type; he
+took the time by his watch, and arrived at Broughty to learn it was
+the very moment of her death.  The incident is at least curious in
+having happened to such a person--as the tale is being told of him.
+In all else, he appears as a man ardent, passionate, practical,
+designed for affairs and prospering in them far beyond the average.
+He founded a solid business in lamps and oils, and was the sole
+proprietor of a concern called the Greenside Company's Works--'a
+multifarious concern it was,' writes my cousin, Professor Swan, 'of
+tinsmiths, coppersmiths, brass-founders, blacksmiths, and
+japanners.'  He was also, it seems, a shipowner and underwriter.
+He built himself 'a land'--Nos. 1 and 2 Baxter's Place, then no
+such unfashionable neighbourhood--and died, leaving his only son in
+easy circumstances, and giving to his three surviving daughters
+portions of five thousand pounds and upwards.  There is no standard
+of success in life; but in one of its meanings, this is to succeed.
+
+In what we know of his opinions, he makes a figure highly
+characteristic of the time.  A high Tory and patriot, a captain--so
+I find it in my notes--of Edinburgh Spearmen, and on duty in the
+Castle during the Muir and Palmer troubles, he bequeathed to his
+descendants a bloodless sword and a somewhat violent tradition,
+both long preserved.  The judge who sat on Muir and Palmer, the
+famous Braxfield, let fall from the bench the obiter dictum--'I
+never liked the French all my days, but now I hate them.'  If
+Thomas Smith, the Edinburgh Spearman, were in court, he must have
+been tempted to applaud.  The people of that land were his
+abhorrence; he loathed Buonaparte like Antichrist.  Towards the end
+he fell into a kind of dotage; his family must entertain him with
+games of tin soldiers, which he took a childish pleasure to array
+and overset; but those who played with him must be upon their
+guard, for if his side, which was always that of the English
+against the French, should chance to be defeated, there would be
+trouble in Baxter's Place.  For these opinions he may almost be
+said to have suffered.  Baptised and brought up in the Church of
+Scotland, he had, upon some conscientious scruple, joined the
+communion of the Baptists.  Like other Nonconformists, these were
+inclined to the Liberal side in politics, and, at least in the
+beginning, regarded Buonaparte as a deliverer.  From the time of
+his joining the Spearmen, Thomas Smith became in consequence a
+bugbear to his brethren in the faith.   'They that take the sword
+shall perish with the sword,' they told him; they gave him 'no
+rest'; 'his position became intolerable'; it was plain he must
+choose between his political and his religious tenets; and in the
+last years of his life, about 1812, he returned to the Church of
+his fathers.
+
+August 1786 was the date of his chief advancement, when, having
+designed a system of oil lights to take the place of the primitive
+coal fires before in use, he was dubbed engineer to the newly-
+formed Board of Northern Lighthouses.  Not only were his fortunes
+bettered by the appointment, but he was introduced to a new and
+wider field for the exercise of his abilities, and a new way of
+life highly agreeable to his active constitution.  He seems to have
+rejoiced in the long journeys, and to have combined them with the
+practice of field sports.  'A tall, stout man coming ashore with
+his gun over his arm'--so he was described to my father--the only
+description that has come down to me by a light-keeper old in the
+service.  Nor did this change come alone.  On the 9th July of the
+same year, Thomas Smith had been left for the second time a
+widower.  As he was still but thirty-three years old, prospering in
+his affairs, newly advanced in the world, and encumbered at the
+time with a family of children, five in number, it was natural that
+he should entertain the notion of another wife.  Expeditious in
+business, he was no less so in his choice; and it was not later
+than June 1787--for my grandfather is described as still in his
+fifteenth year--that he married the widow of Alan Stevenson.
+
+The perilous experiment of bringing together two families for once
+succeeded.  Mr. Smith's two eldest daughters, Jean and Janet,
+fervent in piety, unwearied in kind deeds, were well qualified both
+to appreciate and to attract the stepmother; and her son, on the
+other hand, seems to have found immediate favour in the eyes of Mr.
+Smith.  It is, perhaps, easy to exaggerate the ready-made
+resemblances; the tired woman must have done much to fashion girls
+who were under ten; the man, lusty and opinionated, must have
+stamped a strong impression on the boy of fifteen.  But the
+cleavage of the family was too marked, the identity of character
+and interest produced between the two men on the one hand, and the
+three women on the other, was too complete to have been the result
+of influence alone.  Particular bonds of union must have pre-
+existed on each side.  And there is no doubt that the man and the
+boy met with common ambitions, and a common bent, to the practice
+of that which had not so long before acquired the name of civil
+engineering.
+
+For the profession which is now so thronged, famous, and
+influential, was then a thing of yesterday.  My grandfather had an
+anecdote of Smeaton, probably learned from John Clerk of Eldin,
+their common friend.  Smeaton was asked by the Duke of Argyll to
+visit the West Highland coast for a professional purpose.  He
+refused, appalled, it seems, by the rough travelling.  'You can
+recommend some other fit person?' asked the Duke.  'No,' said
+Smeaton, 'I'm sorry I can't.'  'What!' cried the Duke, 'a
+profession with only one man in it!  Pray, who taught you?'  'Why,'
+said Smeaton, 'I believe I may say I was self-taught, an't please
+your grace.'  Smeaton, at the date of Thomas Smith's third
+marriage, was yet living; and as the one had grown to the new
+profession from his place at the instrument-maker's, the other was
+beginning to enter it by the way of his trade.  The engineer of to-
+day is confronted with a library of acquired results; tables and
+formulae to the value of folios full have been calculated and
+recorded; and the student finds everywhere in front of him the
+footprints of the pioneers.  In the eighteenth century the field
+was largely unexplored; the engineer must read with his own eyes
+the face of nature; he arose a volunteer, from the workshop or the
+mill, to undertake works which were at once inventions and
+adventures.  It was not a science then--it was a living art; and it
+visibly grew under the eyes and between the hands of its
+practitioners.
+
+The charm of such an occupation was strongly felt by stepfather and
+stepson.  It chanced that Thomas Smith was a reformer; the
+superiority of his proposed lamp and reflectors over open fires of
+coal secured his appointment; and no sooner had he set his hand to
+the task than the interest of that employment mastered him.  The
+vacant stage on which he was to act, and where all had yet to be
+created--the greatness of the difficulties, the smallness of the
+means intrusted him--would rouse a man of his disposition like a
+call to battle.  The lad introduced by marriage under his roof was
+of a character to sympathise; the public usefulness of the service
+would appeal to his judgment, the perpetual need for fresh
+expedients stimulate his ingenuity.  And there was another
+attraction which, in the younger man at least, appealed to, and
+perhaps first aroused, a profound and enduring sentiment of
+romance:  I mean the attraction of the life.  The seas into which
+his labours carried the new engineer were still scarce charted, the
+coasts still dark; his way on shore was often far beyond the
+convenience of any road; the isles in which he must sojourn were
+still partly savage.  He must toss much in boats; he must often
+adventure on horseback by the dubious bridle-track through
+unfrequented wildernesses; he must sometimes plant his lighthouse
+in the very camp of wreckers; and he was continually enforced to
+the vicissitudes of outdoor life.  The joy of my grandfather in
+this career was strong as the love of woman.  It lasted him through
+youth and manhood, it burned strong in age, and at the approach of
+death his last yearning was to renew these loved experiences.  What
+he felt himself he continued to attribute to all around him.  And
+to this supposed sentiment in others I find him continually, almost
+pathetically, appealing; often in vain.
+
+Snared by these interests, the boy seems to have become almost at
+once the eager confidant and adviser of his new connection; the
+Church, if he had ever entertained the prospect very warmly, faded
+from his view; and at the age of nineteen I find him already in a
+post of some authority, superintending the construction of the
+lighthouse on the isle of Little Cumbrae, in the Firth of Clyde.
+The change of aim seems to have caused or been accompanied by a
+change of character.  It sounds absurd to couple the name of my
+grandfather with the word indolence; but the lad who had been
+destined from the cradle to the Church, and who had attained the
+age of fifteen without acquiring more than a moderate knowledge of
+Latin, was at least no unusual student.  And from the day of his
+charge at Little Cumbrae he steps before us what he remained until
+the end, a man of the most zealous industry, greedy of occupation,
+greedy of knowledge, a stern husband of time, a reader, a writer,
+unflagging in his task of self-improvement.  Thenceforward his
+summers were spent directing works and ruling workmen, now in
+uninhabited, now in half-savage islands; his winters were set
+apart, first at the Andersonian Institution, then at the University
+of Edinburgh to improve himself in mathematics, chemistry, natural
+history, agriculture, moral philosophy, and logic; a bearded
+student--although no doubt scrupulously shaved.  I find one
+reference to his years in class which will have a meaning for all
+who have studied in Scottish Universities.  He mentions a
+recommendation made by the professor of logic.  'The high-school
+men,' he writes, 'and BEARDED MEN LIKE MYSELF, were all attention.'
+If my grandfather were throughout life a thought too studious of
+the art of getting on, much must be forgiven to the bearded and
+belated student who looked across, with a sense of difference, at
+'the high-school men.'  Here was a gulf to be crossed; but already
+he could feel that he had made a beginning, and that must have been
+a proud hour when he devoted his earliest earnings to the repayment
+of the charitable foundation in which he had received the rudiments
+of knowledge.
+
+In yet another way he followed the example of his father-in-law,
+and from 1794 to 1807, when the affairs of the Bell Rock made it
+necessary for him to resign, he served in different corps of
+volunteers.  In the last of these he rose to a position of
+distinction, no less than captain of the Grenadier Company, and his
+colonel, in accepting his resignation, entreated he would do them
+'the favour of continuing as an honorary member of a corps which
+has been so much indebted for your zeal and exertions.'
+
+To very pious women the men of the house are apt to appear worldly.
+The wife, as she puts on her new bonnet before church, is apt to
+sigh over that assiduity which enabled her husband to pay the
+milliner's bill.  And in the household of the Smiths and Stevensons
+the women were not only extremely pious, but the men were in
+reality a trifle worldly.  Religious they both were; conscious,
+like all Scots, of the fragility and unreality of that scene in
+which we play our uncomprehended parts; like all Scots, realising
+daily and hourly the sense of another will than ours and a
+perpetual direction in the affairs of life.  But the current of
+their endeavours flowed in a more obvious channel.  They had got on
+so far; to get on further was their next ambition--to gather
+wealth, to rise in society, to leave their descendants higher than
+themselves, to be (in some sense) among the founders of families.
+Scott was in the same town nourishing similar dreams.  But in the
+eyes of the women these dreams would be foolish and idolatrous.
+
+I have before me some volumes of old letters addressed to Mrs.
+Smith and the two girls, her favourites, which depict in a strong
+light their characters and the society in which they moved.
+
+'My very dear and much esteemed Friend,' writes one correspondent,
+'this day being the anniversary of our acquaintance, I feel
+inclined to address you; but where shall I find words to express
+the fealings of a graitful Heart, first to the Lord who graiciously
+inclined you on this day last year to notice an afflicted Strainger
+providentially cast in your way far from any Earthly friend? . . .
+Methinks I shall hear him say unto you, "Inasmuch as ye shewed
+kindness to my afflicted handmaiden, ye did it unto me."'
+
+This is to Jean; but the same afflicted lady wrote indifferently to
+Jean, to Janet, and to Ms. Smith, whom she calls 'my Edinburgh
+mother.'  It is plain the three were as one person, moving to acts
+of kindness, like the Graces, inarmed.  Too much stress must not be
+laid on the style of this correspondence; Clarinda survived, not
+far away, and may have met the ladies on the Calton Hill; and many
+of the writers appear, underneath the conventions of the period, to
+be genuinely moved.  But what unpleasantly strikes a reader is,
+that these devout unfortunates found a revenue in their devotion.
+It is everywhere the same tale; on the side of the soft-hearted
+ladies, substantial acts of help; on the side of the
+correspondents, affection, italics, texts, ecstasies, and imperfect
+spelling.  When a midwife is recommended, not at all for
+proficiency in her important art, but because she has 'a sister
+whom I [the correspondent] esteem and respect, and [who] is a
+spiritual daughter of my Hond Father in the Gosple,' the mask seems
+to be torn off, and the wages of godliness appear too openly.
+Capacity is a secondary matter in a midwife, temper in a servant,
+affection in a daughter, and the repetition of a shibboleth fulfils
+the law.  Common decency is at times forgot in the same page with
+the most sanctified advice and aspiration.  Thus I am introduced to
+a correspondent who appears to have been at the time the
+housekeeper at Invermay, and who writes to condole with my
+grandmother in a season of distress.  For nearly half a sheet she
+keeps to the point with an excellent discretion in language then
+suddenly breaks out:
+
+'It was fully my intention to have left this at Martinmass, but the
+Lord fixes the bounds of our habitation.  I have had more need of
+patience in my situation here than in any other, partly from the
+very violent, unsteady, deceitful temper of the Mistress of the
+Family, and also from the state of the house.  It was in a train of
+repair when I came here two years ago, and is still in Confusion.
+There is above six Thousand Pounds' worth of Furniture come from
+London to be put up when the rooms are completely finished; and
+then, woe be to the Person who is Housekeeper at Invermay!'
+
+And by the tail of the document, which is torn, I see she goes on
+to ask the bereaved family to seek her a new place.  It is
+extraordinary that people should have been so deceived in so
+careless an impostor; that a few sprinkled 'God willings' should
+have blinded them to the essence of this venomous letter; and that
+they should have been at the pains to bind it in with others (many
+of them highly touching) in their memorial of harrowing days.  But
+the good ladies were without guile and without suspicion; they were
+victims marked for the axe, and the religious impostors snuffed up
+the wind as they drew near.
+
+I have referred above to my grandmother; it was no slip of the pen:
+for by an extraordinary arrangement, in which it is hard not to
+suspect the managing hand of a mother, Jean Smith became the wife
+of Robert Stevenson.  Mrs. Smith had failed in her design to make
+her son a minister, and she saw him daily more immersed in business
+and worldly ambition.  One thing remained that she might do:  she
+might secure for him a godly wife, that great means of
+sanctification; and she had two under her hand, trained by herself,
+her dear friends and daughters both in law and love--Jean and
+Janet.  Jean's complexion was extremely pale, Janet's was florid;
+my grandmother's nose was straight, my great-aunt's aquiline; but
+by the sound of the voice, not even a son was able to distinguish
+one from other.  The marriage of a man of twenty-seven and a girl
+of twenty who have lived for twelve years as brother and sister, is
+difficult to conceive.  It took place, however, and thus in 1799
+the family was still further cemented by the union of a
+representative of the male or worldly element with one of the
+female and devout.
+
+This essential difference remained unbridged, yet never diminished
+the strength of their relation.  My grandfather pursued his design
+of advancing in the world with some measure of success; rose to
+distinction in his calling, grew to be the familiar of members of
+Parliament, judges of the Court of Session, and 'landed gentlemen';
+learned a ready address, had a flow of interesting conversation,
+and when he was referred to as 'a highly respectable bourgeois,'
+resented the description.  My grandmother remained to the end
+devout and unambitious, occupied with her Bible, her children, and
+her house; easily shocked, and associating largely with a clique of
+godly parasites.  I do not know if she called in the midwife
+already referred to; but the principle on which that lady was
+recommended, she accepted fully.  The cook was a godly woman, the
+butcher a Christian man, and the table suffered.  The scene has
+been often described to me of my grandfather sawing with darkened
+countenance at some indissoluble joint--'Preserve me, my dear, what
+kind of a reedy, stringy beast is this?'--of the joint removed, the
+pudding substituted and uncovered; and of my grandmother's anxious
+glance and hasty, deprecatory comment, 'Just mismanaged!'  Yet with
+the invincible obstinacy of soft natures, she would adhere to the
+godly woman and the Christian man, or find others of the same
+kidney to replace them.  One of her confidants had once a narrow
+escape; an unwieldy old woman, she had fallen from an outside stair
+in a close of the Old Town; and my grandmother rejoiced to
+communicate the providential circumstance that a baker had been
+passing underneath with his bread upon his head.  'I would like to
+know what kind of providence the baker thought it!' cried my
+grandfather.
+
+But the sally must have been unique.  In all else that I have heard
+or read of him, so far from criticising, he was doing his utmost to
+honour and even to emulate his wife's pronounced opinions.  In the
+only letter which has come to my hand of Thomas Smith's, I find him
+informing his wife that he was 'in time for afternoon church';
+similar assurances or cognate excuses abound in the correspondence
+of Robert Stevenson; and it is comical and pretty to see the two
+generations paying the same court to a female piety more highly
+strung:  Thomas Smith to the mother of Robert Stevenson--Robert
+Stevenson to the daughter of Thomas Smith.  And if for once my
+grandfather suffered himself to be hurried, by his sense of humour
+and justice, into that remark about the case of Providence and the
+Baker, I should be sorry for any of his children who should have
+stumbled into the same attitude of criticism.  In the apocalyptic
+style of the housekeeper of Invermay, woe be to that person!  But
+there was no fear; husband and sons all entertained for the pious,
+tender soul the same chivalrous and moved affection.  I have spoken
+with one who remembered her, and who had been the intimate and
+equal of her sons, and I found this witness had been struck, as I
+had been, with a sense of disproportion between the warmth of the
+adoration felt and the nature of the woman, whether as described or
+observed.  She diligently read and marked her Bible; she was a
+tender nurse; she had a sense of humour under strong control; she
+talked and found some amusement at her (or rather at her husband's)
+dinner-parties.  It is conceivable that even my grandmother was
+amenable to the seductions of dress; at least, I find her husband
+inquiring anxiously about 'the gowns from Glasgow,' and very
+careful to describe the toilet of the Princess Charlotte, whom he
+had seen in church 'in a Pelisse and Bonnet of the same colour of
+cloth as the Boys' Dress jackets, trimmed with blue satin ribbons;
+the hat or Bonnet, Mr. Spittal said, was a Parisian slouch, and had
+a plume of three white feathers.'  But all this leaves a blank
+impression, and it is rather by reading backward in these old musty
+letters, which have moved me now to laughter and now to impatience,
+that I glean occasional glimpses of how she seemed to her
+contemporaries, and trace (at work in her queer world of godly and
+grateful parasites) a mobile and responsive nature.  Fashion moulds
+us, and particularly women, deeper than we sometimes think; but a
+little while ago, and, in some circles, women stood or fell by the
+degree of their appreciation of old pictures; in the early years of
+the century (and surely with more reason) a character like that of
+my grandmother warmed, charmed, and subdued, like a strain of
+music, the hearts of the men of her own household.  And there is
+little doubt that Mrs. Smith, as she looked on at the domestic life
+of her son and her stepdaughter, and numbered the heads in their
+increasing nursery, must have breathed fervent thanks to her
+Creator.
+
+Yet this was to be a family unusually tried; it was not for nothing
+that one of the godly women saluted Miss Janet Smith as 'a veteran
+in affliction'; and they were all before middle life experienced in
+that form of service.  By the 1st of January 1808, besides a pair
+of still-born twins, children had been born and still survived to
+the young couple.  By the 11th two were gone; by the 28th a third
+had followed, and the two others were still in danger.  In the
+letters of a former nurserymaid--I give her name, Jean Mitchell,
+honoris causa--we are enabled to feel, even at this distance of
+time, some of the bitterness of that month of bereavement.
+
+'I have this day received,' she writes to Miss Janet, 'the
+melancholy news of my dear babys' deaths.  My heart is like to
+break for my dear Mrs. Stevenson.  O may she be supported on this
+trying occasion!  I hope her other three babys will be spared to
+her.  O, Miss Smith, did I think when I parted from my sweet babys
+that I never was to see them more?'  'I received,' she begins her
+next, 'the mournful news of my dear Jessie's death.  I also
+received the hair of my three sweet babys, which I will preserve as
+dear to their memorys and as a token of Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson's
+friendship and esteem.  At my leisure hours, when the children are
+in bed, they occupy all my thoughts, I dream of them.  About two
+weeks ago I dreamed that my sweet little Jessie came running to me
+in her usual way, and I took her in my arms.  O my dear babys, were
+mortal eyes permitted to see them in heaven, we would not repine
+nor grieve for their loss.'
+
+By the 29th of February, the Reverend John Campbell, a man of
+obvious sense and human value, but hateful to the present
+biographer, because he wrote so many letters and conveyed so little
+information, summed up this first period of affliction in a letter
+to Miss Smith:  'Your dear sister but a little while ago had a full
+nursery, and the dear blooming creatures sitting around her table
+filled her breast with hope that one day they should fill active
+stations in society and become an ornament in the Church below.
+But ah!'
+
+Near a hundred years ago these little creatures ceased to be, and
+for not much less a period the tears have been dried.  And to this
+day, looking in these stitched sheaves of letters, we hear the
+sound of many soft-hearted women sobbing for the lost.  Never was
+such a massacre of the innocents; teething and chincough and
+scarlet fever and smallpox ran the round; and little Lillies, and
+Smiths, and Stevensons fell like moths about a candle; and nearly
+all the sympathetic correspondents deplore and recall the little
+losses of their own.  'It is impossible to describe the Heavnly
+looks of the Dear Babe the three last days of his life,' writes
+Mrs. Laurie to Mrs. Smith.  'Never--never, my dear aunt, could I
+wish to eface the rememberance of this Dear Child.  Never, never,
+my dear aunt!'  And so soon the memory of the dead and the dust of
+the survivors are buried in one grave.
+
+There was another death in 1812; it passes almost unremarked; a
+single funeral seemed but a small event to these 'veterans in
+affliction'; and by 1816 the nursery was full again.  Seven little
+hopefuls enlivened the house; some were growing up; to the elder
+girl my grandfather already wrote notes in current hand at the tail
+of his letters to his wife:  and to the elder boys he had begun to
+print, with laborious care, sheets of childish gossip and pedantic
+applications.  Here, for instance, under date of 26th May 1816, is
+part of a mythological account of London, with a moral for the
+three gentlemen, 'Messieurs Alan, Robert, and James Stevenson,' to
+whom the document is addressed:
+
+'There are many prisons here like Bridewell, for, like other large
+towns, there are many bad men here as well as many good men.  The
+natives of London are in general not so tall and strong as the
+people of Edinburgh, because they have not so much pure air, and
+instead of taking porridge they eat cakes made with sugar and
+plums.  Here you have thousands of carts to draw timber, thousands
+of coaches to take you to all parts of the town, and thousands of
+boats to sail on the river Thames.  But you must have money to pay,
+otherwise you can get nothing.  Now the way to get money is, become
+clever men and men of education, by being good scholars.'
+
+From the same absence, he writes to his wife on a Sunday:
+
+'It is now about eight o'clock with me, and I imagine you to be
+busy with the young folks, hearing the questions [Anglice,
+catechism], and indulging the boys with a chapter from the large
+Bible, with their interrogations and your answers in the soundest
+doctrine.  I hope James is getting his verse as usual, and that
+Mary is not forgetting her little hymn.  While Jeannie will be
+reading Wotherspoon, or some other suitable and instructive book, I
+presume our friend, Aunt Mary, will have just arrived with the news
+of A THRONG KIRK [a crowded church] and a great sermon.  You may
+mention, with my compliments to my mother, that I was at St. Paul's
+to-day, and attended a very excellent service with Mr. James
+Lawrie.  The text was "Examine and see that ye be in the faith."'
+
+A twinkle of humour lights up this evocation of the distant scene--
+the humour of happy men and happy homes.  Yet it is penned upon the
+threshold of fresh sorrow.  James and Mary--he of the verse and she
+of the hymn--did not much more than survive to welcome their
+returning father.  On the 25th, one of the godly women writes to
+Janet:
+
+'My dearest beloved madam, when I last parted from you, you was so
+affected with your affliction [you? or I?] could think of nothing
+else.  But on Saturday, when I went to inquire after your health,
+how was I startled to hear that dear James was gone!  Ah, what is
+this?  My dear benefactors, doing so much good to many, to the
+Lord, suddenly to be deprived of their most valued comforts!  I was
+thrown into great perplexity, could do nothing but murmur, why
+these things were done to such a family.  I could not rest, but at
+midnight, whether spoken [or not] it was presented to my mind--
+"Those whom ye deplore are walking with me in white."  I conclude
+from this the Lord saying to sweet Mrs. Stevenson:  "I gave them to
+be brought up for me:  well done, good and faithful! they are fully
+prepared, and now I must present them to my father and your father,
+to my God and your God."'
+
+It would be hard to lay on flattery with a more sure and daring
+hand.  I quote it as a model of a letter of condolence; be sure it
+would console.  Very different, perhaps quite as welcome, is this
+from a lighthouse inspector to my grandfather:
+
+'In reading your letter the trickling tear ran down ray cheeks in
+silent sorrow for your departed dear ones, my sweet little friends.
+Well do I remember, and you will call to mind, their little
+innocent and interesting stories.  Often have they come round me
+and taken me by the hand, but alas!  I am no more destined to
+behold them.'
+
+The child who is taken becomes canonised, and the looks of the
+homeliest babe seem in the retrospect 'heavenly the three last days
+of his life.'  But it appears that James and Mary had indeed been
+children more than usually engaging; a record was preserved a long
+while in the family of their remarks and 'little innocent and
+interesting stories,' and the blow and the blank were the more
+sensible.
+
+Early the next month Robert Stevenson must proceed upon his voyage
+of inspection, part by land, part by sea.  He left his wife plunged
+in low spirits; the thought of his loss, and still more of her
+concern, was continually present in his mind, and he draws in his
+letters home an interesting picture of his family relations:
+
+'Windygates Inn, Monday (Postmark July 16th)
+
+'MY DEAREST JEANNIE,--While the people of the inn are getting me a
+little bit of something to eat, I sit down to tell you that I had a
+most excellent passage across the water, and got to Wemyss at mid-
+day.  I hope the children will be very good, and that Robert will
+take a course with you to learn his Latin lessons daily; he may,
+however, read English in company.  Let them have strawberries on
+Saturdays.'
+
+'Westhaven, 17th July.
+
+'I have been occupied to-day at the harbour of Newport, opposite
+Dundee, and am this far on my way to Arbroath.  You may tell the
+boys that I slept last night in Mr. Steadman's tent.  I found my
+bed rather hard, but the lodgings were otherwise extremely
+comfortable.  The encampment is on the Fife side of the Tay,
+immediately opposite to Dundee.  From the door of the tent you
+command the most beautiful view of the Firth, both up and down, to
+a great extent.  At night all was serene and still, the sky
+presented the most beautiful appearance of bright stars, and the
+morning was ushered in with the song of many little birds.'
+
+'Aberdeen, July 19th.
+
+'I hope, my dear, that you are going out of doors regularly and
+taking much exercise.  I would have you to MAKE THE MARKETS DAILY--
+and by all means to take a seat in the coach once or twice in the
+week and see what is going on in town.  [The family were at the
+sea-side.]  It will be good not to be too great a stranger to the
+house.  It will be rather painful at first, but as it is to be
+done, I would have you not to be too strange to the house in town.
+
+'Tell the boys that I fell in with a soldier--his name is
+Henderson--who was twelve years with Lord Wellington and other
+commanders.  He returned very lately with only eightpence-halfpenny
+in his pocket, and found his father and mother both in life, though
+they had never heard from him, nor he from them.  He carried my
+great-coat and umbrella a few miles.'
+
+'Fraserburgh, July 20th.
+
+'Fraserburgh is the same dull place which [Auntie] Mary and Jeannie
+found it.  As I am travelling along the coast which they are
+acquainted with, you had better cause Robert bring down the map
+from Edinburgh; and it will be a good exercise in geography for the
+young folks to trace my course.  I hope they have entered upon the
+writing.  The library will afford abundance of excellent books,
+which I wish you would employ a little.  I hope you are doing me
+the favour to go much out with the boys, which will do you much
+good and prevent them from getting so very much overheated.'
+
+[To the Boys--Printed.]
+
+'When I had last the pleasure of writing to you, your dear little
+brother James and your sweet little sister Mary were still with us.
+But it has pleased God to remove them to another and a better
+world, and we must submit to the will of Providence.  I must,
+however, request of you to think sometimes upon them, and to be
+very careful not to do anything that will displease or vex your
+mother.  It is therefore proper that you do not roamp [Scottish
+indeed] too much about, and that you learn your lessons.'
+
+'I went to Fraserburgh and visited Kinnaird Head Lighthouse, which
+I found in good order.  All this time I travelled upon good roads,
+and paid many a toll-man by the way; but from Fraserburgh to Banff
+there is no toll-bars, and the road is so bad that I had to walk up
+and down many a hill, and for want of bridges the horses had to
+drag the chaise up to the middle of the wheels in water.  At Banff
+I saw a large ship of 300 tons lying on the sands upon her beam-
+ends, and a wreck for want of a good harbour.  Captain Wilson--to
+whom I beg my compliments--will show you a ship of 300 tons.  At
+the towns of Macduff, Banff, and Portsoy, many of the houses are
+built of marble, and the rocks on this part of the coast or sea-
+side are marble.  But, my dear Boys, unless marble be polished and
+dressed, it is a very coarse-looking stone, and has no more beauty
+than common rock.  As a proof of this, ask the favour of your
+mother to take you to Thomson's Marble Works in South Leith, and
+you will see marble in all its stages, and perhaps you may there
+find Portsoy marble!  The use I wish to make of this is to tell you
+that, without education, a man is just like a block of rough,
+unpolished marble.  Notice, in proof of this, how much Mr. Neill
+and Mr. M'Gregor [the tutor] know, and observe how little a man
+knows who is not a good scholar.  On my way to Fochabers I passed
+through many thousand acres of Fir timber, and saw many deer
+running in these woods.'
+
+[To Mrs. Stevenson.]
+
+'Inverness, July 21st.
+
+'I propose going to church in the afternoon, and as I have
+breakfasted late, I shall afterwards take a walk, and dine about
+six o'clock.  I do not know who is the clergyman here, but I shall
+think of you all.  I travelled in the mail-coach [from Banff]
+almost alone.  While it was daylight I kept the top, and the
+passing along a country I had never before seen was a considerable
+amusement.  But, my dear, you are all much in my thoughts, and many
+are the objects which recall the recollection of our tender and
+engaging children we have so recently lost.  We must not, however,
+repine.  I could not for a moment wish any change of circumstances
+in their case; and in every comparative view of their state, I see
+the Lord's goodness in removing them from an evil world to an abode
+of bliss; and I must earnestly hope that you may be enabled to take
+such a view of this affliction as to live in the happy prospect of
+our all meeting again to part no more--and that under such
+considerations you are getting up your spirits.  I wish you would
+walk about, and by all means go to town, and do not sit much at
+home.'
+
+'Inverness, July 23rd.
+
+'I am duly favoured with your much-valued letter, and I am happy to
+find that you are so much with my mother, because that sort of
+variety has a tendency to occupy the mind, and to keep it from
+brooding too much upon one subject.  Sensibility and tenderness are
+certainly two of the most interesting and pleasing qualities of the
+mind.  These qualities are also none of the least of the many
+endearingments of the female character.  But if that kind of
+sympathy and pleasing melancholy, which is familiar to us under
+distress, be much indulged, it becomes habitual, and takes such a
+hold of the mind as to absorb all the other affections, and unfit
+us for the duties and proper enjoyments of life.  Resignation sinks
+into a kind of peevish discontent.  I am far, however, from
+thinking there is the least danger of this in your case, my dear;
+for you have been on all occasions enabled to look upon the
+fortunes of this life as under the direction of a higher power, and
+have always preserved that propriety and consistency of conduct in
+all circumstances which endears your example to your family in
+particular, and to your friends.  I am therefore, my dear, for you
+to go out much, and to go to the house up-stairs [he means to go
+up-stairs in the house, to visit the place of the dead children],
+and to put yourself in the way of the visits of your friends.  I
+wish you would call on the Miss Grays, and it would be a good thing
+upon a Saturday to dine with my mother, and take Meggy and all the
+family with you, and let them have their strawberries in town.  The
+tickets of one of the OLD-FASHIONED COACHES would take you all up,
+and if the evening were good, they could all walk down, excepting
+Meggy and little David.'
+
+'Inverness, July 25th, 11 p.m.
+
+'Captain Wemyss, of Wemyss, has come to Inverness to go the voyage
+with me, and as we are sleeping in a double-bedded room, I must no
+longer transgress.  You must remember me the best way you can to
+the children.'
+
+'On board of the Lighthouse Yacht, July 29th.
+
+'I got to Cromarty yesterday about mid-day, and went to church.  It
+happened to be the sacrament there, and I heard a Mr. Smith at that
+place conclude the service with a very suitable exhortation.  There
+seemed a great concourse of people, but they had rather an
+unfortunate day for them at the tent, as it rained a good deal.
+After drinking tea at the inn, Captain Wemyss accompanied me on
+board, and we sailed about eight last night.  The wind at present
+being rather a beating one, I think I shall have an opportunity of
+standing into the bay of Wick, and leaving this letter to let you
+know my progress and that I am well.'
+
+'Lighthouse Yacht, Stornoway, August 4th.
+
+'To-day we had prayers on deck as usual when at sea.  I read the
+14th chapter, I think, of Job.  Captain Wemyss has been in the
+habit of doing this on board his own ship, agreeably to the
+Articles of War.  Our passage round the Cape [Cape Wrath] was
+rather a cross one, and as the wind was northerly, we had a pretty
+heavy sea, but upon the whole have made a good passage, leaving
+many vessels behind us in Orkney.  I am quite well, my dear; and
+Captain Wemyss, who has much spirit, and who is much given to
+observation, and a perfect enthusiast in his profession, enlivens
+the voyage greatly.  Let me entreat you to move about much, and
+take a walk with the boys to Leith.  I think they have still many
+places to see there, and I wish you would indulge them in this
+respect.  Mr. Scales is the best person I know for showing them the
+sailcloth-weaving, etc., and he would have great pleasure in
+undertaking this.  My dear, I trust soon to be with you, and that
+through the goodness of God we shall meet all well.'
+
+'There are two vessels lying here with emigrants for America, each
+with eighty people on board, at all ages, from a few days to
+upwards of sixty!  Their prospects must be very forlorn to go with
+a slender purse for distant and unknown countries.'
+
+'Lighthouse Yacht, off Greenock, Aug. 18th.
+
+'It was after CHURCH-TIME before we got here, but we had prayers
+upon deck on the way up the Clyde.  This has, upon the whole, been
+a very good voyage, and Captain Wemyss, who enjoys it much, has
+been an excellent companion; we met with pleasure, and shall part
+with regret.'
+
+Strange that, after his long experience, my grandfather should have
+learned so little of the attitude and even the dialect of the
+spiritually-minded; that after forty-four years in a most religious
+circle, he could drop without sense of incongruity from a period of
+accepted phrases to 'trust his wife was GETTING UP HER SPIRITS,' or
+think to reassure her as to the character of Captain Wemyss by
+mentioning that he had read prayers on the deck of his frigate
+'AGREEABLY TO THE ARTICLES OF WAR'!  Yet there is no doubt--and it
+is one of the most agreeable features of the kindly series--that he
+was doing his best to please, and there is little doubt that he
+succeeded.  Almost all my grandfather's private letters have been
+destroyed.  This correspondence has not only been preserved entire,
+but stitched up in the same covers with the works of the godly
+women, the Reverend John Campbell, and the painful Mrs. Ogle.  I
+did not think to mention the good dame, but she comes in usefully
+as an example.  Amongst the treasures of the ladies of my family,
+her letters have been honoured with a volume to themselves.  I read
+about a half of them myself; then handed over the task to one of
+stauncher resolution, with orders to communicate any fact that
+should be found to illuminate these pages.  Not one was found; it
+was her only art to communicate by post second-rate sermons at
+second-hand; and such, I take it, was the correspondence in which
+my grandmother delighted.  If I am right, that of Robert Stevenson,
+with his quaint smack of the contemporary 'Sandford and Merton,'
+his interest in the whole page of experience, his perpetual quest,
+and fine scent of all that seems romantic to a boy, his needless
+pomp of language, his excellent good sense, his unfeigned,
+unstained, unwearied human kindliness, would seem to her, in a
+comparison, dry and trivial and worldly.  And if these letters were
+by an exception cherished and preserved, it would be for one or
+both of two reasons--because they dealt with and were bitter-sweet
+reminders of a time of sorrow; or because she was pleased, perhaps
+touched, by the writer's guileless efforts to seem spiritually-
+minded.
+
+After this date there were two more births and two more deaths, so
+that the number of the family remained unchanged; in all five
+children survived to reach maturity and to outlive their parents.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II:  THE SERVICE OF THE NORTHERN LIGHTS
+
+
+
+I
+
+It were hard to imagine a contrast more sharply defined than that
+between the lives of the men and women of this family:  the one so
+chambered, so centred in the affections and the sensibilities; the
+other so active, healthy, and expeditious.  From May to November,
+Thomas Smith and Robert Stevenson were on the mail, in the saddle,
+or at sea; and my grandfather, in particular, seems to have been
+possessed with a demon of activity in travel.  In 1802, by
+direction of the Northern Lighthouse Board, he had visited the
+coast of England from St. Bees, in Cumberland, and round by the
+Scilly Islands to some place undecipherable by me; in all a
+distance of 2500 miles.  In 1806 I find him starting 'on a tour
+round the south coast of England, from the Humber to the Severn.'
+Peace was not long declared ere he found means to visit Holland,
+where he was in time to see, in the navy-yard at Helvoetsluys,
+'about twenty of Bonaparte's ENGLISH FLOTILLA lying in a state of
+decay, the object of curiosity to Englishmen.'  By 1834 he seems to
+have been acquainted with the coast of France from Dieppe to
+Bordeaux; and a main part of his duty as Engineer to the Board of
+Northern Lights was one round of dangerous and laborious travel.
+
+In 1786, when Thomas Smith first received the appointment, the
+extended and formidable coast of Scotland was lighted at a single
+point--the Isle of May, in the jaws of the Firth of Forth, where,
+on a tower already a hundred and fifty years old, an open coal-fire
+blazed in an iron chauffer.  The whole archipelago, thus nightly
+plunged in darkness, was shunned by sea-going vessels, and the
+favourite courses were north about Shetland and west about St.
+Kilda.  When the Board met, four new lights formed the extent of
+their intentions--Kinnaird Head, in Aberdeenshire, at the eastern
+elbow of the coast; North Ronaldsay, in Orkney, to keep the north
+and guide ships passing to the south'ard of Shetland; Island Glass,
+on Harris, to mark the inner shore of the Hebrides and illuminate
+the navigation of the Minch; and the Mull of Kintyre.  These works
+were to be attempted against obstacles, material and financial,
+that might have staggered the most bold.  Smith had no ship at his
+command till 1791; the roads in those outlandish quarters where his
+business lay were scarce passable when they existed, and the tower
+on the Mull of Kintyre stood eleven months unlighted while the
+apparatus toiled and foundered by the way among rocks and mosses.
+Not only had towers to be built and apparatus transplanted; the
+supply of oil must be maintained, and the men fed, in the same
+inaccessible and distant scenes; a whole service, with its routine
+and hierarchy, had to be called out of nothing; and a new trade
+(that of lightkeeper) to be taught, recruited, and organised.  The
+funds of the Board were at the first laughably inadequate.  They
+embarked on their career on a loan of twelve hundred pounds, and
+their income in 1789, after relief by a fresh Act of Parliament,
+amounted to less than three hundred.  It must be supposed that the
+thoughts of Thomas Smith, in these early years, were sometimes
+coloured with despair; and since he built and lighted one tower
+after another, and created and bequeathed to his successors the
+elements of an excellent administration, it may be conceded that he
+was not after all an unfortunate choice for a first engineer.
+
+War added fresh complications.  In 1794 Smith came 'very near to be
+taken' by a French squadron.  In 1813 Robert Stevenson was cruising
+about the neighbourhood of Cape Wrath in the immediate fear of
+Commodore Rogers.  The men, and especially the sailors, of the
+lighthouse service must be protected by a medal and ticket from the
+brutal activity of the press-gang.  And the zeal of volunteer
+patriots was at times embarrassing.
+
+'I set off on foot,' writes my grandfather, 'for Marazion, a town
+at the head of Mount's Bay, where I was in hopes of getting a boat
+to freight.  I had just got that length, and was making the
+necessary inquiry, when a young man, accompanied by several idle-
+looking fellows, came up to me, and in a hasty tone said, "Sir, in
+the king's name I seize your person and papers."  To which I
+replied that I should be glad to see his authority, and know the
+reason of an address so abrupt.  He told me the want of time
+prevented his taking regular steps, but that it would be necessary
+for me to return to Penzance, as I was suspected of being a French
+spy.  I proposed to submit my papers to the nearest Justice of
+Peace, who was immediately applied to, and came to the inn where I
+was.  He seemed to be greatly agitated, and quite at a loss how to
+proceed.  The complaint preferred against me was "that I had
+examined the Longships Lighthouse with the most minute attention,
+and was no less particular in my inquiries at the keepers of the
+lighthouse regarding the sunk rocks lying off the Land's End, with
+the sets of the currents and tides along the coast:  that I seemed
+particularly to regret the situation of the rocks called the Seven
+Stones, and the loss of a beacon which the Trinity Board had caused
+to be fixed on the Wolf Rock; that I had taken notes of the
+bearings of several sunk rocks, and a drawing of the lighthouse,
+and of Cape Cornwall.  Further, that I had refused the honour of
+Lord Edgecombe's invitation to dinner, offering as an apology that
+I had some particular business on hand."'
+
+My grandfather produced in answer his credentials and letter of
+credit; but the justice, after perusing them, 'very gravely
+observed that they were "musty bits of paper,"' and proposed to
+maintain the arrest.  Some more enlightened magistrates at Penzance
+relieved him of suspicion and left him at liberty to pursue his
+journey,--'which I did with so much eagerness,' he adds, 'that I
+gave the two coal lights on the Lizard only a very transient look.'
+
+Lighthouse operations in Scotland differed essentially in character
+from those in England.  The English coast is in comparison a
+habitable, homely place, well supplied with towns; the Scottish
+presents hundreds of miles of savage islands and desolate moors.
+The Parliamentary committee of 1834, profoundly ignorant of this
+distinction, insisted with my grandfather that the work at the
+various stations should be let out on contract 'in the
+neighbourhood,' where sheep and deer, and gulls and cormorants, and
+a few ragged gillies, perhaps crouching in a bee-hive house, made
+up the only neighbours.  In such situations repairs and
+improvements could only be overtaken by collecting (as my
+grandfather expressed it) a few 'lads,' placing them under charge
+of a foreman, and despatching them about the coast as occasion
+served.  The particular danger of these seas increased the
+difficulty.  The course of the lighthouse tender lies amid iron-
+bound coasts, among tide-races, the whirlpools of the Pentland
+Firth, flocks of islands, flocks of reefs, many of them uncharted.
+The aid of steam was not yet.  At first in random coasting sloop,
+and afterwards in the cutter belonging to the service, the engineer
+must ply and run amongst these multiplied dangers, and sometimes
+late into the stormy autumn.  For pages together my grandfather's
+diary preserves a record of these rude experiences; of hard winds
+and rough seas; and of 'the try-sail and storm-jib, those old
+friends which I never like to see.'  They do not tempt to
+quotation, but it was the man's element, in which he lived, and
+delighted to live, and some specimen must be presented.  On Friday,
+September 10th, 1830, the Regent lying in Lerwick Bay, we have this
+entry:  'The gale increases, with continued rain.'  On the morrow,
+Saturday, 11th, the weather appeared to moderate, and they put to
+sea, only to be driven by evening into Levenswick.  There they lay,
+'rolling much,' with both anchors ahead and the square yard on
+deck, till the morning of Saturday, 18th.  Saturday and Sunday they
+were plying to the southward with a 'strong breeze and a heavy
+sea,' and on Sunday evening anchored in Otterswick.  'Monday, 20th,
+it blows so fresh that we have no communication with the shore.  We
+see Mr. Rome on the beach, but we cannot communicate with him.  It
+blows "mere fire," as the sailors express it.'  And for three days
+more the diary goes on with tales of davits unshipped, high seas,
+strong gales from the southward, and the ship driven to refuge in
+Kirkwall or Deer Sound.  I have many a passage before me to
+transcribe, in which my grandfather draws himself as a man of
+minute and anxious exactitude about details.  It must not be
+forgotten that these voyages in the tender were the particular
+pleasure and reward of his existence; that he had in him a reserve
+of romance which carried him delightedly over these hardships and
+perils; that to him it was 'great gain' to be eight nights and
+seven days in the savage bay of Levenswick--to read a book in the
+much agitated cabin--to go on deck and hear the gale scream in his
+ears, and see the landscape dark with rain and the ship plunge at
+her two anchors--and to turn in at night and wake again at morning,
+in his narrow berth, to the glamorous and continued voices of the
+gale.
+
+His perils and escapes were beyond counting.  I shall only refer to
+two:  the first, because of the impression made upon himself; the
+second, from the incidental picture it presents of the north
+islanders.  On the 9th October 1794 he took passage from Orkney in
+the sloop Elizabeth of Stromness.  She made a fair passage till
+within view of Kinnaird Head, where, as she was becalmed some three
+miles in the offing, and wind seemed to threaten from the south-
+east, the captain landed him, to continue his journey more
+expeditiously ashore.  A gale immediately followed, and the
+Elizabeth was driven back to Orkney and lost with all hands.  The
+second escape I have been in the habit of hearing related by an
+eye-witness, my own father, from the earliest days of childhood.
+On a September night, the Regent lay in the Pentland Firth in a fog
+and a violent and windless swell.  It was still dark, when they
+were alarmed by the sound of breakers, and an anchor was
+immediately let go.  The peep of dawn discovered them swinging in
+desperate proximity to the Isle of Swona {54a} and the surf
+bursting close under their stern.  There was in this place a hamlet
+of the inhabitants, fisher-folk and wreckers; their huts stood
+close about the head of the beach.  All slept; the doors were
+closed, and there was no smoke, and the anxious watchers on board
+ship seemed to contemplate a village of the dead.  It was thought
+possible to launch a boat and tow the Regent from her place of
+danger; and with this view a signal of distress was made and a gun
+fired with a red-hot poker from the galley.  Its detonation awoke
+the sleepers.  Door after door was opened, and in the grey light of
+the morning fisher after fisher was seen to come forth, yawning and
+stretching himself, nightcap on head.  Fisher after fisher, I
+wrote, and my pen tripped; for it should rather stand wrecker after
+wrecker.  There was no emotion, no animation, it scarce seemed any
+interest; not a hand was raised; but all callously awaited the
+harvest of the sea, and their children stood by their side and
+waited also.  To the end of his life, my father remembered that
+amphitheatre of placid spectators on the beach; and with a special
+and natural animosity, the boys of his own age.  But presently a
+light air sprang up, and filled the sails, and fainted, and filled
+them again; and little by little the Regent fetched way against the
+swell, and clawed off shore into the turbulent firth.
+
+The purpose of these voyages was to effect a landing on open
+beaches or among shelving rocks, not for persons only, but for
+coals and food, and the fragile furniture of light-rooms.  It was
+often impossible.  In 1831 I find my grandfather 'hovering for a
+week' about the Pentland Skerries for a chance to land; and it was
+almost always difficult.  Much knack and enterprise were early
+developed among the seamen of the service; their management of
+boats is to this day a matter of admiration; and I find my
+grandfather in his diary depicting the nature of their excellence
+in one happily descriptive phrase, when he remarks that Captain
+Soutar had landed 'the small stores and nine casks of oil WITH ALL
+THE ACTIVITY OF A SMUGGLER.'  And it was one thing to land, another
+to get on board again.  I have here a passage from the diary, where
+it seems to have been touch-and-go.  'I landed at Tarbetness, on
+the eastern side of the point, in a MERE GALE OR BLAST OF WIND from
+west-south-west, at 2 p.m.  It blew so fresh that the captain, in a
+kind of despair, went off to the ship, leaving myself and the
+steward ashore.  While I was in the light-room, I felt it shaking
+and waving, not with the tremor of the Bell Rock, but with the
+WAVING OF A TREE!  This the light-keepers seemed to be quite
+familiar to, the principal keeper remarking that "it was very
+pleasant," perhaps meaning interesting or curious.  The captain
+worked the vessel into smooth water with admirable dexterity, and I
+got on board again about 6 p.m. from the other side of the point.'
+But not even the dexterity of Soutar could prevail always; and my
+grandfather must at times have been left in strange berths and with
+but rude provision.  I may instance the case of my father, who was
+storm-bound three days upon an islet, sleeping in the uncemented
+and unchimneyed houses of the islanders, and subsisting on a diet
+of nettle-soup and lobsters.
+
+The name of Soutar has twice escaped my pen, and I feel I owe him a
+vignette.  Soutar first attracted notice as mate of a praam at the
+Bell Rock, and rose gradually to be captain of the Regent.  He was
+active, admirably skilled in his trade, and a man incapable of
+fear.  Once, in London, he fell among a gang of confidence-men,
+naturally deceived by his rusticity and his prodigious accent.
+They plied him with drink--a hopeless enterprise, for Soutar could
+not be made drunk; they proposed cards, and Soutar would not play.
+At last, one of them, regarding him with a formidable countenance,
+inquired if he were not frightened?  'I'm no' very easy fleyed,'
+replied the captain.  And the rooks withdrew after some easier
+pigeon.  So many perils shared, and the partial familiarity of so
+many voyages, had given this man a stronghold in my grandfather's
+estimation; and there is no doubt but he had the art to court and
+please him with much hypocritical skill.  He usually dined on
+Sundays in the cabin.  He used to come down daily after dinner for
+a glass of port or whisky, often in his full rig of sou'-wester,
+oilskins, and long boots; and I have often heard it described how
+insinuatingly he carried himself on these appearances, artfully
+combining the extreme of deference with a blunt and seamanlike
+demeanour.  My father and uncles, with the devilish penetration of
+the boy, were far from being deceived; and my father, indeed, was
+favoured with an object-lesson not to be mistaken.  He had crept
+one rainy night into an apple-barrel on deck, and from this place
+of ambush overheard Soutar and a comrade conversing in their
+oilskins.  The smooth sycophant of the cabin had wholly
+disappeared, and the boy listened with wonder to a vulgar and
+truculent ruffian.  Of Soutar, I may say tantum vidi, having met
+him in the Leith docks now more than thirty years ago, when he
+abounded in the praises of my grandfather, encouraged me (in the
+most admirable manner) to pursue his footprints, and left impressed
+for ever on my memory the image of his own Bardolphian nose.  He
+died not long after.
+
+The engineer was not only exposed to the hazards of the sea; he
+must often ford his way by land to remote and scarce accessible
+places, beyond reach of the mail or the post-chaise, beyond even
+the tracery of the bridle-path, and guided by natives across bog
+and heather.  Up to 1807 my grand-father seems to have travelled
+much on horseback; but he then gave up the idea--'such,' he writes
+with characteristic emphasis and capital letters, 'is the Plague of
+Baiting.'  He was a good pedestrian; at the age of fifty-eight I
+find him covering seventeen miles over the moors of the Mackay
+country in less than seven hours, and that is not bad travelling
+for a scramble.  The piece of country traversed was already a
+familiar track, being that between Loch Eriboll and Cape Wrath; and
+I think I can scarce do better than reproduce from the diary some
+traits of his first visit.  The tender lay in Loch Eriboll; by five
+in the morning they sat down to breakfast on board; by six they
+were ashore--my grandfather, Mr. Slight an assistant, and Soutar of
+the jolly nose, and had been taken in charge by two young gentlemen
+of the neighbourhood and a pair of gillies.  About noon they
+reached the Kyle of Durness and passed the ferry.  By half-past
+three they were at Cape Wrath--not yet known by the emphatic
+abbreviation of 'The Cape'--and beheld upon all sides of them
+unfrequented shores, an expanse of desert moor, and the high-piled
+Western Ocean.  The site of the tower was chosen.  Perhaps it is by
+inheritance of blood, but I know few things more inspiriting than
+this location of a lighthouse in a designated space of heather and
+air, through which the sea-birds are still flying.  By 9 p.m. the
+return journey had brought them again to the shores of the Kyle.
+The night was dirty, and as the sea was high and the ferry-boat
+small, Soutar and Mr. Stevenson were left on the far side, while
+the rest of the party embarked and were received into the darkness.
+They made, in fact, a safe though an alarming passage; but the
+ferryman refused to repeat the adventure; and my grand-father and
+the captain long paced the beach, impatient for their turn to pass,
+and tormented with rising anxiety as to the fate of their
+companions.  At length they sought the shelter of a shepherd's
+house.  'We had miserable up-putting,' the diary continues, 'and on
+both sides of the ferry much anxiety of mind.  Our beds were clean
+straw, and but for the circumstance of the boat, I should have
+slept as soundly as ever I did after a walk through moss and mire
+of sixteen hours.'
+
+To go round the lights, even to-day, is to visit past centuries.
+The tide of tourists that flows yearly in Scotland, vulgarising all
+where it approaches, is still defined by certain barriers.  It will
+be long ere there is a hotel at Sumburgh or a hydropathic at Cape
+Wrath; it will be long ere any char-a-banc, laden with tourists,
+shall drive up to Barra Head or Monach, the Island of the Monks.
+They are farther from London than St. Petersburg, and except for
+the towers, sounding and shining all night with fog-bells and the
+radiance of the light-room, glittering by day with the trivial
+brightness of white paint, these island and moorland stations seem
+inaccessible to the civilisation of to-day, and even to the end of
+my grandfather's career the isolation was far greater.  There ran
+no post at all in the Long Island; from the light-house on Barra
+Head a boat must be sent for letters as far as Tobermory, between
+sixty and seventy miles of open sea; and the posts of Shetland,
+which had surprised Sir Walter Scott in 1814, were still unimproved
+in 1833, when my grandfather reported on the subject.  The group
+contained at the time a population of 30,000 souls, and enjoyed a
+trade which had increased in twenty years seven-fold, to between
+three and four thousand tons.  Yet the mails were despatched and
+received by chance coasting vessels at the rate of a penny a
+letter; six and eight weeks often elapsed between opportunities,
+and when a mail was to be made up, sometimes at a moment's notice,
+the bellman was sent hastily through the streets of Lerwick.
+Between Shetland and Orkney, only seventy miles apart, there was
+'no trade communication whatever.'
+
+Such was the state of affairs, only sixty years ago, with the three
+largest clusters of the Scottish Archipelago; and forty-seven years
+earlier, when Thomas Smith began his rounds, or forty-two, when
+Robert Stevenson became conjoined with him in these excursions, the
+barbarism was deep, the people sunk in superstition, the
+circumstances of their life perhaps unique in history.  Lerwick and
+Kirkwall, like Guam or the Bay of Islands, were but barbarous ports
+where whalers called to take up and to return experienced seamen.
+On the outlying islands the clergy lived isolated, thinking other
+thoughts, dwelling in a different country from their parishioners,
+like missionaries in the South Seas.  My grandfather's unrivalled
+treasury of anecdote was never written down; it embellished his
+talk while he yet was, and died with him when he died; and such as
+have been preserved relate principally to the islands of Ronaldsay
+and Sanday, two of the Orkney group.  These bordered on one of the
+water-highways of civilisation; a great fleet passed annually in
+their view, and of the shipwrecks of the world they were the scene
+and cause of a proportion wholly incommensurable to their size.  In
+one year, 1798, my grandfather found the remains of no fewer than
+five vessels on the isle of Sanday, which is scarcely twelve miles
+long.
+
+'Hardly a year passed,' he writes, 'without instances of this kind;
+for, owing to the projecting points of this strangely formed
+island, the lowness and whiteness of its eastern shores, and the
+wonderful manner in which the scanty patches of land are
+intersected with lakes and pools of water, it becomes, even in
+daylight, a deception, and has often been fatally mistaken for an
+open sea.  It had even become proverbial with some of the
+inhabitants to observe that "if wrecks were to happen, they might
+as well be sent to the poor isle of Sanday as anywhere else."  On
+this and the neighbouring islands the inhabitants had certainly had
+their share of wrecked goods, for the eye is presented with these
+melancholy remains in almost every form.  For example, although
+quarries are to be met with generally in these islands, and the
+stones are very suitable for building dykes (Anglice, walls), yet
+instances occur of the land being enclosed, even to a considerable
+extent, with ship-timbers.  The author has actually seen a park
+(Anglice, meadow) paled round chiefly with cedar-wood and mahogany
+from the wreck of a Honduras-built ship; and in one island, after
+the wreck of a ship laden with wine, the inhabitants have been
+known to take claret to their barley-meal porridge.  On complaining
+to one of the pilots of the badness of his boat's sails, he replied
+to the author with some degree of pleasantry, "Had it been His will
+that you came na' here wi' your lights, we might 'a' had better
+sails to our boats, and more o' other things."  It may further be
+mentioned that when some of Lord Dundas's farms are to be let in
+these islands a competition takes place for the lease, and it is
+bona fide understood that a much higher rent is paid than the lands
+would otherwise give were it not for the chance of making
+considerably by the agency and advantages attending shipwrecks on
+the shores of the respective farms.'
+
+The people of North Ronaldsay still spoke Norse, or, rather, mixed
+it with their English.  The walls of their huts were built to a
+great thickness of rounded stones from the sea-beach; the roof
+flagged, loaded with earth, and perforated by a single hole for the
+escape of smoke.  The grass grew beautifully green on the flat
+house-top, where the family would assemble with their dogs and
+cats, as on a pastoral lawn; there were no windows, and in my
+grandfather's expression, 'there was really no demonstration of a
+house unless it were the diminutive door.'  He once landed on
+Ronaldsay with two friends.  The inhabitants crowded and pressed so
+much upon the strangers that the bailiff, or resident factor of the
+island, blew with his ox-horn, calling out to the natives to stand
+off and let the gentlemen come forward to the laird; upon which one
+of the islanders, as spokesman, called out, "God ha'e us, man! thou
+needsna mak' sic a noise.  It's no' every day we ha'e THREE HATTED
+MEN on our isle."'  When the Surveyor of Taxes came (for the first
+time, perhaps) to Sanday, and began in the King's name to complain
+of the unconscionable swarms of dogs, and to menace the inhabitants
+with taxation, it chanced that my grandfather and his friend, Dr.
+Patrick Neill, were received by an old lady in a Ronaldsay hut.
+Her hut, which was similar to the model described, stood on a Ness,
+or point of land jutting into the sea.  They were made welcome in
+the firelit cellar, placed 'in casey or straw-worked chairs, after
+the Norwegian fashion, with arms, and a canopy overhead,' and given
+milk in a wooden dish.  These hospitalities attended to, the old
+lady turned at once to Dr. Neill, whom she took for the Surveyor of
+Taxes.  'Sir,' said she, 'gin ye'll tell the King that I canna keep
+the Ness free o' the Bangers (sheep) without twa hun's, and twa
+guid hun's too, he'll pass me threa the tax on dugs.'
+
+This familiar confidence, these traits of engaging simplicity, are
+characters of a secluded people.  Mankind--and, above all,
+islanders--come very swiftly to a bearing, and find very readily,
+upon one convention or another, a tolerable corporate life.  The
+danger is to those from without, who have not grown up from
+childhood in the islands, but appear suddenly in that narrow
+horizon, life-sized apparitions.  For these no bond of humanity
+exists, no feeling of kinship is awakened by their peril; they will
+assist at a shipwreck, like the fisher-folk of Lunga, as
+spectators, and when the fatal scene is over, and the beach strewn
+with dead bodies, they will fence their fields with mahogany, and,
+after a decent grace, sup claret to their porridge.  It is not
+wickedness:  it is scarce evil; it is only, in its highest power,
+the sense of isolation and the wise disinterestedness of feeble and
+poor races.  Think how many viking ships had sailed by these
+islands in the past, how many vikings had landed, and raised
+turmoil, and broken up the barrows of the dead, and carried off the
+wines of the living; and blame them, if you are able, for that
+belief (which may be called one of the parables of the devil's
+gospel) that a man rescued from the sea will prove the bane of his
+deliverer.  It might be thought that my grandfather, coming there
+unknown, and upon an employment so hateful to the inhabitants, must
+have run the hazard of his life.  But this were to misunderstand.
+He came franked by the laird and the clergyman; he was the King's
+officer; the work was 'opened with prayer by the Rev. Walter Trail,
+minister of the parish'; God and the King had decided it, and the
+people of these pious islands bowed their heads.  There landed,
+indeed, in North Ronaldsay, during the last decade of the
+eighteenth century, a traveller whose life seems really to have
+been imperilled.  A very little man of a swarthy complexion, he
+came ashore, exhausted and unshaved, from a long boat passage, and
+lay down to sleep in the home of the parish schoolmaster.  But he
+had been seen landing.  The inhabitants had identified him for a
+Pict, as, by some singular confusion of name, they called the dark
+and dwarfish aboriginal people of the land.  Immediately the
+obscure ferment of a race-hatred, grown into a superstition, began
+to work in their bosoms, and they crowded about the house and the
+room-door with fearful whisperings.  For some time the schoolmaster
+held them at bay, and at last despatched a messenger to call my
+grand-father.  He came:  he found the islanders beside themselves
+at this unwelcome resurrection of the dead and the detested; he was
+shown, as adminicular of testimony, the traveller's uncouth and
+thick-soled boots; he argued, and finding argument unavailing,
+consented to enter the room and examine with his own eyes the
+sleeping Pict.  One glance was sufficient:  the man was now a
+missionary, but he had been before that an Edinburgh shopkeeper
+with whom my grandfather had dealt.  He came forth again with this
+report, and the folk of the island, wholly relieved, dispersed to
+their own houses.  They were timid as sheep and ignorant as
+limpets; that was all.  But the Lord deliver us from the tender
+mercies of a frightened flock!
+
+I will give two more instances of their superstition.  When Sir
+Walter Scott visited the Stones of Stennis, my grandfather put in
+his pocket a hundred-foot line, which he unfortunately lost.
+
+'Some years afterwards,' he writes, 'one of my assistants on a
+visit to the Stones of Stennis took shelter from a storm in a
+cottage close by the lake; and seeing a box-measuring-line in the
+bole or sole of the cottage window, he asked the woman where she
+got this well-known professional appendage.  She said:  "O sir, ane
+of the bairns fand it lang syne at the Stanes; and when drawing it
+out we took fright, and thinking it had belanged to the fairies, we
+threw it into the bole, and it has layen there ever since."'
+
+This is for the one; the last shall be a sketch by the master hand
+of Scott himself:
+
+'At the village of Stromness, on the Orkney main island, called
+Pomona, lived, in 1814, an aged dame called Bessie Millie, who
+helped out her subsistence by selling favourable winds to mariners.
+He was a venturous master of a vessel who left the roadstead of
+Stromness without paying his offering to propitiate Bessie Millie!
+Her fee was extremely moderate, being exactly sixpence, for which
+she boiled her kettle and gave the bark the advantage of her
+prayers, for she disclaimed all unlawful acts.  The wind thus
+petitioned for was sure, she said, to arrive, though occasionally
+the mariners had to wait some time for it.  The woman's dwelling
+and appearance were not unbecoming her pretensions.  Her house,
+which was on the brow of the steep hill on which Stromness is
+founded, was only accessible by a series of dirty and precipitous
+lanes, and for exposure might have been the abode of Eolus himself,
+in whose commodities the inhabitant dealt.  She herself was, as she
+told us, nearly one hundred years old, withered and dried up like a
+mummy.  A clay-coloured kerchief, folded round her neck,
+corresponded in colour to her corpse-like complexion.  Two light
+blue eyes that gleamed with a lustre like that of insanity, an
+utterance of astonishing rapidity, a nose and chin that almost met
+together, and a ghastly expression of cunning, gave her the effect
+of Hecate.  Such was Bessie Millie, to whom the mariners paid a
+sort of tribute with a feeling between jest and earnest.'
+
+
+II
+
+
+From about the beginning of the century up to 1807 Robert Stevenson
+was in partnership with Thomas Smith.  In the last-named year the
+partnership was dissolved; Thomas Smith returning to his business,
+and my grandfather becoming sole engineer to the Board of Northern
+Lights.
+
+I must try, by excerpts from his diary and correspondence, to
+convey to the reader some idea of the ardency and thoroughness with
+which he threw himself into the largest and least of his
+multifarious engagements in this service.  But first I must say a
+word or two upon the life of lightkeepers, and the temptations to
+which they are more particularly exposed.  The lightkeeper occupies
+a position apart among men.  In sea-towers the complement has
+always been three since the deplorable business in the Eddystone,
+when one keeper died, and the survivor, signalling in vain for
+relief, was compelled to live for days with the dead body.  These
+usually pass their time by the pleasant human expedient of
+quarrelling; and sometimes, I am assured, not one of the three is
+on speaking terms with any other.  On shore stations, which on the
+Scottish coast are sometimes hardly less isolated, the usual number
+is two, a principal and an assistant.  The principal is
+dissatisfied with the assistant, or perhaps the assistant keeps
+pigeons, and the principal wants the water from the roof.  Their
+wives and families are with them, living cheek by jowl.  The
+children quarrel; Jockie hits Jimsie in the eye, and the mothers
+make haste to mingle in the dissension.  Perhaps there is trouble
+about a broken dish; perhaps Mrs. Assistant is more highly born
+than Mrs. Principal and gives herself airs; and the men are drawn
+in and the servants presently follow.  'Church privileges have been
+denied the keeper's and the assistant's servants,' I read in one
+case, and the eminently Scots periphrasis means neither more nor
+less than excommunication, 'on account of the discordant and
+quarrelsome state of the families.  The cause, when inquired into,
+proves to be tittle-tattle on both sides.'  The tender comes round;
+the foremen and artificers go from station to station; the gossip
+flies through the whole system of the service, and the stories,
+disfigured and exaggerated, return to their own birthplace with the
+returning tender.  The English Board was apparently shocked by the
+picture of these dissensions.  'When the Trinity House can,' I find
+my grandfather writing at Beachy Head, in 1834, 'they do not
+appoint two keepers, they disagree so ill.  A man who has a family
+is assisted by his family; and in this way, to my experience and
+present observation, the business is very much neglected.  One
+keeper is, in my view, a bad system.  This day's visit to an
+English lighthouse convinces me of this, as the lightkeeper was
+walking on a staff with the gout, and the business performed by one
+of his daughters, a girl of thirteen or fourteen years of age.'
+This man received a hundred a year!  It shows a different reading
+of human nature, perhaps typical of Scotland and England, that I
+find in my grandfather's diary the following pregnant entry:  'THE
+LIGHTKEEPERS, AGREEING ILL, KEEP ONE ANOTHER TO THEIR DUTY.'  But
+the Scottish system was not alone founded on this cynical opinion.
+The dignity and the comfort of the northern lightkeeper were both
+attended to.  He had a uniform to 'raise him in his own estimation,
+and in that of his neighbour, which is of consequence to a person
+of trust.  The keepers,' my grandfather goes on, in another place,
+'are attended to in all the detail of accommodation in the best
+style as shipmasters; and this is believed to have a sensible
+effect upon their conduct, and to regulate their general habits as
+members of society.'  He notes, with the same dip of ink, that 'the
+brasses were not clean, and the persons of the keepers not TRIG';
+and thus we find him writing to a culprit:  'I have to complain
+that you are not cleanly in your person, and that your manner of
+speech is ungentle, and rather inclines to rudeness.  You must
+therefore take a different view of your duties as a lightkeeper.'
+A high ideal for the service appears in these expressions, and will
+be more amply illustrated further on.  But even the Scottish
+lightkeeper was frail.  During the unbroken solitude of the winter
+months, when inspection is scarce possible, it must seem a vain
+toil to polish the brass hand-rail of the stair, or to keep an
+unrewarded vigil in the light-room; and the keepers are habitually
+tempted to the beginnings of sloth, and must unremittingly resist.
+He who temporises with his conscience is already lost.  I must tell
+here an anecdote that illustrates the difficulties of inspection.
+In the days of my uncle David and my father there was a station
+which they regarded with jealousy.  The two engineers compared
+notes and were agreed.  The tower was always clean, but seemed
+always to bear traces of a hasty cleansing, as though the keepers
+had been suddenly forewarned.  On inquiry, it proved that such was
+the case, and that a wandering fiddler was the unfailing harbinger
+of the engineer.  At last my father was storm-stayed one Sunday in
+a port at the other side of the island.  The visit was quite
+overdue, and as he walked across upon the Monday morning he
+promised himself that he should at last take the keepers
+unprepared.  They were both waiting for him in uniform at the gate;
+the fiddler had been there on Saturday!
+
+My grandfather, as will appear from the following extracts, was
+much a martinet, and had a habit of expressing himself on paper
+with an almost startling emphasis.  Personally, with his powerful
+voice, sanguine countenance, and eccentric and original locutions,
+he was well qualified to inspire a salutary terror in the service.
+
+'I find that the keepers have, by some means or another, got into
+the way of cleaning too much with rotten-stone and oil.  I take the
+principal keeper to TASK on this subject, and make him bring a
+clean towel and clean one of the brazen frames, which leaves the
+towel in an odious state.  This towel I put up in a sheet of paper,
+seal, and take with me to confront Mr. Murdoch, who has just left
+the station.'  'This letter'--a stern enumeration of complaints--
+'to lie a week on the light-room book-place, and to be put in the
+Inspector's hands when he comes round.'  'It is the most painful
+thing that can occur for me to have a correspondence of this kind
+with any of the keepers; and when I come to the Lighthouse, instead
+of having the satisfaction to meet them with approbation, it is
+distressing when one is obliged to put on a most angry countenance
+and demeanour; but from such culpable negligence as you have shown
+there is no avoiding it.  I hold it as a fixed maxim that, when a
+man or a family put on a slovenly appearance in their houses,
+stairs, and lanterns, I always find their reflectors, burners,
+windows, and light in general, ill attended to; and, therefore, I
+must insist on cleanliness throughout.'  'I find you very deficient
+in the duty of the high tower.  You thus place your appointment as
+Principal Keeper in jeopardy; and I think it necessary, as an old
+servant of the Board, to put you upon your guard once for all at
+this time.  I call upon you to recollect what was formerly and is
+now said to you.  The state of the backs of the reflectors at the
+high tower was disgraceful, as I pointed out to you on the spot.
+They were as if spitten upon, and greasy finger-marks upon the back
+straps.  I demand an explanation of this state of things.'  'The
+cause of the Commissioners dismissing you is expressed in the
+minute; and it must be a matter of regret to you that you have been
+so much engaged in smuggling, and also that the Reports relative to
+the cleanliness of the Lighthouse, upon being referred to, rather
+added to their unfavourable opinion.'  'I do not go into the
+dwelling-house, but severely chide the lightkeepers for the
+disagreement that seems to subsist among them.'  'The families of
+the two lightkeepers here agree very ill.  I have effected a
+reconciliation for the present.'  'Things are in a very HUMDRUM
+state here.  There is no painting, and in and out of doors no taste
+or tidiness displayed.  Robert's wife GREETS and M'Gregor's scolds;
+and Robert is so down-hearted that he says he is unfit for duty.  I
+told him that if he was to mind wives' quarrels, and to take them
+up, the only way was for him and M'Gregor to go down to the point
+like Sir G. Grant and Lord Somerset.'  'I cannot say that I have
+experienced a more unpleasant meeting than that of the lighthouse
+folks this morning, or ever saw a stronger example of unfeeling
+barbarity than the conduct which the ---s exhibited.  These two
+cold-hearted persons, not contented with having driven the daughter
+of the poor nervous woman from her father's house, BOTH kept
+POUNCING at her, lest she should forget her great misfortune.
+Write me of their conduct.  Do not make any communication of the
+state of these families at Kinnaird Head, as this would be like
+TALE-BEARING.'
+
+There is the great word out.  Tales and Tale-bearing, always with
+the emphatic capitals, run continually in his correspondence.  I
+will give but two instances:-
+
+'Write to David [one of the lightkeepers] and caution him to be
+more prudent how he expresses himself.  Let him attend his duty to
+the Lighthouse and his family concerns, and give less heed to Tale-
+bearers.'  'I have not your last letter at hand to quote its date;
+but, if I recollect, it contains some kind of tales, which nonsense
+I wish you would lay aside, and notice only the concerns of your
+family and the important charge committed to you.'
+
+Apparently, however, my grandfather was not himself inaccessible to
+the Tale-bearer, as the following indicates:
+
+'In walking along with Mr. --- , I explain to him that I should be
+under the necessity of looking more closely into the business here
+from his conduct at Buddonness, which had given an instance of
+weakness in the Moral principle which had staggered my opinion of
+him.  His answer was, "That will be with regard to the lass?"  I
+told him I was to enter no farther with him upon the subject.'
+'Mr. Miller appears to be master and man.  I am sorry about this
+foolish fellow.  Had I known his train, I should not, as I did,
+have rather forced him into the service.  Upon finding the windows
+in the state they were, I turned upon Mr. Watt, and especially upon
+Mr. Stewart.  The latter did not appear for a length of time to
+have visited the light-room.  On asking the cause--did Mr. Watt and
+him (sic) disagree; he said no; but he had got very bad usage from
+the assistant, "who was a very obstreperous man."  I could not
+bring Mr. Watt to put in language his objections to Miller; all I
+could get was that, he being your friend, and saying he was unwell,
+he did not like to complain or to push the man; that the man seemed
+to have no liking to anything like work; that he was unruly; that,
+being an educated man, he despised them.  I was, however,
+determined to have out of these UNWILLING witnesses the language
+alluded to.  I fixed upon Mr. Stewart as chief; he hedged.  My
+curiosity increased, and I urged.  Then he said, "What would I
+think, just exactly, of Mr. Watt being called an Old B-?"  You may
+judge of my surprise.  There was not another word uttered.  This
+was quite enough, as coming from a person I should have calculated
+upon quite different behaviour from.  It spoke a volume of the
+man's mind and want of principle.'  'Object to the keeper keeping a
+Bull-Terrier dog of ferocious appearance.  It is dangerous, as we
+land at all times of the night.'  'Have only to complain of the
+storehouse floor being spotted with oil.  Give orders for this
+being instantly rectified, so that on my return to-morrow I may see
+things in good order.'  'The furniture of both houses wants much
+rubbing.  Mrs. -'s carpets are absurd beyond anything I have seen.
+I want her to turn the fenders up with the bottom to the fireplace:
+the carpets, when not likely to be in use, folded up and laid as a
+hearthrug partly under the fender.'
+
+My grandfather was king in the service to his finger-tips.  All
+should go in his way, from the principal lightkeeper's coat to the
+assistant's fender, from the gravel in the garden-walks to the bad
+smell in the kitchen, or the oil-spots on the store-room floor.  It
+might be thought there was nothing more calculated to awake men's
+resentment, and yet his rule was not more thorough than it was
+beneficent.  His thought for the keepers was continual, and it did
+not end with their lives.  He tried to manage their successions; he
+thought no pains too great to arrange between a widow and a son who
+had succeeded his father; he was often harassed and perplexed by
+tales of hardship; and I find him writing, almost in despair, of
+their improvident habits and the destitution that awaited their
+families upon a death.  'The house being completely furnished, they
+come into possession without necessaries, and they go out NAKED.
+The insurance seems to have failed, and what next is to be tried?'
+While they lived he wrote behind their backs to arrange for the
+education of their children, or to get them other situations if
+they seemed unsuitable for the Northern Lights.  When he was at a
+lighthouse on a Sunday he held prayers and heard the children read.
+When a keeper was sick, he lent him his horse and sent him mutton
+and brandy from the ship.  'The assistant's wife having been this
+morning confined, there was sent ashore a bottle of sherry and a
+few rusks--a practice which I have always observed in this
+service,' he writes.  They dwelt, many of them, in uninhabited
+isles or desert forelands, totally cut off from shops.  Many of
+them were, besides, fallen into a rustic dishabitude of life, so
+that even when they visited a city they could scarce be trusted
+with their own affairs, as (for example) he who carried home to his
+children, thinking they were oranges, a bag of lemons.  And my
+grandfather seems to have acted, at least in his early years, as a
+kind of gratuitous agent for the service.  Thus I find him writing
+to a keeper in 1806, when his mind was already preoccupied with
+arrangements for the Bell Rock:  'I am much afraid I stand very
+unfavourably with you as a man of promise, as I was to send several
+things of which I believe I have more than once got the memorandum.
+All I can say is that in this respect you are not singular.  This
+makes me no better; but really I have been driven about beyond all
+example in my past experience, and have been essentially obliged to
+neglect my own urgent affairs.'  No servant of the Northern Lights
+came to Edinburgh but he was entertained at Baxter's Place to
+breakfast.  There, at his own table, my grandfather sat down
+delightedly with his broad-spoken, homespun officers.  His whole
+relation to the service was, in fact, patriarchal; and I believe I
+may say that throughout its ranks he was adored.  I have spoken
+with many who knew him; I was his grandson, and their words may
+have very well been words of flattery; but there was one thing that
+could not be affected, and that was the look and light that came
+into their faces at the name of Robert Stevenson.
+
+In the early part of the century the foreman builder was a young
+man of the name of George Peebles, a native of Anstruther.  My
+grandfather had placed in him a very high degree of confidence, and
+he was already designated to be foreman at the Bell Rock, when, on
+Christmas-day 1806, on his way home from Orkney, he was lost in the
+schooner Traveller.  The tale of the loss of the Traveller is
+almost a replica of that of the Elizabeth of Stromness; like the
+Elizabeth she came as far as Kinnaird Head, was then surprised by a
+storm, driven back to Orkney, and bilged and sank on the island of
+Flotta.  It seems it was about the dusk of the day when the ship
+struck, and many of the crew and passengers were drowned.  About
+the same hour, my grandfather was in his office at the writing-
+table; and the room beginning to darken, he laid down his pen and
+fell asleep.  In a dream he saw the door open and George Peebles
+come in, 'reeling to and fro, and staggering like a drunken man,'
+with water streaming from his head and body to the floor.  There it
+gathered into a wave which, sweeping forward, submerged my
+grandfather.  Well, no matter how deep; versions vary; and at last
+he awoke, and behold it was a dream!  But it may be conceived how
+profoundly the impression was written even on the mind of a man
+averse from such ideas, when the news came of the wreck on Flotta
+and the death of George.
+
+George's vouchers and accounts had perished with himself; and it
+appeared he was in debt to the Commissioners.  But my grandfather
+wrote to Orkney twice, collected evidence of his disbursements, and
+proved him to be seventy pounds ahead.  With this sum, he applied
+to George's brothers, and had it apportioned between their mother
+and themselves.  He approached the Board and got an annuity of 5
+pounds bestowed on the widow Peebles; and we find him writing her a
+long letter of explanation and advice, and pressing on her the duty
+of making a will.  That he should thus act executor was no singular
+instance.  But besides this we are able to assist at some of the
+stages of a rather touching experiment; no less than an attempt to
+secure Charles Peebles heir to George's favour.  He is despatched,
+under the character of 'a fine young man'; recommended to gentlemen
+for 'advice, as he's a stranger in your place, and indeed to this
+kind of charge, this being his first outset as Foreman'; and for a
+long while after, the letter-book, in the midst of that thrilling
+first year of the Bell Rock, is encumbered with pages of
+instruction and encouragement.  The nature of a bill, and the
+precautions that are to be observed about discounting it, are
+expounded at length and with clearness.  'You are not, I hope,
+neglecting, Charles, to work the harbour at spring-tides; and see
+that you pay the greatest attention to get the well so as to supply
+the keeper with water, for he is a very helpless fellow, and so
+unfond of hard work that I fear he could do ill to keep himself in
+water by going to the other side for it.'--'With regard to spirits,
+Charles, I see very little occasion for it.'  These abrupt
+apostrophes sound to me like the voice of an awakened conscience;
+but they would seem to have reverberated in vain in the ears of
+Charles.  There was trouble in Pladda, his scene of operations; his
+men ran away from him, there was at least a talk of calling in the
+Sheriff.  'I fear,' writes my grandfather, 'you have been too
+indulgent, and I am sorry to add that men do not answer to be too
+well treated, a circumstance which I have experienced, and which
+you will learn as you go on in business.'  I wonder, was not
+Charles Peebles himself a case in point?  Either death, at least,
+or disappointment and discharge, must have ended his service in the
+Northern Lights; and in later correspondence I look in vain for any
+mention of his name--Charles, I mean, not Peebles:  for as late as
+1839 my grandfather is patiently writing to another of the family:
+'I am sorry you took the trouble of applying to me about your son,
+as it lies quite out of my way to forward his views in the line of
+his profession as a Draper.'
+
+
+III
+
+
+A professional life of Robert Stevenson has been already given to
+the world by his son David, and to that I would refer those
+interested in such matters.  But my own design, which is to
+represent the man, would be very ill carried out if I suffered
+myself or my reader to forget that he was, first of all and last of
+all, an engineer.  His chief claim to the style of a mechanical
+inventor is on account of the Jib or Balance Crane of the Bell
+Rock, which are beautiful contrivances.  But the great merit of
+this engineer was not in the field of engines.  He was above all
+things a projector of works in the face of nature, and a modifier
+of nature itself.  A road to be made, a tower to be built, a
+harbour to be constructed, a river to be trained and guided in its
+channel--these were the problems with which his mind was
+continually occupied; and for these and similar ends he travelled
+the world for more than half a century, like an artist, note-book
+in hand.
+
+He once stood and looked on at the emptying of a certain oil-tube;
+he did so watch in hand, and accurately timed the operation; and in
+so doing offered the perfect type of his profession.  The fact
+acquired might never be of use:  it was acquired:  another link in
+the world's huge chain of processes was brought down to figures and
+placed at the service of the engineer.  'The very term mensuration
+sounds ENGINEER-LIKE,' I find him writing; and in truth what the
+engineer most properly deals with is that which can be measured,
+weighed, and numbered.  The time of any operation in hours and
+minutes, its cost in pounds, shillings, and pence, the strain upon
+a given point in foot-pounds--these are his conquests, with which
+he must continually furnish his mind, and which, after he has
+acquired them, he must continually apply and exercise.  They must
+be not only entries in note-books, to be hurriedly consulted; in
+the actor's phrase, he must be STALE in them; in a word of my
+grandfather's, they must be 'fixed in the mind like the ten fingers
+and ten toes.'
+
+These are the certainties of the engineer; so far he finds a solid
+footing and clear views.  But the province of formulas and
+constants is restricted.  Even the mechanical engineer comes at
+last to an end of his figures, and must stand up, a practical man,
+face to face with the discrepancies of nature and the hiatuses of
+theory.  After the machine is finished, and the steam turned on,
+the next is to drive it; and experience and an exquisite sympathy
+must teach him where a weight should be applied or a nut loosened.
+With the civil engineer, more properly so called (if anything can
+be proper with this awkward coinage), the obligation starts with
+the beginning.  He is always the practical man.  The rains, the
+winds and the waves, the complexity and the fitfulness of nature,
+are always before him.  He has to deal with the unpredictable, with
+those forces (in Smeaton's phrase) that 'are subject to no
+calculation'; and still he must predict, still calculate them, at
+his peril.  His work is not yet in being, and he must foresee its
+influence:  how it shall deflect the tide, exaggerate the waves,
+dam back the rain-water, or attract the thunderbolt.  He visits a
+piece of sea-board; and from the inclination and soil of the beach,
+from the weeds and shell-fish, from the configuration of the coast
+and the depth of soundings outside, he must deduce what magnitude
+of waves is to be looked for.  He visits a river, its summer water
+babbling on shallows; and he must not only read, in a thousand
+indications, the measure of winter freshets, but be able to predict
+the violence of occasional great floods.  Nay, and more; he must
+not only consider that which is, but that which may be.  Thus I
+find my grandfather writing, in a report on the North Esk Bridge:
+'A less waterway might have sufficed, but the VALLEYS MAY COME TO
+BE MELIORATED BY DRAINAGE.'  One field drained after another
+through all that confluence of vales, and we come to a time when
+they shall precipitate by so much a more copious and transient
+flood, as the gush of the flowing drain-pipe is superior to the
+leakage of a peat.
+
+It is plain there is here but a restricted use for formulas.  In
+this sort of practice, the engineer has need of some transcendental
+sense.  Smeaton, the pioneer, bade him obey his 'feelings'; my
+father, that 'power of estimating obscure forces which supplies a
+coefficient of its own to every rule.'  The rules must be
+everywhere indeed; but they must everywhere be modified by this
+transcendental coefficient, everywhere bent to the impression of
+the trained eye and the FEELINGS of the engineer.  A sentiment of
+physical laws and of the scale of nature, which shall have been
+strong in the beginning and progressively fortified by observation,
+must be his guide in the last recourse.  I had the most opportunity
+to observe my father.  He would pass hours on the beach, brooding
+over the waves, counting them, noting their least deflection,
+noting when they broke.  On Tweedside, or by Lyne or Manor, we have
+spent together whole afternoons; to me, at the time, extremely
+wearisome; to him, as I am now sorry to think, bitterly mortifying.
+The river was to me a pretty and various spectacle; I could not
+see--I could not be made to see--it otherwise.  To my father it was
+a chequer-board of lively forces, which he traced from pool to
+shallow with minute appreciation and enduring interest.  'That bank
+was being under-cut,' he might say.  'Why?  Suppose you were to put
+a groin out here, would not the filum fluminis be cast abruptly off
+across the channel? and where would it impinge upon the other
+shore? and what would be the result?  Or suppose you were to blast
+that boulder, what would happen?  Follow it--use the eyes God has
+given you--can you not see that a great deal of land would be
+reclaimed upon this side?'  It was to me like school in holidays;
+but to him, until I had worn him out with my invincible triviality,
+a delight.  Thus he pored over the engineer's voluminous handy-book
+of nature; thus must, too, have pored my grand-father and uncles.
+
+But it is of the essence of this knowledge, or this knack of mind,
+to be largely incommunicable.  'It cannot be imparted to another,'
+says my father.  The verbal casting-net is thrown in vain over
+these evanescent, inferential relations. Hence the insignificance
+of much engineering literature.  So far as the science can be
+reduced to formulas or diagrams, the book is to the point; so far
+as the art depends on intimate study of the ways of nature, the
+author's words will too often be found vapid.  This fact--that
+engineering looks one way, and literature another--was what my
+grand-father overlooked.  All his life long, his pen was in his
+hand, piling up a treasury of knowledge, preparing himself against
+all possible contingencies.  Scarce anything fell under his notice
+but he perceived in it some relation to his work, and chronicled it
+in the pages of his journal in his always lucid, but sometimes
+inexact and wordy, style.  The Travelling Diary (so he called it)
+was kept in fascicles of ruled paper, which were at last bound up,
+rudely indexed, and put by for future reference.  Such volumes as
+have reached me contain a surprising medley:  the whole details of
+his employment in the Northern Lights and his general practice; the
+whole biography of an enthusiastic engineer.  Much of it is useful
+and curious; much merely otiose; and much can only be described as
+an attempt to impart that which cannot be imparted in words.  Of
+such are his repeated and heroic descriptions of reefs; monuments
+of misdirected literary energy, which leave upon the mind of the
+reader no effect but that of a multiplicity of words and the
+suggested vignette of a lusty old gentleman scrambling among
+tangle.  It is to be remembered that he came to engineering while
+yet it was in the egg and without a library, and that he saw the
+bounds of that profession widen daily.  He saw iron ships,
+steamers, and the locomotive engine, introduced.  He lived to
+travel from Glasgow to Edinburgh in the inside of a forenoon, and
+to remember that he himself had 'often been twelve hours upon the
+journey, and his grand-father (Lillie) two days'!  The profession
+was still but in its second generation, and had already broken down
+the barriers of time and space.  Who should set a limit to its
+future encroachments?  And hence, with a kind of sanguine pedantry,
+he pursued his design of 'keeping up with the day' and posting
+himself and his family on every mortal subject.  Of this
+unpractical idealism we shall meet with many instances; there was
+not a trade, and scarce an accomplishment, but he thought it should
+form part of the outfit of an engineer; and not content with
+keeping an encyclopaedic diary himself, he would fain have set all
+his sons to work continuing and extending it.  They were more
+happily inspired.  My father's engineering pocket-book was not a
+bulky volume; with its store of pregnant notes and vital formulas,
+it served him through life, and was not yet filled when he came to
+die.  As for Robert Stevenson and the Travelling Diary, I should be
+ungrateful to complain, for it has supplied me with many lively
+traits for this and subsequent chapters; but I must still remember
+much of the period of my study there as a sojourn in the Valley of
+the Shadow.
+
+The duty of the engineer is twofold--to design the work, and to see
+the work done.  We have seen already something of the vociferous
+thoroughness of the man, upon the cleaning of lamps and the
+polishing of reflectors.  In building, in road-making, in the
+construction of bridges, in every detail and byway of his
+employments, he pursued the same ideal.  Perfection (with a capital
+P and violently under-scored) was his design.  A crack for a
+penknife, the waste of 'six-and-thirty shillings,' 'the loss of a
+day or a tide,' in each of these he saw and was revolted by the
+finger of the sloven; and to spirits intense as his, and immersed
+in vital undertakings, the slovenly is the dishonest, and wasted
+time is instantly translated into lives endangered.  On this
+consistent idealism there is but one thing that now and then
+trenches with a touch of incongruity, and that is his love of the
+picturesque.  As when he laid out a road on Hogarth's line of
+beauty; bade a foreman be careful, in quarrying, not 'to disfigure
+the island'; or regretted in a report that 'the great stone, called
+the Devil in the Hole, was blasted or broken down to make road-
+metal, and for other purposes of the work.'
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III:  THE BUILDING OF THE BELL ROCK
+
+
+
+Off the mouths of the Tay and the Forth, thirteen miles from
+Fifeness, eleven from Arbroath, and fourteen from the Red Head of
+Angus, lies the Inchcape or Bell Rock.  It extends to a length of
+about fourteen hundred feet, but the part of it discovered at low
+water to not more than four hundred and twenty-seven.  At a little
+more than half-flood in fine weather the seamless ocean joins over
+the reef, and at high-water springs it is buried sixteen feet.  As
+the tide goes down, the higher reaches of the rock are seen to be
+clothed by Conferva rupestris as by a sward of grass; upon the more
+exposed edges, where the currents are most swift and the breach of
+the sea heaviest, Baderlock or Henware flourishes; and the great
+Tangle grows at the depth of several fathoms with luxuriance.
+Before man arrived, and introduced into the silence of the sea the
+smoke and clangour of a blacksmith's shop, it was a favourite
+resting-place of seals.  The crab and lobster haunt in the
+crevices; and limpets, mussels, and the white buckie abound.
+
+According to a tradition, a bell had been once hung upon this rock
+by an abbot of Arbroath, {91a} 'and being taken down by a sea-
+pirate, a year thereafter he perished upon the same rock, with ship
+and goods, in the righteous judgment of God.'  From the days of the
+abbot and the sea-pirate no man had set foot upon the Inchcape,
+save fishers from the neighbouring coast, or perhaps--for a moment,
+before the surges swallowed them--the unfortunate victims of
+shipwreck.  The fishers approached the rock with an extreme
+timidity; but their harvest appears to have been great, and the
+adventure no more perilous than lucrative.  In 1800, on the
+occasion of my grandfather's first landing, and during the two or
+three hours which the ebb-tide and the smooth water allowed them to
+pass upon its shelves, his crew collected upwards of two
+hundredweight of old metal:  pieces of a kedge anchor and a cabin
+stove, crowbars, a hinge and lock of a door, a ship's marking-iron,
+a piece of a ship's caboose, a soldier's bayonet, a cannon ball,
+several pieces of money, a shoe-buckle, and the like.  Such were
+the spoils of the Bell Rock.
+
+From 1794 onward, the mind of my grandfather had been exercised
+with the idea of a light upon this formidable danger.  To build a
+tower on a sea rock, eleven miles from shore, and barely uncovered
+at low water of neaps, appeared a fascinating enterprise.  It was
+something yet unattempted, unessayed; and even now, after it has
+been lighted for more than eighty years, it is still an exploit
+that has never been repeated. {92a}  My grandfather was, besides,
+but a young man, of an experience comparatively restricted, and a
+reputation confined to Scotland; and when he prepared his first
+models, and exhibited them in Merchants' Hall, he can hardly be
+acquitted of audacity.  John Clerk of Eldin stood his friend from
+the beginning, kept the key of the model room, to which he carried
+'eminent strangers,' and found words of counsel and encouragement
+beyond price.  'Mr. Clerk had been personally known to Smeaton, and
+used occasionally to speak of him to me,' says my grandfather; and
+again:  'I felt regret that I had not the opportunity of a greater
+range of practice to fit me for such an undertaking; but I was
+fortified by an expression of my friend Mr. Clerk in one of our
+conversations. "This work," said he, "is unique, and can be little
+forwarded by experience of ordinary masonic operations.  In this
+case Smeaton's 'Narrative' must be the text-book, and energy and
+perseverance the pratique."'
+
+A Bill for the work was introduced into Parliament and lost in the
+Lords in 1802-3.  John Rennie was afterwards, at my grandfather's
+suggestion, called in council, with the style of chief engineer.
+The precise meaning attached to these words by any of the parties
+appears irrecoverable.  Chief engineer should have full authority,
+full responsibility, and a proper share of the emoluments; and
+there were none of these for Rennie.  I find in an appendix a paper
+which resumes the controversy on this subject; and it will be
+enough to say here that Rennie did not design the Bell Rock, that
+he did not execute it, and that he was not paid for it. {94a}  From
+so much of the correspondence as has come down to me, the
+acquaintance of this man, eleven years his senior, and already
+famous, appears to have been both useful and agreeable to Robert
+Stevenson.  It is amusing to find my grandfather seeking high and
+low for a brace of pistols which his colleague had lost by the way
+between Aberdeen and Edinburgh; and writing to Messrs. Dollond, 'I
+have not thought it necessary to trouble Mr. Rennie with this
+order, but I BEG YOU WILL SEE TO GET TWO MINUTES OF HIM AS HE
+PASSES YOUR DOOR'--a proposal calculated rather from the latitude
+of Edinburgh than from London, even in 1807.  It is pretty, too, to
+observe with what affectionate regard Smeaton was held in mind by
+his immediate successors.  'Poor old fellow,' writes Rennie to
+Stevenson, 'I hope he will now and then take a peep at us, and
+inspire you with fortitude and courage to brave all difficulties
+and dangers to accomplish a work which will, if successful,
+immortalise you in the annals of fame.'  The style might be
+bettered, but the sentiment is charming.
+
+Smeaton was, indeed, the patron saint of the Bell Rock.  Undeterred
+by the sinister fate of Winstanley, he had tackled and solved the
+problem of the Eddystone; but his solution had not been in all
+respects perfect.  It remained for my grand-father to outdo him in
+daring, by applying to a tidal rock those principles which had been
+already justified by the success of the Eddystone, and to perfect
+the model by more than one exemplary departure.  Smeaton had
+adopted in his floors the principle of the arch; each therefore
+exercised an outward thrust upon the walls, which must be met and
+combated by embedded chains.  My grandfather's flooring-stones, on
+the other hand, were flat, made part of the outer wall, and were
+keyed and dovetailed into a central stone, so as to bind the work
+together and be positive elements of strength.  In 1703 Winstanley
+still thought it possible to erect his strange pagoda, with its
+open gallery, its florid scrolls and candlesticks:  like a rich
+man's folly for an ornamental water in a park.  Smeaton followed;
+then Stevenson in his turn corrected such flaws as were left in
+Smeaton's design; and with his improvements, it is not too much to
+say the model was made perfect.  Smeaton and Stevenson had between
+them evolved and finished the sea-tower.  No subsequent builder has
+departed in anything essential from the principles of their design.
+It remains, and it seems to us as though it must remain for ever,
+an ideal attained.  Every stone in the building, it may interest
+the reader to know, my grandfather had himself cut out in the
+model; and the manner in which the courses were fitted, joggled,
+trenailed, wedged, and the bond broken, is intricate as a puzzle
+and beautiful by ingenuity.
+
+In 1806 a second Bill passed both Houses, and the preliminary works
+were at once begun.  The same year the Navy had taken a great
+harvest of prizes in the North Sea, one of which, a Prussian
+fishing dogger, flat-bottomed and rounded at the stem and stern,
+was purchased to be a floating lightship, and re-named the Pharos.
+By July 1807 she was overhauled, rigged for her new purpose, and
+turned into the lee of the Isle of May.  'It was proposed that the
+whole party should meet in her and pass the night; but she rolled
+from side to side in so extraordinary a manner, that even the most
+seahardy fled.  It was humorously observed of this vessel that she
+was in danger of making a round turn and appearing with her keel
+uppermost; and that she would even turn a half-penny if laid upon
+deck.'  By two o'clock on the morning of the 15th July this
+purgatorial vessel was moored by the Bell Rock.
+
+A sloop of forty tons had been in the meantime built at Leith, and
+named the Smeaton; by the 7th of August my grandfather set sail in
+her -
+
+'carrying with him Mr. Peter Logan, foreman builder, and five
+artificers selected from their having been somewhat accustomed to
+the sea, the writer being aware of the distressing trial which the
+floating light would necessarily inflict upon landsmen from her
+rolling motion.  Here he remained till the 10th, and, as the
+weather was favourable, a landing was effected daily, when the
+workmen were employed in cutting the large seaweed from the sites
+of the lighthouse and beacon, which were respectively traced with
+pickaxes upon the rock.  In the meantime the crew of the Smeaton
+was employed in laying down the several sets of moorings within
+about half a mile of the rock for the convenience of vessels.  The
+artificers, having, fortunately, experienced moderate weather,
+returned to the workyard of Arbroath with a good report of their
+treatment afloat; when their comrades ashore began to feel some
+anxiety to see a place of which they had heard so much, and to
+change the constant operations with the iron and mallet in the
+process of hewing for an occasional tide's work on the rock, which
+they figured to themselves as a state of comparative ease and
+comfort.'
+
+I am now for many pages to let my grandfather speak for himself,
+and tell in his own words the story of his capital achievement.
+The tall quarto of 533 pages from which the following narrative has
+been dug out is practically unknown to the general reader, yet good
+judges have perceived its merit, and it has been named (with
+flattering wit) 'The Romance of Stone and Lime' and 'The Robinson
+Crusoe of Civil Engineering.'  The tower was but four years in the
+building; it took Robert Stevenson, in the midst of his many
+avocations, no less than fourteen to prepare the Account.  The
+title-page is a solid piece of literature of upwards of a hundred
+words; the table of contents runs to thirteen pages; and the
+dedication (to that revered monarch, George IV) must have cost him
+no little study and correspondence.  Walter Scott was called in
+council, and offered one miscorrection which still blots the page.
+In spite of all this pondering and filing, there remain pages not
+easy to construe, and inconsistencies not easy to explain away.  I
+have sought to make these disappear, and to lighten a little the
+baggage with which my grandfather marches; here and there I have
+rejointed and rearranged a sentence, always with his own words, and
+all with a reverent and faithful hand; and I offer here to the
+reader the true Monument of Robert Stevenson with a little of the
+moss removed from the inscription, and the Portrait of the artist
+with some superfluous canvas cut away.
+
+
+I--OPERATIONS OF 1807
+
+
+[Sunday, 16th Aug.]
+
+Everything being arranged for sailing to the rock on Saturday the
+15th, the vessel might have proceeded on the Sunday; but
+understanding that this would not be so agreeable to the artificers
+it was deferred until Monday.  Here we cannot help observing that
+the men allotted for the operations at the rock seemed to enter
+upon the undertaking with a degree of consideration which fully
+marked their opinion as to the hazardous nature of the undertaking
+on which they were about to enter.  They went in a body to church
+on Sunday, and whether it was in the ordinary course, or designed
+for the occasion, the writer is not certain, but the service was,
+in many respects, suitable to their circumstances.
+
+[Monday, 17th Aug.]
+
+The tide happening to fall late in the evening of Monday the 17th,
+the party, counting twenty-four in number, embarked on board of the
+Smeaton about ten o'clock p.m., and sailed from Arbroath with a
+gentle breeze at west.  Our ship's colours having been flying all
+day in compliment to the commencement of the work, the other
+vessels in the harbour also saluted, which made a very gay
+appearance.  A number of the friends and acquaintances of those on
+board having been thus collected, the piers, though at a late hour,
+were perfectly crowded, and just as the Smeaton cleared the
+harbour, all on board united in giving three hearty cheers, which
+were returned by those on shore in such good earnest, that, in the
+still of the evening, the sound must have been heard in all parts
+of the town, re-echoing from the walls and lofty turrets of the
+venerable Abbey of Aberbrothwick.  The writer felt much
+satisfaction at the manner of this parting scene, though he must
+own that the present rejoicing was, on his part, mingled with
+occasional reflections upon the responsibility of his situation,
+which extended to the safety of all who should be engaged in this
+perilous work.  With such sensations he retired to his cabin; but
+as the artificers were rather inclined to move about the deck than
+to remain in their confined berths below, his repose was transient,
+and the vessel being small every motion was necessarily heard.
+Some who were musically inclined occasionally sung; but he listened
+with peculiar pleasure to the sailor at the helm, who hummed over
+Dibdin's characteristic air:-
+
+'They say there's a Providence sits up aloft,
+To keep watch for the life of poor Jack.'
+
+[Tuesday, 18th Aug.]
+
+The weather had been very gentle all night, and, about four in the
+morning of the 18th, the Smeaton anchored.  Agreeably to an
+arranged plan of operations, all hands were called at five o'clock
+a.m., just as the highest part of the Bell Rock began to show its
+sable head among the light breakers, which occasionally whitened
+with the foaming sea.  The two boats belonging to the floating
+light attended the Smeaton, to carry the artificers to the rock, as
+her boat could only accommodate about six or eight sitters.  Every
+one was more eager than his neighbour to leap into the boats and it
+required a good deal of management on the part of the coxswains to
+get men unaccustomed to a boat to take their places for rowing and
+at the same time trimming her properly.  The landing-master and
+foreman went into one boat, while the writer took charge of
+another, and steered it to and from the rock.  This became the more
+necessary in the early stages of the work, as places could not be
+spared for more than two, or at most three seamen to each boat, who
+were always stationed, one at the bow, to use the boat-hook in
+fending or pushing off, and the other at the aftermost oar, to give
+the proper time in rowing, while the middle oars were double-
+banked, and rowed by the artificers.
+
+As the weather was extremely fine, with light airs of wind from the
+east, we landed without difficulty upon the central part of the
+rock at half-past five, but the water had not yet sufficiently left
+it for commencing the work.  This interval, however, did not pass
+unoccupied.  The first and last of all the principal operations at
+the Bell Rock were accompanied by three hearty cheers from all
+hands, and, on occasions like the present, the steward of the ship
+attended, when each man was regaled with a glass of rum.  As the
+water left the rock about six, some began to bore the holes for the
+great bats or holdfasts, for fixing the beams of the Beacon-house,
+while the smith was fully attended in laying out the site of his
+forge, upon a somewhat sheltered spot of the rock, which also
+recommended itself from the vicinity of a pool of water for
+tempering his irons.  These preliminary steps occupied about an
+hour, and as nothing further could be done during this tide towards
+fixing the forge, the workmen gratified their curiosity by roaming
+about the rock, which they investigated with great eagerness till
+the tide overflowed it.  Those who had been sick picked dulse
+(Fucus palmatus), which they ate with much seeming appetite; others
+were more intent upon collecting limpets for bait, to enjoy the
+amusement of fishing when they returned on board of the vessel.
+Indeed, none came away empty-handed, as everything found upon the
+Bell Rock was considered valuable, being connected with some
+interesting association.  Several coins, and numerous bits of
+shipwrecked iron, were picked up, of almost every description; and,
+in particular, a marking-iron lettered JAMES--a circumstance of
+which it was thought proper to give notice to the public, as it
+might lead to the knowledge of some unfortunate shipwreck, perhaps
+unheard of till this simple occurrence led to the discovery.  When
+the rock began to be overflowed, the landing-master arranged the
+crews of the respective boats, appointing twelve persons to each.
+According to a rule which the writer had laid down to himself, he
+was always the last person who left the rock.
+
+In a short time the Bell Rock was laid completely under water, and
+the weather being extremely fine, the sea was so smooth that its
+place could not be pointed out from the appearance of the surface--
+a circumstance which sufficiently demonstrates the dangerous nature
+of this rock, even during the day, and in the smoothest and calmest
+state of the sea.  During the interval between the morning and the
+evening tides, the artificers were variously employed in fishing
+and reading; others were busy in drying and adjusting their wet
+clothes, and one or two amused their companions with the violin and
+German flute.
+
+About seven in the evening the signal bell for landing on the rock
+was again rung, when every man was at his quarters.  In this
+service it was thought more appropriate to use the bell than to
+PIPE to quarters, as the use of this instrument is less known to
+the mechanic than the sound of the bell.  The landing, as in the
+morning, was at the eastern harbour.  During this tide the seaweed
+was pretty well cleared from the site of the operations, and also
+from the tracks leading to the different landing-places; for
+walking upon the rugged surface of the Bell Rock, when covered with
+seaweed, was found to be extremely difficult and even dangerous.
+Every hand that could possibly be occupied now employed in
+assisting the smith to fit up the apparatus for his forge.  At 9
+p.m. the boats returned to the tender, after other two hours' work,
+in the same order as formerly--perhaps as much gratified with the
+success that attended the work of this day as with any other in the
+whole course of the operations.  Although it could not he said that
+the fatigues of this day had been great, yet all on board retired
+early to rest.  The sea being calm, and no movement on deck, it was
+pretty generally remarked in the morning that the bell awakened the
+greater number on board from their first sleep; and though this
+observation was not altogether applicable to the writer himself,
+yet he was not a little pleased to find that thirty people could
+all at once become so reconciled to a night's quarters within a few
+hundred paces of the Bell Rock.
+
+[Wednesday, 19th Aug.]
+
+Being extremely anxious at this time to get forward with fixing the
+smith's forge, on which the progress of the work at present
+depended, the writer requested that he might be called at daybreak
+to learn the landing-master's opinion of the weather from the
+appearance of the rising sun, a criterion by which experienced
+seamen can generally judge pretty accurately of the state of the
+weather for the following day.  About five o'clock, on coming upon
+deck, the sun's upper limb or disc had just begun to appear as if
+rising from the ocean, and in less than a minute he was seen in the
+fullest splendour; but after a short interval he was enveloped in a
+soft cloudy sky, which was considered emblematical of fine weather.
+His rays had not yet sufficiently dispelled the clouds which hid
+the land from view, and the Bell Rock being still overflowed, the
+whole was one expanse of water.  This scene in itself was highly
+gratifying; and, when the morning bell was tolled, we were
+gratified with the happy forebodings of good weather and the
+expectation of having both a morning and an evening tide's work on
+the rock.
+
+The boat which the writer steered happened to be the last which
+approached the rock at this tide; and, in standing up in the stern,
+while at some distance, to see how the leading boat entered the
+creek, he was astonished to observe something in the form of a
+human figure, in a reclining posture, upon one of the ledges of the
+rock.  He immediately steered the boat through a narrow entrance to
+the eastern harbour, with a thousand unpleasant sensations in his
+mind.  He thought a vessel or boat must have been wrecked upon the
+rock during the night; and it seemed probable that the rock might
+be strewed with dead bodies, a spectacle which could not fail to
+deter the artificers from returning so freely to their work.  In
+the midst of these reveries the boat took the ground at an improper
+landing-place; but, without waiting to push her off, he leapt upon
+the rock, and making his way hastily to the spot which had
+privately given him alarm, he had the satisfaction to ascertain
+that he had only been deceived by the peculiar situation and aspect
+of the smith's anvil and block, which very completely represented
+the appearance of a lifeless body upon the rock.  The writer
+carefully suppressed his feelings, the simple mention of which
+might have had a bad effect upon the artificers, and his haste
+passed for an anxiety to examine the apparatus of the smith's
+forge, left in an unfinished state at evening tide.
+
+In the course of this morning's work two or three apparently
+distant peals of thunder were heard, and the atmosphere suddenly
+became thick and foggy.  But as the Smeaton, our present tender,
+was moored at no great distance from the rock, the crew on board
+continued blowing with a horn, and occasionally fired a musket, so
+that the boats got to the ship without difficulty.
+
+[Thursday, 20th Aug.]
+
+The wind this morning inclined from the north-east, and the sky had
+a heavy and cloudy appearance, but the sea was smooth, though there
+was an undulating motion on, the surface, which indicated easterly
+winds, and occasioned a slight surf upon the rock.  But the boats
+found no difficulty in landing at the western creek at half-past
+seven, and, after a good tide's work, left it again about a quarter
+from eleven.  In the evening the artificers landed at half-past
+seven, and continued till half-past eight, having completed the
+fixing of the smith's forge, his vice, and a wooden board or bench,
+which were also batted to a ledge of the rock, to the great joy of
+all, under a salute of three hearty cheers.  From an oversight on
+the part of the smith, who had neglected to bring his tinder-box
+and matches from the vessel, the work was prevented from being
+continued for at least an hour longer.
+
+The smith's shop was, of course, in OPEN SPACE:  the large bellows
+were carried to and from the rock every tide, for the serviceable
+condition of which, together with the tinder-box, fuel, and embers
+of the former fire, the smith was held responsible.  Those who have
+been placed in situations to feel the inconveniency and want of
+this useful artisan, will be able to appreciate his value in a case
+like the present.  It often happened, to our annoyance and
+disappointment, in the early state of the work, when the smith was
+in the middle of a FAVOURITE HEAT in making some useful article, or
+in sharpening the tools, after the flood-tide had obliged the
+pickmen to strike work, a sea would come rolling over the rocks,
+dash out the fire, and endanger his indispensable implement, the
+bellows.  If the sea was smooth, while the smith often stood at
+work knee-deep in water, the tide rose by imperceptible degrees,
+first cooling the exterior of the fireplace, or hearth, and then
+quietly blackening and extinguishing the fire from below.  The
+writer has frequently been amused at the perplexing anxiety of the
+blacksmith when coaxing his fire and endeavouring to avert the
+effects of the rising tide.
+
+[Friday, 21st Aug.]
+
+Everything connected with the forge being now completed, the
+artificers found no want of sharp tools, and the work went forward
+with great alacrity and spirit.  It was also alleged that the rock
+had a more habitable appearance from the volumes of smoke which
+ascended from the smith's shop and the busy noise of his anvil, the
+operations of the masons, the movements of the boats, and shipping
+at a distance--all contributed to give life and activity to the
+scene.  This noise and traffic had, however, the effect of almost
+completely banishing the herd of seals which had hitherto
+frequented the rock as a resting-place during the period of low
+water.  The rock seemed to be peculiarly adapted to their habits,
+for, excepting two or three days at neap-tides, a part of it always
+dries at low water--at least, during the summer season--and as
+there was good fishing-ground in the neighbourhood, without a human
+being to disturb or molest them, it had become a very favourite
+residence of these amphibious animals, the writer having
+occasionally counted from fifty to sixty playing about the rock at
+a time.  But when they came to be disturbed every tide, and their
+seclusion was broken in upon by the kindling of great fires,
+together with the beating of hammers and picks during low water,
+after hovering about for a time, they changed their place, and
+seldom more than one or two were to be seen about the rock upon the
+more detached outlayers which dry partially, whence they seemed to
+look with that sort of curiosity which is observable in these
+animals when following a boat.
+
+[Saturday, 22nd Aug.]
+
+Hitherto the artificers had remained on board the Smeaton, which
+was made fast to one of the mooring buoys at a distance only of
+about a quarter of a mile from the rock, and, of course, a very
+great conveniency to the work.  Being so near, the seamen could
+never be mistaken as to the progress of the tide, or state of the
+sea upon the rock, nor could the boats be much at a loss to pull on
+board of the vessel during fog, or even in very rough weather; as
+she could be cast loose from her moorings at pleasure, and brought
+to the lee side of the rock.  But the Smeaton being only about
+forty register tons, her accommodations were extremely limited.  It
+may, therefore, be easily imagined that an addition of twenty-four
+persons to her own crew must have rendered the situation of those
+on board rather uncomfortable.  The only place for the men's
+hammocks on board being in the hold, they were unavoidably much
+crowded:  and if the weather had required the hatches to be
+fastened down, so great a number of men could not possibly have
+been accommodated.  To add to this evil, the co-boose or cooking-
+place being upon deck, it would not have been possible to have
+cooked for so large a company in the event of bad weather.
+
+The stock of water was now getting short, and some necessaries
+being also wanted for the floating light, the Smeaton was
+despatched for Arbroath; and the writer, with the artificers at the
+same time shifted their quarters from her to the floating light.
+
+Although the rock barely made its appearance at this period of the
+tides till eight o'clock, yet, having now a full mile to row from
+the floating light to the rock, instead of about a quarter of a
+mile from the moorings of the Smeaton, it was necessary to be
+earlier astir, and to form different arrangements; breakfast was
+accordingly served up at seven o'clock this morning.  From the
+excessive motion of the floating light, the writer had looked
+forward rather with anxiety to the removal of the workmen to this
+ship.  Some among them, who had been congratulating themselves upon
+having become sea-hardy while on board the Smeaton, had a complete
+relapse upon returning to the floating light.  This was the case
+with the writer.  From the spacious and convenient berthage of the
+floating light, the exchange to the artificers was, in this
+respect, much for the better.  The boats were also commodious,
+measuring sixteen feet in length on the keel, so that, in fine
+weather, their complement of sitters was sixteen persons for each,
+with which, however, they were rather crowded, but she could not
+stow two boats of larger dimensions.  When there was what is called
+a breeze of wind, and a swell in the sea, the proper number for
+each boat could not, with propriety, be rated at more than twelve
+persons.
+
+When the tide-bell rung the boats were hoisted out, and two active
+seamen were employed to keep them from receiving damage alongside.
+The floating light being very buoyant, was so quick in her motions
+that when those who were about to step from her gunwale into a
+boat, placed themselves upon a cleat or step on the ship's side,
+with the man or rail ropes in their hands, they had often to wait
+for some time till a favourable opportunity occurred for stepping
+into the boat.  While in this situation, with the vessel rolling
+from side to side, watching the proper time for letting go the man-
+ropes, it required the greatest dexterity and presence of mind to
+leap into the boats.  One who was rather awkward would often wait a
+considerable period in this position:  at one time his side of the
+ship would be so depressed that he would touch the boat to which he
+belonged, while the next sea would elevate him so much that he
+would see his comrades in the boat on the opposite side of the
+ship, his friends in the one boat calling to him to 'Jump,' while
+those in the boat on the other side, as he came again and again
+into their view, would jocosely say, 'Are you there yet?  You seem
+to enjoy a swing.'  In this situation it was common to see a person
+upon each side of the ship for a length of time, waiting to quit
+his hold.
+
+On leaving the rock to-day a trial of seamanship was proposed
+amongst the rowers, for by this time the artificers had become
+tolerably expert in this exercise.  By inadvertency some of the
+oars provided had been made of fir instead of ash, and although a
+considerable stock had been laid in, the workmen, being at first
+awkward in the art, were constantly breaking their oars; indeed it
+was no uncommon thing to see the broken blades of a pair of oars
+floating astern, in the course of a passage from the rock to the
+vessel.  The men, upon the whole, had but little work to perform in
+the course of a day; for though they exerted themselves extremely
+hard while on the rock, yet, in the early state of the operations,
+this could not be continued for more than three or four hours at a
+time, and as their rations were large--consisting of one pound and
+a half of beef, one pound of ship biscuit, eight ounces oatmeal,
+two ounces barley, two ounces butter, three quarts of small beer,
+with vegetables and salt--they got into excellent spirits when free
+of sea-sickness.  The rowing of the boats against each other became
+a favourite amusement, which was rather a fortunate circumstance,
+as it must have been attended with much inconvenience had it been
+found necessary to employ a sufficient number of sailors for this
+purpose.  The writer, therefore, encouraged the spirit of
+emulation, and the speed of their respective boats became a
+favourite topic.  Premiums for boat-races were instituted, which
+were contended for with great eagerness, and the respective crews
+kept their stations in the boats with as much precision as they
+kept their beds on board of the ship.  With these and other
+pastimes, when the weather was favourable, the time passed away
+among the inmates of the forecastle and waist of the ship.  The
+writer looks back with interest upon the hours of solitude which he
+spent in this lonely ship with his small library.
+
+This being the first Saturday that the artificers were afloat, all
+hands were served with a glass of rum and water at night, to drink
+the sailors' favourite toast of 'Wives and Sweethearts.'  It was
+customary, upon these occasions, for the seamen and artificers to
+collect in the galley, when the musical instruments were put in
+requisition:  for, according to invariable practice, every man must
+play a tune, sing a song, or tell a story.
+
+[Sunday, 23rd Aug.]
+
+Having, on the previous evening, arranged matters with the landing-
+master as to the business of the day, the signal was rung for all
+hands at half-past seven this morning.  In the early state of the
+spring-tides the artificers went to the rock before breakfast, but
+as the tides fell later in the day, it became necessary to take
+this meal before leaving the ship.  At eight o'clock all hands were
+assembled on the quarter-deck for prayers, a solemnity which was
+gone through in as orderly a manner as circumstances would admit.
+When the weather permitted, the flags of the ship were hung up as
+an awning or screen, forming the quarter-deck into a distinct
+compartment; the pendant was also hoisted at the mainmast, and a
+large ensign flag was displayed over the stern; and lastly, the
+ship's companion, or top of the staircase, was covered with the
+FLAG PROPER of the Lighthouse Service, on which the Bible was laid.
+A particular toll of the bell called all hands to the quarter-deck,
+when the writer read a chapter of the Bible, and, the whole ship's
+company being uncovered, he also read the impressive prayer
+composed by the Reverend Dr. Brunton, one of the ministers of
+Edinburgh.
+
+Upon concluding this service, which was attended with becoming
+reverence and attention, all on board retired to their respective
+berths to breakfast, and, at half-past nine, the bell again rung
+for the artificers to take their stations in their respective
+boats.  Some demur having been evinced on board about the propriety
+of working on Sunday, which had hitherto been touched upon as
+delicately as possible, all hands being called aft, the writer,
+from the quarter-deck, stated generally the nature of the service,
+expressing his hopes that every man would feel himself called upon
+to consider the erection of a lighthouse on the Bell Rock, in every
+point of view, as a work of necessity and mercy.  He knew that
+scruples had existed with some, and these had, indeed, been fairly
+and candidly urged before leaving the shore; but it was expected
+that, after having seen the critical nature of the rock, and the
+necessity of the measure, every man would now be satisfied of the
+propriety of embracing all opportunities of landing on the rock
+when the state of the weather would permit.  The writer further
+took them to witness that it did not proceed from want of respect
+for the appointments and established forms of religion that he had
+himself adopted the resolution of attending the Bell Rock works on
+the Sunday; but, as he hoped, from a conviction that it was his
+bounden duty, on the strictest principles of morality.  At the same
+time it was intimated that, if any were of a different opinion,
+they should be perfectly at liberty to hold their sentiments
+without the imputation of contumacy or disobedience; the only
+difference would be in regard to the pay.
+
+Upon stating this much, he stepped into his boat, requesting all
+who were so disposed to follow him.  The sailors, from their
+habits, found no scruple on this subject, and all of the
+artificers, though a little tardy, also embarked, excepting four of
+the masons, who, from the beginning, mentioned that they would
+decline working on Sundays.  It may here be noticed that throughout
+the whole of the operations it was observable that the men wrought,
+if possible, with more keenness upon the Sundays than at other
+times from an impression that they were engaged in a work of
+imperious necessity, which required every possible exertion.  On
+returning to the floating light, after finishing the tide's work,
+the boats were received by the part of the ship's crew left on
+board with the usual attention of handing ropes to the boats and
+helping the artificers on board; but the four masons who had
+absented themselves from the work did not appear upon deck.
+
+[Monday, 24th Aug.]
+
+The boats left the floating light at a quarter-past nine o'clock
+this morning, and the work began at three-quarters past nine; but
+as the neap-tides were approaching the working time at the rock
+became gradually shorter, and it was now with difficulty that two
+and a half hours' work could be got.  But so keenly had the workmen
+entered into the spirit of the beacon-house operations, that they
+continued to bore the holes in the rock till some of them were
+knee-deep in water.
+
+The operations at this time were entirely directed to the erection
+of the beacon, in which every man felt an equal interest, as at
+this critical period the slightest casualty to any of the boats at
+the rock might have been fatal to himself individually, while it
+was perhaps peculiar to the writer more immediately to feel for the
+safety of the whole.  Each log or upright beam of the beacon was to
+be fixed to the rock by two strong and massive bats or stanchions
+of iron.  These bats, for the fixture of the principal and diagonal
+beams and bracing chains, required fifty-four holes, each measuring
+two inches in diameter and eighteen inches in depth.  There had
+already been so considerable a progress made in boring and
+excavating the holes that the writer's hopes of getting the beacon
+erected this year began to be more and more confirmed, although it
+was now advancing towards what was considered the latter end of the
+proper working season at the Bell Rock.  The foreman joiner, Mr.
+Francis Watt, was accordingly appointed to attend at the rock to-
+day, when the necessary levels were taken for the step or seat of
+each particular beam of the beacon, that they might be cut to their
+respective lengths, to suit the inequalities of the rock; several
+of the stanchions were also tried into their places, and other
+necessary observations made, to prevent mistakes on the application
+of the apparatus, and to facilitate the operations when the beams
+came to be set up, which would require to be done in the course of
+a single tide.
+
+[Tuesday, 25th Aug.]
+
+We had now experienced an almost unvaried tract of light airs of
+easterly wind, with clear weather in the fore-part of the day and
+fog in the evenings.  To-day, however, it sensibly changed; when
+the wind came to the south-west, and blew a fresh breeze.  At nine
+a.m. the bell rung, and the boats were hoisted out, and though the
+artificers were now pretty well accustomed to tripping up and down
+the sides of the floating light, yet it required more seamanship
+this morning than usual.  It therefore afforded some merriment to
+those who had got fairly seated in their respective boats to see
+the difficulties which attended their companions, and the
+hesitating manner in which they quitted hold of the man-ropes in
+leaving the ship.  The passage to the rock was tedious, and the
+boats did not reach it till half-past ten.
+
+It being now the period of neap-tides, the water only partially
+left the rock, and some of the men who were boring on the lower
+ledges of the site of the beacon stood knee-deep in water.  The
+situation of the smith to-day was particularly disagreeable, but
+his services were at all times indispensable.  As the tide did not
+leave the site of the forge, he stood in the water, and as there
+was some roughness on the surface it was with considerable
+difficulty that, with the assistance of the sailors, he was enabled
+to preserve alive his fire; and, while his feet were immersed in
+water, his face was not only scorched but continually exposed to
+volumes of smoke, accompanied with sparks from the fire, which were
+occasionally set up owing to the strength and direction of the
+wind.
+
+[Wednesday, 26th Aug.]
+
+The wind had shifted this morning to N.N.W., with rain, and was
+blowing what sailors call a fresh breeze.  To speak, perhaps,
+somewhat more intelligibly to the general reader, the wind was such
+that a fishing-boat could just carry full sail.  But as it was of
+importance, specially in the outset of the business, to keep up the
+spirit of enterprise for landing on all practicable occasions, the
+writer, after consulting with the landing-master, ordered the bell
+to be rung for embarking, and at half-past eleven the boats reached
+the rock, and left it again at a quarter-past twelve, without,
+however, being able to do much work, as the smith could not be set
+to work from the smallness of the ebb and the strong breach of sea,
+which lashed with great force among the bars of the forge.
+
+Just as we were about to leave the rock the wind shifted to the
+S.W., and, from a fresh gale, it became what seamen term a hard
+gale, or such as would have required the fisherman to take in two
+or three reefs in his sail.  It is a curious fact that the
+respective tides of ebb and flood are apparent upon the shore about
+an hour and a half sooner than at the distance of three or four
+miles in the offing.  But what seems chiefly interesting here is
+that the tides around this small sunken rock should follow exactly
+the same laws as on the extensive shores of the mainland.  When the
+boats left the Bell Rock to-day it was overflowed by the flood-
+tide, but the floating light did not swing round to the flood-tide
+for more than an hour afterwards.  Under this disadvantage the
+boats had to struggle with the ebb-tide and a hard gale of wind, so
+that it was with the greatest difficulty that they reached the
+floating light.  Had this gale happened in spring-tides when the
+current was strong we must have been driven to sea in a very
+helpless condition.
+
+The boat which the writer steered was considerably behind the
+other, one of the masons having unluckily broken his oar.  Our
+prospect of getting on board, of course, became doubtful, and our
+situation was rather perilous, as the boat shipped so much sea that
+it occupied two of the artificers to bale and clear her of water.
+When the oar gave way we were about half a mile from the ship, but,
+being fortunately to windward, we got into the wake of the floating
+light, at about 250 fathoms astern, just as the landing-master's
+boat reached the vessel.  He immediately streamed or floated a
+life-buoy astern, with a line which was always in readiness, and by
+means of this useful implement the boat was towed alongside of the
+floating light, where, from her rolling motion, it required no
+small management to get safely on board, as the men were much worn
+out with their exertions in pulling from the rock.  On the present
+occasion the crews of both boats were completely drenched with
+spray, and those who sat upon the bottom of the boats to bale them
+were sometimes pretty deep in the water before it could be cleared
+out.  After getting on board, all hands were allowed an extra dram,
+and, having shifted and got a warm and comfortable dinner, the
+affair, it is believed, was little more thought of.
+
+[Thursday, 27th Aug.]
+
+The tides were now in that state which sailors term the dead of the
+neap, and it was not expected that any part of the rock would be
+seen above water to-day; at any rate, it was obvious, from the
+experience of yesterday, that no work could be done upon it, and
+therefore the artificers were not required to land.  The wind was
+at west, with light breezes, and fine clear weather; and as it was
+an object with the writer to know the actual state of the Bell Rock
+at neap-tides, he got one of the boats manned, and, being
+accompanied by the landing-master, went to it at a quarter-past
+twelve.  The parts of the rock that appeared above water being very
+trifling, were covered by every wave, so that no landing was made.
+Upon trying the depth of water with a boathook, particularly on the
+sites of the lighthouse and beacon, on the former, at low water,
+the depth was found to be three feet, and on the central parts of
+the latter it was ascertained to be two feet eight inches.  Having
+made these remarks, the boat returned to the ship at two p.m., and
+the weather being good, the artificers were found amusing
+themselves with fishing.  The Smeaton came from Arbroath this
+afternoon, and made fast to her moorings, having brought letters
+and newspapers, with parcels of clean linen, etc., for the workmen,
+who were also made happy by the arrival of three of their comrades
+from the workyard ashore.  From these men they not only received
+all the news of the workyard, but seemed themselves to enjoy great
+pleasure in communicating whatever they considered to be
+interesting with regard to the rock.  Some also got letters from
+their friends at a distance, the postage of which for the men
+afloat was always free, so that they corresponded the more readily.
+
+The site of the building having already been carefully traced out
+with the pick-axe, the artificers this day commenced the excavation
+of the rock for the foundation or first course of the lighthouse.
+Four men only were employed at this work, while twelve continued at
+the site of the beacon-house, at which every possible opportunity
+was embraced, till this essential art of the operations should be
+completed.
+
+[Wednesday, 2nd Sept.]
+
+The floating light's bell rung this morning at half-past four
+o'clock, as a signal for the boats to be got ready, and the landing
+took place at half-past five.  In passing the Smeaton at her
+moorings near the rock, her boat followed with eight additional
+artificers who had come from Arbroath with her at last trip, but
+there being no room for them in the floating light's boats, they
+had continued on board.  The weather did not look very promising in
+the morning, the wind blowing pretty fresh from W.S.W.:  and had it
+not been that the writer calculated upon having a vessel so much at
+command, in all probability he would not have ventured to land.
+The Smeaton rode at what sailors call a salvagee, with a cross-head
+made fast to the floating buoy.  This kind of attachment was found
+to be more convenient than the mode of passing the hawser through
+the ring of the buoy when the vessel was to be made fast.  She had
+then only to be steered very close to the buoy, when the salvagee
+was laid hold of with a boat-hook, and the BITE of the hawser
+thrown over the cross-head.  But the salvagee, by this method, was
+always left at the buoy, and was, of course, more liable to chafe
+and wear than a hawser passed through the ring, which could be
+wattled with canvas, and shifted at pleasure.  The salvagee and
+cross method is, however, much practised; but the experience of
+this morning showed it to be very unsuitable for vessels riding in
+an exposed situation for any length of time.
+
+Soon after the artificers landed they commenced work; but the wind
+coming to blow hard, the Smeaton's boat and crew, who had brought
+their complement of eight men to the rock, went off to examine her
+riding ropes, and see that they were in proper order.  The boat had
+no sooner reached the vessel than she went adrift, carrying the
+boat along with her.  By the time that she was got round to make a
+tack towards the rock, she had drifted at least three miles to
+leeward, with the praam-boat astern; and, having both the wind and
+a tide against her, the writer perceived, with no little anxiety,
+that she could not possibly return to the rock till long after its
+being overflowed; for, owing to the anomaly of the tides formerly
+noticed, the Bell Rock is completely under water when the ebb
+abates to the offing.
+
+In this perilous predicament, indeed, he found himself placed
+between hope and despair--but certainly the latter was by much the
+most predominant feeling of his mind--situate upon a sunken rock in
+the middle of the ocean, which, in the progress of the flood-tide,
+was to be laid under water to the depth of at least twelve feet in
+a stormy sea.  There were this morning thirty-two persons in all
+upon the rock, with only two boats, whose complement, even in good
+weather, did not exceed twenty-four sitters; but to row to the
+floating light with so much wind, and in so heavy a sea, a
+complement of eight men for each boat was as much as could, with
+propriety, be attempted, so that, in this way, about one-half of
+our number was unprovided for.  Under these circumstances, had the
+writer ventured to despatch one of the boats in expectation of
+either working the Smeaton sooner up towards the rock, or in hopes
+of getting her boat brought to our assistance, this must have given
+an immediate alarm to the artificers, each of whom would have
+insisted upon taking to his own boat, and leaving the eight
+artificers belonging to the Smeaton to their chance.  Of course a
+scuffle might have ensued, and it is hard to say, in the ardour of
+men contending for life, where it might have ended.  It has even
+been hinted to the writer that a party of the PICKMEN were
+determined to keep exclusively to their own boat against all
+hazards.
+
+The unfortunate circumstance of the Smeaton and her boat having
+drifted was, for a considerable time, only known to the writer and
+to the landing-master, who removed to the farther point of the
+rock, where he kept his eye steadily upon the progress of the
+vessel.  While the artificers were at work, chiefly in sitting or
+kneeling postures, excavating the rock, or boring with the jumpers,
+and while their numerous hammers, with the sound of the smith's
+anvil, continued, the situation of things did not appear so awful.
+In this state of suspense, with almost certain destruction at hand,
+the water began to rise upon those who were at work on the lower
+parts of the sites of the beacon and lighthouse.  From the run of
+sea upon the rock, the forge fire was also sooner extinguished this
+morning than usual, and the volumes of smoke having ceased, objects
+in every direction became visible from all parts of the rock.
+After having had about three 'hours' work, the men began, pretty
+generally, to make towards their respective boats for their jackets
+and stockings, when, to their astonishment, instead of three, they
+found only two boats, the third being adrift with the Smeaton.  Not
+a word was uttered by any one, but all appeared to be silently
+calculating their numbers, and looking to each other with evident
+marks of perplexity depicted in their countenances.  The landing-
+master, conceiving that blame might be attached to him for allowing
+the boat to leave the rock, still kept at a distance.  At this
+critical moment the author was standing upon an elevated part of
+Smith's Ledge, where he endeavoured to mark the progress of the
+Smeaton, not a little surprised that her crew did not cut the praam
+adrift, which greatly retarded her way, and amazed that some effort
+was not making to bring at least the boat, and attempt our relief.
+The workmen looked steadfastly upon the writer, and turned
+occasionally towards the vessel, still far to leeward. {122a}  All
+this passed in the most perfect silence, and the melancholy
+solemnity of the group made an impression never to be effaced from
+his mind.
+
+The writer had all along been considering of various schemes--
+providing the men could be kept under command--which might be put
+in practice for the general safety, in hopes that the Smeaton might
+be able to pick up the boats to leeward, when they were obliged to
+leave the rock.  He was, accordingly, about to address the
+artificers on the perilous nature of their circumstances, and to
+propose that all hands should unstrip their upper clothing when the
+higher parts of the rock were laid under water; that the seamen
+should remove every unnecessary weight and encumbrance from the
+boats; that a specified number of men should go into each boat, and
+that the remainder should hang by the gunwales, while the boats
+were to be rowed gently towards the Smeaton, as the course to the
+Pharos, or floating light, lay rather to windward of the rock.  But
+when he attempted to speak his mouth was so parched that his tongue
+refused utterance, and he now learned by experience that the saliva
+is as necessary as the tongue itself for speech.  He turned to one
+of the pools on the rock and lapped a little water, which produced
+immediate relief.  But what was his happiness, when on rising from
+this unpleasant beverage, some one called out, 'A boat! a boat!'
+and, on looking around, at no great distance, a large boat was seen
+through the haze making towards the rock.  This at once enlivened
+and rejoiced every heart.  The timeous visitor proved to be James
+Spink, the Bell Rock pilot, who had come express from Arbroath with
+letters.  Spink had for some time seen the Smeaton, and had even
+supposed, from the state of the weather, that all hands were on
+board of her till he approached more nearly and observed people
+upon the rock; but not supposing that the assistance of his boat
+was necessary to carry the artificers off the rock, he anchored on
+the lee-side and began to fish, waiting, as usual, till the letters
+were sent for, as the pilot-boat was too large and unwieldy for
+approaching the rock when there was any roughness or run of the sea
+at the entrance of the landing creeks.
+
+Upon this fortunate change of circumstances, sixteen of the
+artificers were sent, at two trips, in one of the boats, with
+instructions for Spink to proceed with them to the floating light.
+This being accomplished, the remaining sixteen followed in the two
+boats belonging to the service of the rock.  Every one felt the
+most perfect happiness at leaving the Bell Rock this morning,
+though a very hard and even dangerous passage to the floating light
+still awaited us, as the wind by this time had increased to a
+pretty hard gale, accompanied with a considerable swell of sea.
+Every one was as completely drenched in water as if he had been
+dragged astern of the boats.  The writer, in particular, being at
+the helm, found, on getting on board, that his face and ears were
+completely coated with a thin film of salt from the sea spray,
+which broke constantly over the bows of the boat.  After much
+baling of water and severe work at the oars, the three boats
+reached the floating light, where some new difficulties occurred in
+getting on board in safety, owing partly to the exhausted state of
+the men, and partly to the violent rolling of the vessel.
+
+As the tide flowed, it was expected that the Smeaton would have got
+to windward; but, seeing that all was safe, after tacking for
+several hours and making little progress, she bore away for
+Arbroath, with the praam-boat.  As there was now too much wind for
+the pilot-boat to return to Arbroath, she was made fast astern of
+the floating light, and the crew remained on board till next day,
+when the weather moderated.  There can be very little doubt that
+the appearance of James Spink with his boat on this critical
+occasion was the means of preventing the loss of lives at the rock
+this morning.  When these circumstances, some years afterwards,
+came to the knowledge of the Board, a small pension was ordered to
+our faithful pilot, then in his seventieth year; and he still
+continues to wear the uniform clothes and badge of the Lighthouse
+service.  Spink is a remarkably strong man, whose tout ensemble is
+highly characteristic of a North-country fisherman.  He usually
+dresses in a pe-jacket, cut after a particular fashion, and wears a
+large, flat, blue bonnet.  A striking likeness of Spink in his
+pilot-dress, with the badge or insignia on his left arm which is
+characteristic of the boatmen in the service of the Northern
+Lights, has been taken by Howe, and is in the writer's possession.
+
+[Thursday, 3rd Sept.]
+
+The bell rung this morning at five o'clock, but the writer must
+acknowledge, from the circumstances of yesterday, that its sound
+was extremely unwelcome.  This appears also to have been the
+feelings of the artificers, for when they came to be mustered, out
+of twenty-six, only eight, besides the foreman and seamen, appeared
+upon deck to accompany the writer to the rock.  Such are the
+baneful effects of anything like misfortune or accident connected
+with a work of this description.  The use of argument to persuade
+the men to embark in cases of this kind would have been out of
+place, as it is not only discomfort, or even the risk of the loss
+of a limb, but life itself that becomes the question.  The boats,
+notwithstanding the thinness of our ranks, left the vessel at half-
+past five.  The rough weather of yesterday having proved but a
+summer's gale, the wind came to-day in gentle breezes; yet, the
+atmosphere being cloudy, it a not a very favourable appearance.
+The boats reached the rock at six a.m., and the eight artificers
+who landed were employed in clearing out the bat-holes for the
+beacon-house, and had a very prosperous tide of four hours' work,
+being the longest yet experienced by half an hour.
+
+The boats left the rock again at ten o'clock, and the weather
+having cleared up as we drew near the vessel, the eighteen
+artificers who had remained on board were observed upon deck, but
+as the boats approached they sought their way below, being quite
+ashamed of their conduct.  This was the only instance of refusal to
+go to the rock which occurred during the whole progress of the
+work, excepting that of the four men who declined working upon
+Sunday, a case which the writer did not conceive to be at all
+analogous to the present.  It may here be mentioned, much to the
+credit of these four men, that they stood foremost in embarking for
+the rock this morning.
+
+[Saturday, 5th Sept.]
+
+It was fortunate that a landing was not attempted this evening, for
+at eight o'clock the wind shifted to E.S.E., and at ten it had
+become a hard gale, when fifty fathoms of the floating light's
+hempen cable were veered out.  The gale still increasing, the ship
+rolled and laboured excessively, and at midnight eighty fathoms of
+cable were veered out; while the sea continued to strike the vessel
+with a degree of force which had not before been experienced.
+
+[Sunday, 6th Sept.]
+
+During the last night there was little rest on board of the Pharos,
+and daylight, though anxiously wished for, brought no relief, as
+the gale continued with unabated violence.  The sea struck so hard
+upon the vessel's bows that it rose in great quantities, or in
+'green seas,' as the sailors termed it, which were carried by the
+wind as far aft as the quarter-deck, and not infrequently over the
+stern of the ship altogether.  It fell occasionally so heavily on
+the skylight of the writer's cabin, though so far aft as to be
+within five feet of the helm, that the glass was broken to pieces
+before the dead-light could be got into its place, so that the
+water poured down in great quantities.  In shutting out the water,
+the admission of light was prevented, and in the morning all
+continued in the most comfortless state of darkness.  About ten
+o'clock a.m. the wind shifted to N.E., and blew, if possible,
+harder than before, and it was accompanied by a much heavier swell
+of sea.  In the course of the gale, the part of the cable in the
+hause-hole had been so often shifted that nearly the whole length
+of one of her hempen cables, of 120 fathoms, had been veered out,
+besides the chain-moorings.  The cable, for its preservation, was
+also carefully served or wattled with pieces of canvas round the
+windlass, and with leather well greased in the hause-hole.  In this
+state things remained during the whole day, every sea which struck
+the vessel--and the seas followed each other in close succession--
+causing her to shake, and all on board occasionally to tremble.  At
+each of these strokes of the sea the rolling and pitching of the
+vessel ceased for a time, and her motion was felt as if she had
+either broke adrift before the wind or were in the act of sinking;
+but, when another sea came, she ranged up against it with great
+force, and this became the regular intimation of our being still
+riding at anchor.
+
+About eleven o'clock, the writer with some difficulty got out of
+bed, but, in attempting to dress, he was thrown twice upon the
+floor at the opposite end of the cabin.  In an undressed state he
+made shift to get about half-way up the companion-stairs, with an
+intention to observe the state of the sea and of the ship upon
+deck; but he no sooner looked over the companion than a heavy sea
+struck the vessel, which fell on the quarter-deck, and rushed
+downstairs in the officers' cabin in so considerable a quantity
+that it was found necessary to lift one of the scuttles in the
+floor, to let the water into the limbers of the ship, as it dashed
+from side to side in such a manner as to run into the lower tier of
+beds.  Having been foiled in this attempt, and being completely
+wetted, he again got below and went to bed.  In this state of the
+weather the seamen had to move about the necessary or indispensable
+duties of the ship with the most cautious use both of hands and
+feet, while it required all the art of the landsman to keep within
+the precincts of his bed.  The writer even found himself so much
+tossed about that it became necessary, in some measure, to shut
+himself in bed, in order to avoid being thrown upon the floor.
+Indeed, such was the motion of the ship that it seemed wholly
+impracticable to remain in any other than a lying posture.  On deck
+the most stormy aspect presented itself, while below all was wet
+and comfortless.
+
+ About two o'clock p.m. a great alarm was given throughout the ship
+from the effects of a very heavy sea which struck her, and almost
+filled the waist, pouring down into the berths below, through every
+chink and crevice of the hatches and skylights.  From the motion of
+the vessel being thus suddenly deadened or checked, and from the
+flowing in of the water above, it is believed there was not an
+individual on board who did not think, at the moment, that the
+vessel had foundered, and was in the act of sinking.  The writer
+could withstand this no longer, and as soon as she again began to
+range to the sea he determined to make another effort to get upon
+deck.  In the first instance, however, he groped his way in
+darkness from his own cabin through the berths of the officers,
+where all was quietness.  He next entered the galley and other
+compartments occupied by the artificers.  Here also all was shut up
+in darkness, the fire having been drowned out in the early part of
+the gale.  Several of the artificers were employed in prayer,
+repeating psalms and other devotional exercises in a full tone of
+voice; others protesting that, if they should fortunately get once
+more on shore, no one should ever see them afloat again.  With the
+assistance of the landing-master, the writer made his way, holding
+on step by step, among the numerous impediments which lay in the
+way.  Such was the creaking noise of the bulk-heads or partitions,
+the dashing of the water, and the whistling noise of the winds,
+that it was hardly possible to break in upon such a confusion of
+sounds.  In one or two instances, anxious and repeated inquiries
+were made by the artificers as to the state of things upon deck, to
+which the captain made the usual answer, that it could not blow
+long in this way, and that we must soon have better weather.  The
+next berth in succession, moving forward in the ship, was that
+allotted for the seamen.  Here the scene was considerably
+different.  Having reached the middle of this darksome berth
+without its inmates being aware of any intrusion, the writer had
+the consolation of remarking that, although they talked of bad
+weather and the cross accidents of the sea, yet the conversation
+was carried on in that sort of tone and manner which bespoke an
+ease and composure of mind highly creditable to them and pleasing
+to him.  The writer immediately accosted the seamen about the state
+of the ship.  To these inquiries they replied that the vessel being
+light, and having but little hold of the water, no top-rigging,
+with excellent ground-tackle, and everything being fresh and new,
+they felt perfect confidence in their situation.
+
+It being impossible to open any of the hatches in the fore part of
+the ship in communicating with the deck, the watch was changed by
+passing through the several berths to the companion-stair leading
+to the quarter-deck.  The writer, therefore, made the best of his
+way aft, and, on a second attempt to look out, he succeeded, and
+saw indeed an astonishing sight.  The sea or waves appeared to be
+ten or fifteen feet in height of unbroken water, and every
+approaching billow seemed as if it would overwhelm our vessel, but
+she continued to rise upon the waves and to fall between the seas
+in a very wonderful manner.  It seemed to be only those seas which
+caught her in the act of rising which struck her with so much
+violence and threw such quantities of water aft.  On deck there was
+only one solitary individual looking out, to give the alarm in the
+event of the ship breaking from her moorings.  The seaman on watch
+continued only two hours; he who kept watch at this time was a
+tall, slender man of a black complexion; he had no greatcoat nor
+over-all of any kind, but was simply dressed in his ordinary jacket
+and trousers; his hat was tied under his chin with a napkin, and he
+stood aft the foremast, to which he had lashed himself with a
+gasket or small rope round his waist, to prevent his falling upon
+deck or being washed overboard.  When the writer looked up, he
+appeared to smile, which afforded a further symptom of the
+confidence of the crew in their ship.  This person on watch was as
+completely wetted as if he had been drawn through the sea, which
+was given as a reason for his not putting on a greatcoat, that he
+might wet as few of his clothes as possible, and have a dry shift
+when he went below.  Upon deck everything that was movable was out
+of sight, having either been stowed below, previous to the gale, or
+been washed overboard.  Some trifling parts of the quarter boards
+were damaged by the breach of the sea; and one of the boats upon
+deck was about one-third full of water, the oyle-hole or drain
+having been accidently stopped up, and part of her gunwale had
+received considerable injury.  These observations were hastily
+made, and not without occasionally shutting the companion, to avoid
+being wetted by the successive seas which broke over the bows and
+fell upon different parts of the deck according to the impetus with
+which the waves struck the vessel.  By this time it was about three
+o'clock in the afternoon, and the gale, which had now continued
+with unabated force for twenty-seven hours, had not the least
+appearance of going off.
+
+In the dismal prospect of undergoing another night like the last,
+and being in imminent hazard of parting from our cable, the writer
+thought it necessary to advise with the master and officers of the
+ship as to the probable event of the vessel's drifting from her
+moorings.  They severally gave it as their opinion that we had now
+every chance of riding out the gale, which, in all probability,
+could not continue with the same fury many hours longer; and that
+even if she should part from her anchor, the storm-sails had been
+laid to hand, and could be bent in a very short time.  They further
+stated that from the direction of the wind being N.E., she would
+sail up the Firth of Forth to Leith Roads.  But if this should
+appear doubtful, after passing the Island and Light of May, it
+might be advisable at once to steer for Tyningham Sands, on the
+western side of Dunbar, and there run the vessel ashore.  If this
+should happen at the time of high-water, or during the ebbing of
+the tide, they were of opinion, from the flatness and strength of
+the floating light, that no danger would attend her taking the
+ground, even with a very heavy sea.  The writer, seeing the
+confidence which these gentlemen possessed with regard to the
+situation of things, found himself as much relieved with this
+conversation as he had previously been with the seeming
+indifference of the forecastle men, and the smile of the watch upon
+deck, though literally lashed to the foremast.  From this time he
+felt himself almost perfectly at ease; at any rate, he was entirely
+resigned to the ultimate result.
+
+About six o'clock in the evening the ship's company was heard
+moving upon deck, which on the present occasion was rather the
+cause of alarm.  The writer accordingly rang his bell to know what
+was the matter, when he was informed by the steward that the
+weather looked considerably better, and that the men upon deck were
+endeavouring to ship the smoke-funnel of the galley that the people
+might get some meat.  This was a more favourable account than had
+been anticipated.  During the last twenty-one hours he himself had
+not only had nothing to eat, but he had almost never passed a
+thought on the subject.  Upon the mention of a change of weather,
+he sent the steward to learn how the artificers felt, and on his
+return he stated that they now seemed to be all very happy, since
+the cook had begun to light the galley-fire and make preparations
+for the suet-pudding of Sunday, which was the only dish to be
+attempted for the mess, from the ease with which it could both be
+cooked and served up.
+
+The principal change felt upon the ship as the wind abated was her
+increased rolling motion, but the pitching was much diminished, and
+now hardly any sea came farther aft than the foremast:  but she
+rolled so extremely hard as frequently to dip and take in water
+over the gunwales and rails in the waist.  By nine o'clock all
+hands had been refreshed by the exertions of the cook and steward,
+and were happy in the prospect of the worst of the gale being over.
+The usual complement of men was also now set on watch, and more
+quietness was experienced throughout the ship.  Although the
+previous night had been a very restless one, it had not the effect
+of inducing repose in the writer's berth on the succeeding night;
+for having been so much tossed about in bed during the last thirty
+hours, he found no easy spot to turn to, and his body was all sore
+to the touch, which ill accorded with the unyielding materials with
+which his bed-place was surrounded.
+
+[Monday, 7th Sept.]
+
+This morning, about eight o'clock, the writer was agreeably
+surprised to see the scuttle of his cabin sky-light removed, and
+the bright rays of the sun admitted.  Although the ship continued
+to roll excessively, and the sea was still running very high, yet
+the ordinary business on board seemed to be going forward on deck.
+It was impossible to steady a telescope, so as to look minutely at
+the progress of the waves and trace their breach upon the Bell
+Rock; but the height to which the cross-running waves rose in
+sprays when they met each other was truly grand, and the continued
+roar and noise of the sea was very perceptible to the ear.  To
+estimate the height of the sprays at forty or fifty feet would
+surely be within the mark.  Those of the workmen who were not much
+afflicted with sea-sickness, came upon deck, and the wetness below
+being dried up, the cabins were again brought into a habitable
+state.  Every one seemed to meet as if after a long absence,
+congratulating his neighbour upon the return of good weather.
+Little could be said as to the comfort of the vessel, but after
+riding out such a gale, no one felt the least doubt or hesitation
+as to the safety and good condition of her moorings.  The master
+and mate were extremely anxious, however, to heave in the hempen
+cable, and see the state of the clinch or iron ring of the chain-
+cable.  But the vessel rolled at such a rate that the seamen could
+not possibly keep their feet at the windlass nor work the hand-
+spikes, though it had been several times attempted since the gale
+took off.
+
+About twelve noon, however, the vessel's motion was observed to be
+considerably less, and the sailors were enabled to walk upon deck
+with some degree of freedom.  But, to the astonishment of every
+one, it was soon discovered that the floating light was adrift!
+The windlass was instantly manned, and the men soon gave out that
+there was no strain upon the cable.  The mizzen sail, which was
+bent for the occasional purpose of making the vessel ride more
+easily to the tide, was immediately set, and the other sails were
+also hoisted in a short time, when, in no small consternation, we
+bore away about one mile to the south-westward of the former
+station, and there let go the best bower anchor and cable in twenty
+fathoms water, to ride until the swell of the sea should fall, when
+it might be practicable to grapple for the moorings, and find a
+better anchorage for the ship.
+
+[Tuesday, 15th Sept.]
+
+This morning, at five a.m., the bell rung as a signal for landing
+upon the rock, a sound which, after a lapse of ten days, it is
+believed was welcomed by every one on board.  There being a heavy
+breach of sea at the eastern creek, we landed, though not without
+difficulty, on the western side, every one seeming more eager than
+another to get upon the rock; and never did hungry men sit down to
+a hearty meal with more appetite than the artificers began to pick
+the dulse from the rocks.  This marine plant had the effect of
+reviving the sickly, and seemed to be no less relished by those who
+were more hardy.
+
+While the water was ebbing, and the men were roaming in quest of
+their favourite morsel, the writer was examining the effects of the
+storm upon the forge and loose apparatus left upon the rock.  Six
+large blocks of granite which had been landed, by way of
+experiment, on the 1st instant, were now removed from their places
+and, by the force of the sea, thrown over a rising ledge into a
+hole at the distance of twelve or fifteen paces from the place on
+which they had been landed.  This was a pretty good evidence both
+of the violence of the storm and the agitation of the sea upon the
+rock.  The safety of the smith's forge was always an object of
+essential regard.  The ash-pan of the hearth or fireplace, with its
+weighty cast-iron back, had been washed from their places of
+supposed security; the chains of attachment had been broken, and
+these ponderous articles were found at a very considerable distance
+in a hole on the western side of the rock; while the tools and
+picks of the Aberdeen masons were scattered about in every
+direction.  It is, however, remarkable that not a single article
+was ultimately lost.
+
+This being the night on which the floating light was advertised to
+be lighted, it was accordingly exhibited, to the great joy of every
+one.
+
+[Wednesday, 16th Sept.]
+
+The writer was made happy to-day by the return of the Lighthouse
+yacht from a voyage to the Northern Lighthouses.  Having
+immediately removed on board of this fine vessel of eighty-one tons
+register, the artificers gladly followed; for, though they found
+themselves more pinched for accommodation on board of the yacht,
+and still more so in the Smeaton, yet they greatly preferred either
+of these to the Pharos, or floating light, on account of her
+rolling motion, though in all respects fitted up for their
+conveniency.
+
+The writer called them to the quarter-deck and informed them that,
+having been one mouth afloat, in terms of their agreement they were
+now at liberty to return to the workyard at Arbroath if they
+preferred this to continuing at the Bell Rock.  But they replied
+that, in the prospect of soon getting the beacon erected upon the
+rock, and having made a change from the floating light, they were
+now perfectly reconciled to their situation, and would remain
+afloat till the end of the working season.
+
+[Thursday, 17th Sept.]
+
+The wind was at N.E. this morning, and though they were only light
+airs, yet there was a pretty heavy swell coming ashore upon the
+rock.  The boats landed at half-past seven o'clock a.m., at the
+creek on the southern side of the rock, marked Port Hamilton.  But
+as one of the boats was in the act of entering this creek, the
+seaman at the bow-oar, who had just entered the service, having
+inadvertently expressed some fear from a heavy sea which came
+rolling towards the boat, and one of the artificers having at the
+same time looked round and missed a stroke with his oar, such a
+preponderance was thus given to the rowers upon the opposite side
+that when the wave struck the boat it threw her upon a ledge of
+shelving rocks, where the water left her, and she having KANTED to
+seaward, the next wave completely filled her with water.  After
+making considerable efforts the boat was again got afloat in the
+proper track of the creek, so that we landed without any other
+accident than a complete ducking.  There being no possibility of
+getting a shift of clothes, the artificers began with all speed to
+work, so as to bring themselves into heat, while the writer and his
+assistants kept as much as possible in motion.  Having remained
+more than an hour upon the rock, the boats left it at half-past
+nine; and, after getting on board, the writer recommended to the
+artificers, as the best mode of getting into a state of comfort, to
+strip off their wet clothes and go to bed for an hour or two.  No
+further inconveniency was felt, and no one seemed to complain of
+the affection called 'catching cold.'
+
+[Friday, 18th Sept.]
+
+An important occurrence connected with the operations of this
+season was the arrival of the Smeaton at four p.m., having in tow
+the six principal beams of the beacon-house, together with all the
+stanchions and other work on board for fixing it on the rock.  The
+mooring of the floating light was a great point gained, but in the
+erection of the beacon at this late period of the season new
+difficulties presented themselves.  The success of such an
+undertaking at any season was precarious, because a single day of
+bad weather occurring before the necessary fixtures could be made
+might sweep the whole apparatus from the rock.  Notwithstanding
+these difficulties, the writer had determined to make the trial,
+although he could almost have wished, upon looking at the state of
+the clouds and the direction of the wind, that the apparatus for
+the beacon had been still in the workyard.
+
+[Saturday, 19th Sept.]
+
+The main beams of the beacon were made up in two separate rafts,
+fixed with bars and bolts of iron.  One of these rafts, not being
+immediately wanted, was left astern of the floating light, and the
+other was kept in tow by the Smeaton, at the buoy nearest to the
+rock.  The Lighthouse yacht rode at another buoy with all hands on
+board that could possibly be spared out of the floating light.  The
+party of artificers and seamen which landed on the rock counted
+altogether forty in number.  At half-past eight o'clock a derrick,
+or mast of thirty feet in height, was erected and properly
+supported with guy-ropes, for suspending the block for raising the
+first principal beam of the beacon; and a winch machine was also
+bolted down to the rock for working the purchase-tackle.
+
+Upon raising the derrick, all hands on the rock spontaneously gave
+three hearty cheers, as a favourable omen of our future exertions
+in pointing out more permanently the position of the rock.  Even to
+this single spar of timber, could it be preserved, a drowning man
+might lay hold.  When the Smeaton drifted on the 2nd of this month
+such a spar would have been sufficient to save us till she could
+have come to our relief.
+
+[Sunday, 20th Sept.]
+
+The wind this morning was variable, but the weather continued
+extremely favourable for the operations throughout the whole day.
+At six a.m. the boats were in motion, and the raft, consisting of
+four of the six principal beams of the beacon-house, each measuring
+about sixteen inches square, and fifty feet in length, was towed to
+the rock, where it was anchored, that it might ground upon it as
+the water ebbed.  The sailors and artificers, including all hands,
+to-day counted no fewer than fifty-two, being perhaps the greatest
+number of persons ever collected upon the Bell Rock.  It was early
+in the tide when the boats reached the rock, and the men worked a
+considerable time up to their middle in water, every one being more
+eager than his neighbour to be useful.  Even the four artificers
+who had hitherto declined working on Sunday were to-day most
+zealous in their exertions.  They had indeed become so convinced of
+the precarious nature and necessity of the work that they never
+afterwards absented themselves from the rock on Sunday when a
+landing was practicable.
+
+Having made fast a piece of very good new line, at about two-thirds
+from the lower end of one of the beams, the purchase-tackle of the
+derrick was hooked into the turns of the line, and it was speedily
+raised by the number of men on the rock and the power of the winch
+tackle.  When this log was lifted to a sufficient height, its foot,
+or lower end, was STEPPED into the spot which had been previously
+prepared for it.  Two of the great iron stanchions were then set in
+their respective holes on each side of the beam, when a rope was
+passed round them and the beam, to prevent it from slipping till it
+could be more permanently fixed.  The derrick, or upright spar used
+for carrying the tackle to raise the first beam, was placed in such
+a position as to become useful for supporting the upper end of it,
+which now became, in its turn, the prop of the tackle for raising
+the second beam.  The whole difficulty of this operation was in the
+raising and propping of the first beam, which became a convenient
+derrick for raising the second, these again a pair of shears for
+lifting the third, and the shears a triangle for raising the
+fourth.  Having thus got four of the six principal beams set on
+end, it required a considerable degree of trouble to get their
+upper ends to fit.  Here they formed the apex of a cone, and were
+all together mortised into a large piece of beechwood, and secured,
+for the present, with ropes, in a temporary manner.  During the
+short period of one tide all that could further be done for their
+security was to put a single screw-bolt through the great kneed
+bats or stanchions on each side of the beams, and screw the nut
+home.
+
+In this manner these four principal beams were erected, and left in
+a pretty secure state.  The men had commenced while there was about
+two or three feet of water upon the side of the beacon, and as the
+sea was smooth they continued the work equally long during flood-
+tide.  Two of the boats being left at the rock to take off the
+joiners, who were busily employed on the upper parts till two
+o'clock p.m., this tide's work may be said to have continued for
+about seven hours, which was the longest that had hitherto been got
+upon the rock by at least three hours.
+
+When the first boats left the rock with the artificers employed on
+the lower part of the work during the flood-tide, the beacon had
+quite a novel appearance.  The beams erected formed a common base
+of about thirty-three feet, meeting at the top, which was about
+forty-five feet above the rock, and here half a dozen of the
+artificers were still at work.  After clearing the rock the boats
+made a stop, when three hearty cheers were given, which were
+returned with equal goodwill by those upon the beacon, from the
+personal interest which every one felt in the prosperity of this
+work, so intimately connected with his safety.
+
+All hands having returned to their respective ships, they got a
+shift of dry clothes and some refreshment.  Being Sunday, they were
+afterwards convened by signal on board of the Lighthouse yacht,
+when prayers were read; for every heart upon this occasion felt
+gladness, and every mind was disposed to be thankful for the happy
+and successful termination of the operations of this day.
+
+[Monday, 21st Sept.]
+
+The remaining two principal beams were erected in the course of
+this tide, which, with the assistance of those set up yesterday,
+was found to be a very simple operation.
+
+The six principal beams of the beacon were thus secured, at least
+in a temporary manner, in the course of two tides, or in the short
+space of about eleven hours and a half.  Such is the progress that
+may be made when active hands and willing minds set properly to
+work in operations of this kind.
+
+[Tuesday 22nd, Sept.]
+
+Having now got the weighty part of this work over, and being
+thereby relieved of the difficulty both of landing and victualling
+such a number of men, the Smeaton could now be spared, and she was
+accordingly despatched to Arbroath for a supply of water and
+provisions, and carried with her six of the artificers who could
+best be spared.
+
+[Wednesday, 23rd Sept.]
+
+In going out of the eastern harbour, the boat which the writer
+steered shipped a sea, that filled her about one-third with water.
+She had also been hid for a short time, by the waves breaking upon
+the rock, from the sight of the crew of the preceding boat, who
+were much alarmed for our safety, imagining for a time that she had
+gone down.
+
+The Smeaton returned from Arbroath this afternoon, but there was so
+much sea that she could not be made fast to her moorings, and the
+vessel was obliged to return to Arbroath without being able either
+to deliver the provisions or take the artificers on board.  The
+Lighthouse yacht was also soon obliged to follow her example, as
+the sea was breaking heavily over her bows.  After getting two
+reefs in the mainsail, and the third or storm-jib set, the wind
+being S.W., she bent to windward, though blowing a hard gale, and
+got into St. Andrews Bay, where we passed the night under the lee
+of Fifeness.
+
+[Thursday, 24th Sept.]
+
+At two o'clock this morning we were in St. Andrews Bay, standing
+off and on shore, with strong gales of wind at S.W.; at seven we
+were off the entrance of the Tay; at eight stood towards the rock,
+and at ten passed to leeward of it, but could not attempt a
+landing.  The beacon, however, appeared to remain in good order,
+and by six p.m. the vessel had again beaten up to St. Andrews Bay,
+and got into somewhat smoother water for the night.
+
+[Friday, 25th Sept.]
+
+At seven o'clock bore away for the Bell Rock, but finding a heavy
+sea running on it were unable to land.  The writer, however, had
+the satisfaction to observe, with his telescope, that everything
+about the beacon appeared entire:  and although the sea had a most
+frightful appearance, yet it was the opinion of every one that,
+since the erection of the beacon, the Bell Rock was divested of
+many of its terrors, and had it been possible to have got the boats
+hoisted out and manned, it might have even been found practicable
+to land.  At six it blew so hard that it was found necessary to
+strike the topmast and take in a third reef of the mainsail, and
+under this low canvas we soon reached St. Andrews Bay, and got
+again under the lee of the land for the night.  The artificers,
+being sea-hardy, were quite reconciled to their quarters on board
+of the Lighthouse yacht; but it is believed that hardly any
+consideration would have induced them again to take up their abode
+in the floating light.
+
+[Saturday, 26th Sept.]
+
+At daylight the yacht steered towards the Bell Rock, and at eight
+a.m. made fast to her moorings; at ten, all hands, to the amount of
+thirty, landed, when the writer had the happiness to find that the
+beacon had withstood the violence of the gale and the heavy breach
+of sea, everything being found in the same state in which it had
+been left on the 21st.  The artificers were now enabled to work
+upon the rock throughout the whole day, both at low and high water,
+but it required the strictest attention to the state of the
+weather, in case of their being overtaken with a gale, which might
+prevent the possibility of getting them off the rock.
+
+Two somewhat memorable circumstances in the annals of the Bell Rock
+attended the operations of this day:  one was the removal of Mr.
+James Dove, the foreman smith, with his apparatus, from the rock to
+the upper part of the beacon, where the forge was now erected on a
+temporary platform, laid on the cross beams or upper framing.  The
+other was the artificers having dined for the first time upon the
+rock, their dinner being cooked on board of the yacht, and sent to
+them by one of the boats.  But what afforded the greatest happiness
+and relief was the removal of the large bellows, which had all
+along been a source of much trouble and perplexity, by their
+hampering and incommoding the boat which carried the smiths and
+their apparatus.
+
+[Saturday, 3rd Oct.]
+
+The wind being west to-day, the weather was very favourable for
+operations at the rock, and during the morning and evening tides,
+with the aid of torchlight, the masons had seven hours' work upon
+the site of the building.  The smiths and joiners, who landed at
+half-past six a.m., did not leave the rock till a quarter-past
+eleven p.m., having been at work, with little intermission, for
+sixteen hours and three-quarters.  When the water left the rock,
+they were employed at the lower parts of the beacon, and as the
+tide rose or fell, they shifted the place of their operations.
+From these exertions, the fixing and securing of the beacon made
+rapid advancement, as the men were now landed in the morning and
+remained throughout the day.  But, as a sudden change of weather
+might have prevented their being taken off at the proper time of
+tide, a quantity of bread and water was always kept on the beacon.
+
+During this period of working at the beacon all the day, and often
+a great part of the night, the writer was much on board of the
+tender; but, while the masons could work on the rock, and
+frequently also while it was covered by the tide, he remained on
+the beacon; especially during the night, as he made a point of
+being on the rock to the latest hour, and was generally the last
+person who stepped into the boat.  He had laid this down as part of
+his plan of procedure; and in this way had acquired, in the course
+of the first season, a pretty complete knowledge and experience of
+what could actually be done at the Bell Rock, under all
+circumstances of the weather.  By this means also his assistants,
+and the artificers and mariners, got into a systematic habit of
+proceeding at the commencement of the work, which, it is believed,
+continued throughout the whole of the operations.
+
+[Sunday, 4th Oct.]
+
+The external part of the beacon was now finished, with its supports
+and bracing-chains, and whatever else was considered necessary for
+its stability in so far as the season would permit; and although
+much was still wanting to complete this fabric, yet it was in such
+a state that it could be left without much fear of the consequences
+of a storm.  The painting of the upper part was nearly finished
+this afternoon; and the Smeaton had brought off a quantity of
+brushwood and other articles, for the purpose of heating or
+charring the lower part of the principal beams, before being laid
+over with successive coats of boiling pitch, to the height of from
+eight to twelve feet, or as high as the rise of spring-tides.  A
+small flagstaff having also been erected to-day, a flag was
+displayed for the first time from the beacon, by which its
+perspective effect was greatly improved.  On this, as on all like
+occasions at the Bell Rock, three hearty cheers were given; and the
+steward served out a dram of rum to all hands, while the Lighthouse
+yacht, Smeaton, and floating light, hoisted their colours in
+compliment to the erection.
+
+[Monday, 5th Oct.]
+
+In the afternoon, and just as the tide's work was over, Mr. John
+Rennie, engineer, accompanied by his son Mr. George, on their way
+to the harbour works of Fraserburgh, in Aberdeenshire, paid a visit
+to the Bell Rock, in a boat from Arbroath.  It being then too late
+in the tide for landing, they remained on board of the Lighthouse
+yacht all night, when the writer, who had now been secluded from
+society for several weeks, enjoyed much of Mr. Rennie's interesting
+conversation, both on general topics, and professionally upon the
+progress of the Bell Rock works, on which he was consulted as chief
+engineer.
+
+[Tuesday, 6th Oct.]
+
+The artificers landed this morning at nine, after which one of the
+boats returned to the ship for the writer and Messrs. Rennie, who,
+upon landing, were saluted with a display of the colours from the
+beacon and by three cheers from the workmen.  Everything was now in
+a prepared state for leaving the rock, and giving up the works
+afloat for this season, excepting some small articles, which would
+still occupy the smiths and joiners for a few days longer.  They
+accordingly shifted on board of the Smeaton, while the yacht left
+the rock for Arbroath, with Messrs. Rennie, the writer, and the
+remainder of the artificers.  But, before taking leave, the steward
+served out a farewell glass, when three hearty cheers were given,
+and an earnest wish expressed that everything, in the spring of
+1808, might be found in the same state of good order as it was now
+about to be left.
+
+
+II--OPERATIONS OF 1808
+
+
+[Monday, 29th Feb.]
+
+The writer sailed from Arbroath at one a.m. in the Lighthouse
+yacht.  At seven the floating light was hailed, and all on board
+found to be well.  The crew were observed to have a very healthy-
+like appearance, and looked better than at the close of the works
+upon the rock.  They seemed only to regret one thing, which was the
+secession of their cook, Thomas Elliot--not on account of his
+professional skill, but for his facetious and curious manner.
+Elliot had something peculiar in his history, and was reported by
+his comrades to have seen better days.  He was, however, happy with
+his situation on board of the floating light, and, having a taste
+for music, dancing, and acting plays, he contributed much to the
+amusement of the ship's company in their dreary abode during the
+winter months.  He had also recommended himself to their notice as
+a good shipkeeper, for as it did not answer Elliot to go often
+ashore, he had always given up his turn of leave to his neighbours.
+At his own desire he was at length paid off, when he had a
+considerable balance of wages to receive, which he said would be
+sufficient to carry him to the West Indies, and he accordingly took
+leave of the Lighthouse service.
+
+[Tuesday, 1st March]
+
+At daybreak the Lighthouse yacht, attended by a boat from the
+floating light, again stood towards the Bell Rock.  The weather
+felt extremely cold this morning, the thermometer being at 34
+degrees, with the wind at east, accompanied by occasional showers
+of snow, and the marine barometer indicated 29.80.  At half-past
+seven the sea ran with such force upon the rock that it seemed
+doubtful if a landing could be effected.  At half-past eight, when
+it was fairly above water, the writer took his place in the
+floating light's boat with the artificers, while the yacht's boat
+followed, according to the general rule of having two boats afloat
+in landing expeditions of this kind, that, in case of accident to
+one boat, the other might assist.  In several unsuccessful attempts
+the boats were beat back by the breach of the sea upon the rock.
+On the eastern side it separated into two distinct waves, which
+came with a sweep round to the western side, where they met; and at
+the instance of their confluence the water rose in spray to a
+considerable height.  Watching what the sailors term a SMOOTH, we
+caught a favourable opportunity, and in a very dexterous manner the
+boats were rowed between the two seas, and made a favourable
+landing at the western creek.
+
+At the latter end of last season, as was formerly noticed, the
+beacon was painted white, and from the bleaching of the weather and
+the sprays of the sea the upper parts were kept clean; but within
+the range of the tide the principal beams were observed to be
+thickly coated with a green stuff, the conferva of botanists.
+Notwithstanding the intrusion of these works, which had formerly
+banished the numerous seals that played about the rock, they were
+now seen in great numbers, having been in an almost undisturbed
+state for six months.  It had now also, for the first time, got
+some inhabitants of the feathered tribe:  in particular the scarth
+or cormorant, and the large herring-gull, had made the beacon a
+resting-place, from its vicinity to their fishing-grounds.  About a
+dozen of these birds had rested upon the cross-beams, which, in
+some places, were coated with their dung; and their flight, as the
+boats approached, was a very unlooked-for indication of life and
+habitation on the Bell Rock, conveying the momentary idea of the
+conversion of this fatal rock, from being a terror to the mariner,
+into a residence of man and a safeguard to shipping.
+
+Upon narrowly examining the great iron stanchions with which the
+beams were fixed to the rock, the writer had the satisfaction of
+finding that there was not the least appearance of working or
+shifting at any of the joints or places of connection; and,
+excepting the loosening of the bracing-chains, everything was found
+in the same entire state in which it had been left in the month of
+October.  This, in the estimation of the writer, was a matter of no
+small importance to the future success of the work.  He from that
+moment saw the practicability and propriety of fitting up the
+beacon, not only as a place of refuge in case of accident to the
+boats in landing, but as a residence for the artificers during the
+working months.
+
+While upon the top of the beacon the writer was reminded by the
+landing-master that the sea was running high, and that it would be
+necessary to set off while the rock afforded anything like shelter
+to the boats, which by this time had been made fast by a long line
+to the beacon, and rode with much agitation, each requiring two men
+with boat-hooks to keep them from striking each other, or from
+ranging up against the beacon.  But even under these circumstances
+the greatest confidence was felt by every one, from the security
+afforded by this temporary erection.  For, supposing the wind had
+suddenly increased to a gale, and that it had been found
+unadvisable to go into the boats; or, supposing they had drifted or
+sprung a leak from striking upon the rocks; in any of these
+possible and not at all improbable cases, those who might thus have
+been left upon the rock had now something to lay hold of, and,
+though occupying this dreary habitation of the sea-gull and the
+cormorant, affording only bread and water, yet LIFE, would be
+preserved, and the mind would still be supported by the hope of
+being ultimately relieved.
+
+[Wednesday, 25th May]
+
+On the 25th of May the writer embarked at Arbroath, on board of the
+Sir Joseph Banks, for the Bell Rock, accompanied by Mr. Logan
+senior, foreman builder, with twelve masons and two smiths,
+together with thirteen seamen, including the master, mate, and
+steward.
+
+[Thursday, 26th May]
+
+Mr. James Wilson, now commander of the Pharos, floating light, and
+landing-master, in the room of Mr. Sinclair, who had left the
+service, came into the writer's cabin this morning at six o'clock,
+and intimated that there was a good appearance of landing on the
+rock.  Everything being arranged, both boats proceeded in company,
+and at eight a.m. they reached the rock.  The lighthouse colours
+were immediately hoisted upon the flagstaff of the beacon, a
+compliment which was duly returned by the tender and floating
+light, when three hearty cheers were given, and a glass of rum was
+served out to all hands to drink success to the operations of 1808.
+
+[Friday, 27th May]
+
+This morning the wind was at east, blowing a fresh gale, the
+weather being hazy, with a considerable breach of sea setting in
+upon the rock.  The morning bell was therefore rung, in some doubt
+as to the practicability of making a landing.  After allowing the
+rock to get fully up, or to be sufficiently left by the tide, that
+the boats might have some shelter from the range of the sea, they
+proceeded at 8 a.m., and upon the whole made a pretty good landing;
+and after two hours and three-quarters' work returned to the ship
+in safety.
+
+In the afternoon the wind considerably increased, and, as a pretty
+heavy sea was still running, the tender rode very hard, when Mr.
+Taylor, the commander, found it necessary to take in the bowsprit,
+and strike the fore and main topmasts, that she might ride more
+easily.  After consulting about the state of the weather, it was
+resolved to leave the artificers on board this evening, and carry
+only the smiths to the rock, as the sharpening of the irons was
+rather behind, from their being so much broken and blunted by the
+hard and tough nature of the rock, which became much more compact
+and hard as the depth of excavation was increased.  Besides
+avoiding the risk of encumbering the boats with a number of men who
+had not yet got the full command of the oar in a breach of sea, the
+writer had another motive for leaving them behind.  He wanted to
+examine the site of the building without interruption, and to take
+the comparative levels of the different inequalities of its area;
+and as it would have been painful to have seen men standing idle
+upon the Bell Rock, where all moved with activity, it was judged
+better to leave them on board.  The boats landed at half-past seven
+p.m., and the landing-master, with the seamen, was employed during
+this tide in cutting the seaweeds from the several paths leading to
+the landing-places, to render walking more safe, for, from the
+slippery state of the surface of the rock, many severe tumbles had
+taken place.  In the meantime the writer took the necessary levels,
+and having carefully examined the site of the building and
+considered all its parts, it still appeared to be necessary to
+excavate to the average depth of fourteen inches over the whole
+area of the foundation.
+
+[Saturday, 28th May]
+
+The wind still continued from the eastward with a heavy swell; and
+to-day it was accompanied with foggy weather and occasional showers
+of rain.  Notwithstanding this, such was the confidence which the
+erection of the beacon had inspired that the boats landed the
+artificers on the rock under very unpromising circumstances, at
+half-past eight, and they continued at work till half-past eleven,
+being a period of three hours, which was considered a great tide's
+work in the present low state of the foundation.  Three of the
+masons on board were so afflicted with sea-sickness that they had
+not been able to take any food for almost three days, and they were
+literally assisted into the boats this morning by their companions.
+It was, however, not a little surprising to see how speedily these
+men revived upon landing on the rock and eating a little dulse.
+Two of them afterwards assisted the sailors in collecting the chips
+of stone and carrying them out of the way of the pickmen; but the
+third complained of a pain in his head, and was still unable to do
+anything.  Instead of returning to the tender with the boats, these
+three men remained on the beacon all day, and had their victuals
+sent to them along with the smiths'.  From Mr. Dove, the foreman
+smith, they had much sympathy, for he preferred remaining on the
+beacon at all hazards, to be himself relieved from the malady of
+sea-sickness.  The wind continuing high, with a heavy sea, and the
+tide falling late, it was not judged proper to land the artificers
+this evening, but in the twilight the boats were sent to fetch the
+people on board who had been left on the rock.
+
+[Sunday, 29th May]
+
+The wind was from the S.W. to-day, and the signal-bell rung, as
+usual, about an hour before the period for landing on the rock.
+The writer was rather surprised, however, to hear the landing-
+master repeatedly call, 'All hands for the rock!' and, coming on
+deck, he was disappointed to find the seamen only in the boats.
+Upon inquiry, it appeared that some misunderstanding had taken
+place about the wages of the artificers for Sundays.  They had
+preferred wages for seven days statedly to the former mode of
+allowing a day for each tide's work on Sunday, as they did not like
+the appearance of working for double or even treble wages on
+Sunday, and would rather have it understood that their work on that
+day arose more from the urgency of the case than with a view to
+emolument.  This having been judged creditable to their religious
+feelings, and readily adjusted to their wish, the boats proceeded
+to the rock, and the work commenced at nine a.m.
+
+[Monday, 30th May]
+
+Mr. Francis Watt commenced, with five joiners, to fit up a
+temporary platform upon the beacon, about twenty-five feet above
+the highest part of the rock.  This platform was to be used as the
+site of the smith's forge, after the beacon should be fitted up as
+a barrack; and here also the mortar was to be mixed and prepared
+for the building, and it was accordingly termed the Mortar Gallery.
+
+The landing-master's crew completed the discharging from the
+Smeaton of her cargo of the cast-iron rails and timber.  It must
+not here be omitted to notice that the Smeaton took in ballast from
+the Bell Rock, consisting of the shivers or chips of stone produced
+by the workmen in preparing the site of the building, which were
+now accumulating in great quantities on the rock.  These the boats
+loaded, after discharging the iron.  The object in carrying off
+these chips, besides ballasting the vessel, was to get them
+permanently out of the way, as they were apt to shift about from
+place to place with every gale of wind; and it often required a
+considerable time to clear the foundation a second time of this
+rubbish.  The circumstance of ballasting a ship at the Bell Rock
+afforded great entertainment, especially to the sailors; and it was
+perhaps with truth remarked that the Smeaton was the first vessel
+that had ever taken on board ballast at the Bell Rock.  Mr. Pool,
+the commander of this vessel, afterwards acquainted the writer
+that, when the ballast was landed upon the quay at Leith, many
+persons carried away specimens of it, as part of a cargo from the
+Bell Rock; when he added, that such was the interest excited, from
+the number of specimens carried away, that some of his friends
+suggested that he should have sent the whole to the Cross of
+Edinburgh, where each piece might have sold for a penny.
+
+[Tuesday, 31st May]
+
+In the evening the boats went to the rock, and brought the joiners
+and smiths, and their sickly companions, on board of the tender.
+These also brought with them two baskets full of fish, which they
+had caught at high-water from the beacon, reporting, at the same
+time, to their comrades, that the fish were swimming in such
+numbers over the rock at high-water that it was completely hid from
+their sight, and nothing seen but the movement of thousands of
+fish.  They were almost exclusively of the species called the
+podlie, or young coal-fish.  This discovery, made for the first
+time to-day by the workmen, was considered fortunate, as an
+additional circumstance likely to produce an inclination among the
+artificers to take up their residence in the beacon, when it came
+to be fitted up as a barrack.
+
+[Tuesday, 7th June]
+
+At three o'clock in the morning the ship's bell was rung as the
+signal for landing at the rock.  When the landing was to be made
+before breakfast, it was customary to give each of the artificers
+and seamen a dram and a biscuit, and coffee was prepared by the
+steward for the cabins.  Exactly at four o'clock the whole party
+landed from three boats, including one of those belonging to the
+floating light, with a part of that ship's crew, which always
+attended the works in moderate weather.  The landing-master's boat,
+called the Seaman, but more commonly called the Lifeboat, took the
+lead.  The next boat, called the Mason, was generally steered by
+the writer; while the floating light's boat, Pharos, was under the
+management of the boatswain of that ship.
+
+Having now so considerable a party of workmen and sailors on the
+rock, it may be proper here to notice how their labours were
+directed.  Preparations having been made last month for the
+erection of a second forge upon the beacon, the smiths commenced
+their operations both upon the lower and higher platforms.  They
+were employed in sharpening the picks and irons for the masons, and
+in making bats and other apparatus of various descriptions
+connected with the fitting of the railways.  The landing-master's
+crew were occupied in assisting the millwrights in laying the
+railways to hand.  Sailors, of all other descriptions of men, are
+the most accommodating in the use of their hands.  They worked
+freely with the boring-irons, and assisted in all the operations of
+the railways, acting by turns as boatmen, seamen, and artificers.
+We had no such character on the Bell Rock as the common labourer.
+All the operations of this department were cheerfully undertaken by
+the seamen, who, both on the rock and on shipboard, were the
+inseparable companions of every work connected with the erection of
+the Bell Rock Lighthouse.  It will naturally be supposed that about
+twenty-five masons, occupied with their picks in executing and
+preparing the foundation of the lighthouse, in the course of a tide
+of about three hours, would make a considerable impression upon an
+area even of forty-two feet in diameter.  But in proportion as the
+foundation was deepened, the rock was found to be much more hard
+and difficult to work, while the baling and pumping of water became
+much more troublesome.  A joiner was kept almost constantly
+employed in fitting the picks to their handles, which, as well as
+the points to the irons, were very frequently broken.
+
+The Bell Rock this morning presented by far the most busy and
+active appearance it had exhibited since the erection of the
+principal beams of the beacon.  The surface of the rock was crowded
+with men, the two forges flaming, the one above the other, upon the
+beacon, while the anvils thundered with the rebounding noise of
+their wooden supports, and formed a curious contrast with the
+occasional clamour of the surges.  The wind was westerly, and the
+weather being extremely agreeable, as soon after breakfast as the
+tide had sufficiently overflowed the rock to float the boats over
+it, the smiths, with a number of the artificers, returned to the
+beacon, carrying their fishing-tackle along with them.  In the
+course of the forenoon, the beacon exhibited a still more
+extraordinary appearance than the rock had done in the morning.
+The sea being smooth, it seemed to be afloat upon the water, with a
+number of men supporting themselves in all the variety of attitude
+and position:  while, from the upper part of this wooden house, the
+volumes of smoke which ascended from the forges gave the whole a
+very curious and fanciful appearance.
+
+In the course of this tide it was observed that a heavy swell was
+setting in from the eastward, and the appearance of the sky
+indicated a change of weather, while the wind was shifting about.
+The barometer also had fallen from 30 in. to 29.6.  It was,
+therefore, judged prudent to shift the vessel to the S.W. or more
+distant buoy.  Her bowsprit was also soon afterwards taken in, the
+topmasts struck, and everything made SNUG, as seamen term it, for a
+gale.  During the course of the night the wind increased and
+shifted to the eastward, when the vessel rolled very hard, and the
+sea often broke over her bows with great force.
+
+[Wednesday, 8th June]
+
+Although the motion of the tender was much less than that of the
+floating light--at least, in regard to the rolling motion--yet she
+SENDED, or pitched, much.  Being also of a very handsome build, and
+what seamen term very CLEAN AFT, the sea often struck the counter
+with such force that the writer, who possessed the aftermost cabin,
+being unaccustomed to this new vessel, could not divest himself of
+uneasiness; for when her stern fell into the sea, it struck with so
+much violence as to be more like the resistance of a rock than the
+sea.  The water, at the same time, often rushed with great force up
+the rudder-case, and, forcing up the valve of the water-closet, the
+floor of his cabin was at times laid under water.  The gale
+continued to increase, and the vessel rolled and pitched in such a
+manner that the hawser by which the tender was made fast to the
+buoy snapped, and she went adrift.  In the act of swinging round to
+the wind she shipped a very heavy sea, which greatly alarmed the
+artificers, who imagined that we had got upon the rock; but this,
+from the direction of the wind, was impossible.  The writer,
+however, sprung upon deck, where he found the sailors busily
+employed in rigging out the bowsprit and in setting sail.  From the
+easterly direction of the wind, it was considered most advisable to
+steer for the Firth of Forth, and there wait a change of weather.
+At two p.m. we accordingly passed the Isle of May, at six anchored
+in Leith Roads, and at eight the writer landed, when he came in
+upon his friends, who were not a little surprised at his unexpected
+appearance, which gave an instantaneous alarm for the safety of
+things at the Bell Rock.
+
+[Thursday, 9th June]
+
+The wind still continued to blow very hard at E. by N., and the Sir
+Joseph Banks rode heavily, and even drifted with both anchors
+ahead, in Leith Roads.  The artificers did not attempt to leave the
+ship last night; but there being upwards of fifty people on board,
+and the decks greatly lumbered with the two large boats, they were
+in a very crowded and impatient state on board.  But to-day they
+got ashore, and amused themselves by walking about the streets of
+Edinburgh, some in very humble apparel, from having only the worst
+of their jackets with them, which, though quite suitable for their
+work, were hardly fit for public inspection, being not only
+tattered, but greatly stained with the red colour of the rock.
+
+[Friday, 10th June]
+
+To-day the wind was at S.E., with light breezes and foggy weather.
+At six a.m. the writer again embarked for the Bell Rock, when the
+vessel immediately sailed.  At eleven p.m., there being no wind,
+the kedge-anchor was LET GO off Anstruther, one of the numerous
+towns on the coast of Fife, where we waited the return of the tide.
+
+[Saturday, 11th June]
+
+At six a.m. the Sir Joseph got under weigh, and at eleven was again
+made fast to the southern buoy at the Bell Rock.  Though it was now
+late in the tide, the writer, being anxious to ascertain the state
+of things after the gale, landed with the artificers to the number
+of forty-four.  Everything was found in an entire state; but, as
+the tide was nearly gone, only half an hour's work had been got
+when the site of the building was overflowed.  In the evening the
+boats again landed at nine, and after a good tide's work of three
+hours with torchlight, the work was left off at midnight.  To the
+distant shipping the appearance of things under night on the Bell
+Rock, when the work was going forward, must have been very
+remarkable, especially to those who were strangers to the
+operations.  Mr. John Reid, principal lightkeeper, who also acted
+as master of the floating light during the working months at the
+rock, described the appearance of numerous lights situated so low
+in the water, when seen at the distance of two or three miles, as
+putting him in mind of Milton's description of the fiends in the
+lower regions, adding, 'for it seems greatly to surpass Will-o'-
+the-Wisp, or any of those earthly spectres of which we have so
+often heard.'
+
+[Monday, 13th June]
+
+From the difficulties attending the landing on the rock, owing to
+the breach of sea which had for days past been around it, the
+artificers showed some backwardness at getting into the boats this
+morning; but after a little explanation this was got over.  It was
+always observable that for some time after anything like danger had
+occurred at the rock, the workmen became much more cautious, and on
+some occasions their timidity was rather troublesome.  It
+fortunately happened, however, that along with the writer's
+assistants and the sailors there were also some of the artificers
+themselves who felt no such scruples, and in this way these
+difficulties were the more easily surmounted.  In matters where
+life is in danger it becomes necessary to treat even unfounded
+prejudices with tenderness, as an accident, under certain
+circumstances, would not only have been particularly painful to
+those giving directions, but have proved highly detrimental to the
+work, especially in the early stages of its advancement.
+
+At four o'clock fifty-eight persons landed; but the tides being
+extremely languid, the water only left the higher parts of the
+rock, and no work could be done at the site of the building.  A
+third forge was, however, put in operation during a short time, for
+the greater conveniency of sharpening the picks and irons, and for
+purposes connected with the preparations for fixing the railways on
+the rock.  The weather towards the evening became thick and foggy,
+and there was hardly a breath of wind to ruffle the surface of the
+water.  Had it not, therefore, been for the noise from the anvils
+of the smiths who had been left on the beacon throughout the day,
+which afforded a guide for the boats, a landing could not have been
+attempted this evening, especially with such a company of
+artificers.  This circumstance confirmed the writer's opinion with
+regard to the propriety of connecting large bells to be rung with
+machinery in the lighthouse, to be tolled day and night during the
+continuance of foggy weather.
+
+[Thursday, 23rd June]
+
+The boats landed this evening, when the artificers had again two
+hours' work.  The weather still continuing very thick and foggy,
+more difficulty was experienced in getting on board of the vessels
+to-night than had occurred on any previous occasion, owing to a
+light breeze of wind which carried the sound of the bell, and the
+other signals made on board of the vessels, away from the rock.
+Having fortunately made out the position of the sloop Smeaton at
+the N.E. buoy--to which we were much assisted by the barking of the
+ship's dog,--we parted with the Smeaton's boat, when the boats of
+the tender took a fresh departure for that vessel, which lay about
+half a mile to the south-westward.  Yet such is the very deceiving
+state of the tides, that, although there was a small binnacle and
+compass in the landing-master's boat, we had, nevertheless, passed
+the Sir Joseph a good way, when, fortunately, one of the sailors
+catched the sound of a blowing-horn.  The only fire-arms on board
+were a pair of swivels of one-inch calibre; but it is quite
+surprising how much the sound is lost in foggy weather, as the
+report was heard but at a very short distance.  The sound from the
+explosion of gunpowder is so instantaneous that the effect of the
+small guns was not so good as either the blowing of a horn or the
+tolling of a bell, which afforded a more constant and steady
+direction for the pilot.
+
+[Wednesday, 6th July]
+
+Landed on the rock with the three boats belonging to the tender at
+five p.m., and began immediately to bale the water out of the
+foundation-pit with a number of buckets, while the pumps were also
+kept in action with relays of artificers and seamen.  The work
+commenced upon the higher parts of the foundation as the water left
+them, but it was now pretty generally reduced to a level.  About
+twenty men could be conveniently employed at each pump, and it is
+quite astonishing in how short a time so great a body of water
+could be drawn off.  The water in the foundation-pit at this time
+measured about two feet in depth, on an area of forty-two feet in
+diameter, and yet it was drawn off in the course of about half an
+hour.  After this the artificers commenced with their picks and
+continued at work for two hours and a half, some of the sailors
+being at the same time busily employed in clearing the foundation
+of chips and in conveying the irons to and from the smiths on the
+beacon, where they were sharped.  At eight o'clock the sea broke in
+upon us and overflowed the foundation-pit, when the boats returned
+to the tender.
+
+[Thursday, 7th July]
+
+The landing-master's bell rung this morning about four o'clock, and
+at half-past five, the foundation being cleared, the work commenced
+on the site of the building.  But from the moment of landing, the
+squad of joiners and millwrights was at work upon the higher parts
+of the rock in laying the railways, while the anvils of the smith
+resounded on the beacon, and such columns of smoke ascended from
+the forges that they were often mistaken by strangers at a distance
+for a ship on fire.  After continuing three hours at work the
+foundation of the building was again overflowed, and the boats
+returned to the ship at half-past eight o'clock. the masons and
+pickmen had, at this period, a pretty long day on board of the
+tender, but the smiths and joiners were kept constantly at work
+upon the beacon, the stability and great conveniency of which had
+now been so fully shown that no doubt remained as to the propriety
+of fitting it up as a barrack.  The workmen were accordingly
+employed, during the period of high-water, in making preparations
+for this purpose.
+
+The foundation-pit now assumed the appearance of a great platform,
+and the late tides had been so favourable that it became apparent
+that the first course, consisting of a few irregular and detached
+stones for making up certain inequalities in the interior parts of
+the site of the building, might be laid in the course of the
+present spring-tides.  Having been enabled to-day to get the
+dimensions of the foundation, or first stone, accurately taken, a
+mould was made of its figure, when the writer left the rock, after
+the tide's work of this morning, in a fast rowing-boat for
+Arbroath; and, upon landing, two men were immediately set to work
+upon one of the blocks from Mylnefield quarry, which was prepared
+in the course of the following day, as the stone-cutters relieved
+each other, and worked both night and day, so that it was sent off
+in one of the stone-lighters without delay.
+
+[Saturday, 9th July]
+
+The site of the foundation-stone was very difficult to work, from
+its depth in the rock; but being now nearly prepared, it formed a
+very agreeable kind of pastime at high-water for all hands to land
+the stone itself upon the rock.  The landing-master's crew and
+artificers accordingly entered with great spirit into this
+operation.  The stone was placed upon the deck of the Hedderwick
+praam-boat, which had just been brought from Leith, and was
+decorated with colours for the occasion.  Flags were also displayed
+from the shipping in the offing, and upon the beacon.  Here the
+writer took his station with the greater part of the artificers,
+who supported themselves in every possible position while the boats
+towed the praam from her moorings and brought her immediately over
+the site of the building, where her grappling anchors were let go.
+The stone was then lifted off the deck by a tackle hooked into a
+Lewis bat inserted into it, when it was gently lowered into the
+water and grounded on the site of the building, amidst the cheering
+acclamations of about sixty persons.
+
+[Sunday, 10th July]
+
+At eleven o'clock the foundation-stone was laid to hand.  It was of
+a square form, containing about twenty cubic feet, and had the
+figures, or date, of 1808 simply cut upon it with a chisel.  A
+derrick, or spar of timber, having been erected at the edge of the
+hole and guyed with ropes, the stone was then hooked to the tackle
+and lowered into its place, when the writer, attended by his
+assistants--Mr. Peter Logan, Mr. Francis Watt, and Mr. James
+Wilson,--applied the square, the level, and the mallet, and
+pronounced the following benediction:  'May the great Architect of
+the Universe complete and bless this building,' on which three
+hearty cheers were given, and success to the future operations was
+drunk with the greatest enthusiasm.
+
+[Tuesday, 26th July]
+
+The wind being at S.E. this evening, we had a pretty heavy swell of
+sea upon the rock, and some difficulty attended our getting off in
+safety, as the boats got aground in the creek and were in danger of
+being upset.  Upon extinguishing the torchlights, about twelve in
+number, the darkness of the night seemed quite horrible; the water
+being also much charged with the phosphorescent appearance which is
+familiar to every one on shipboard, the waves, as they dashed upon
+the rock, were in some degree like so much liquid flame.  The
+scene, upon the whole, was truly awful!
+
+[Wednesday, 27th July]
+
+In leaving the rock this evening everything, after the torches were
+extinguished, had the same dismal appearance as last night, but so
+perfectly acquainted were the landing-master and his crew with the
+position of things at the rock, that comparatively little
+inconveniency was experienced on these occasions when the weather
+was moderate; such is the effect of habit, even in the most
+unpleasant situations.  If, for example, it had been proposed to a
+person accustomed to a city life, at once to take up his quarters
+off a sunken reef and land upon it in boats at all hours of the
+night, the proposition must have appeared quite impracticable and
+extravagant; but this practice coming progressively upon the
+artificers, it was ultimately undertaken with the greatest
+alacrity.  Notwithstanding this, however, it must be acknowledged
+that it was not till after much labour and peril, and many an
+anxious hour, that the writer is enabled to state that the site of
+the Bell Rock Lighthouse is fully prepared for the first entire
+course of the building.
+
+[Friday, 12th Aug.]
+
+The artificers landed this morning at half-past ten, and after an
+hour and a half's work eight stones were laid, which completed the
+first entire course of the building, consisting of 123 blocks, the
+last of which was laid with three hearty cheers.
+
+[Saturday, 10th Sept.]
+
+Landed at nine a.m., and by a quarter-past twelve noon twenty-three
+stones had been laid.  The works being now somewhat elevated by the
+lower courses, we got quit of the very serious inconvenience of
+pumping water to clear the foundation-pit.  This gave much facility
+to the operations, and was noticed with expressions of as much
+happiness by the artificers as the seamen had shown when relieved
+of the continual trouble of carrying the smith's bellows off the
+rock prior to the erection of the beacon.
+
+[Wednesday, 21st Sept.]
+
+Mr. Thomas Macurich, mate of the Smeaton, and James Scott, one of
+the crew, a young man about eighteen years of age, immediately went
+into their boat to make fast a hawser to the ring in the top of the
+floating buoy of the moorings, and were forthwith to proceed to
+land their cargo, so much wanted, at the rock.  The tides at this
+period were very strong, and the mooring-chain, when sweeping the
+ground, had caught hold of a rock or piece of wreck by which the
+chain was so shortened that when the tide flowed the buoy got
+almost under water, and little more than the ring appeared at the
+surface.  When Macurich and Scott were in the act of making the
+hawser fast to the ring, the chain got suddenly disentangled at the
+bottom, and this large buoy, measuring about seven feet in height
+and three feet in diameter at the middle, tapering to both ends,
+being what seamen term a Nun-buoy, vaulted or sprung up with such
+force that it upset the boat, which instantly filled with water.
+Mr. Macurich, with much exertion, succeeded in getting hold of the
+boat's gunwale, still above the surface of the water, and by this
+means was saved; but the young man Scott was unfortunately drowned.
+He had in all probability been struck about the head by the ring of
+the buoy, for although surrounded with the oars and the thwarts of
+the boat which floated near him, yet he seemed entirely to want the
+power of availing himself of such assistance, and appeared to be
+quite insensible, while Pool, the master of the Smeaton, called
+loudly to him; and before assistance could be got from the tender,
+he was carried away by the strength of the current and disappeared.
+
+The young man Scott was a great favourite in the service, having
+had something uncommonly mild and complaisant in his manner; and
+his loss was therefore universally regretted.  The circumstances of
+his case were also peculiarly distressing to his mother, as her
+husband, who was a seaman, had for three years past been confined
+to a French prison, and the deceased was the chief support of the
+family.  In order in some measure to make up the loss to the poor
+woman for the monthly aliment regularly allowed her by her late
+son, it was suggested that a younger boy, a brother of the
+deceased, might be taken into the service.  This appeared to be
+rather a delicate proposition, but it was left to the landing-
+master to arrange according to circumstances; such was the
+resignation, and at the same time the spirit, of the poor woman,
+that she readily accepted the proposal, and in a few days the
+younger Scott was actually afloat in the place of his brother.  On
+representing this distressing case to the Board, the Commissioners
+were pleased to grant an annuity of 5 pounds to Scott's mother.
+
+The Smeaton, not having been made fast to the buoy, had, with the
+ebb-tide, drifted to leeward a considerable way eastward of the
+rock, and could not, till the return of the flood-tide, be worked
+up to her moorings, so that the present tide was lost,
+notwithstanding all exertions which had been made both ashore and
+afloat with this cargo.  The artificers landed at six a.m.; but, as
+no materials could be got upon the rock this morning, they were
+employed in boring trenail holes and in various other operations,
+and after four hours' work they returned on board the tender.  When
+the Smeaton got up to her moorings, the landing-master's crew
+immediately began to unload her.  There being too much wind for
+towing the praams in the usual way, they were warped to the rock in
+the most laborious manner by their windlasses, with successive
+grapplings and hawsers laid out for this purpose.  At six p.m. the
+artificers landed, and continued at work till half-past ten, when
+the remaining seventeen stones were laid which completed the third
+entire course, or fourth of the lighthouse, with which the building
+operations were closed for the season.
+
+
+III--OPERATIONS OF 1809
+
+
+[Wednesday, 24th May]
+
+The last night was the first that the writer, had passed in his old
+quarters on board of the floating light for about twelve months,
+when the weather was so fine and the sea so smooth that even here
+he felt but little or no motion, excepting at the turn of the tide,
+when the vessel gets into what the seamen term the TROUGH OF THE
+SEA.  At six a.m. Mr. Watt, who conducted the operations of the
+railways and beacon-house, had landed with nine artificers.  At
+half-past one p.m. Mr. Peter Logan had also landed with fifteen
+masons, and immediately proceeded to set up the crane.  The sheer-
+crane or apparatus for lifting the stones out of the praam-boats at
+the eastern creek had been already erected, and the railways now
+formed about two-thirds of an entire circle round the building:
+some progress had likewise been made with the reach towards the
+western landing-place.  The floors being laid, the beacon now
+assumed the appearance of a habitation.  The Smeaton was at her
+moorings, with the Fernie praam-boat astern, for which she was
+laying down moorings, and the tender being also at her station, the
+Bell Rock had again put on its former busy aspect.
+
+[Wednesday, 31st May]
+
+The landing-master's bell, often no very favourite sound, rung at
+six this morning; but on this occasion, it is believed, it was
+gladly received by all on board, as the welcome signal of the
+return of better weather.  The masons laid thirteen stones to-day,
+which the seamen had landed, together with other building
+materials.  During these twenty-four hours the wind was from the
+south, blowing fresh breezes, accompanied with showers of snow.  In
+the morning the snow showers were so thick that it was with
+difficulty the landing-master, who always steered the leading boat,
+could make his way to the rock through the drift.  But at the Bell
+Rock neither snow nor rain, nor fog nor wind, retarded the progress
+of the work, if unaccompanied by a heavy swell or breach of the
+sea.
+
+The weather during the months of April and May had been uncommonly
+boisterous, and so cold that the thermometer seldom exceeded 40
+degrees, while the barometer was generally about 29.50.  We had not
+only hail and sleet, but the snow on the last day of May lay on the
+decks and rigging of the ship to the depth of about three inches;
+and, although now entering upon the month of June, the length of
+the day was the chief indication of summer.  Yet such is the effect
+of habit, and such was the expertness of the landing-master's crew,
+that, even in this description of weather, seldom a tide's work was
+lost.  Such was the ardour and zeal of the heads of the several
+departments at the rock, including Mr. Peter Logan, foreman
+builder, Mr. Francis Watt, foreman millwright, and Captain Wilson,
+landing-master, that it was on no occasion necessary to address
+them, excepting in the way of precaution or restraint.  Under these
+circumstances, however, the writer not unfrequently felt
+considerable anxiety, of which this day's experience will afford an
+example.
+
+[Thursday, 1st June]
+
+This morning, at a quarter-past eight, the artificers were landed
+as usual, and, after three hours and three-quarters' work, five
+stones were laid, the greater part of this tide having been taken
+up in completing the boring and trenailing of the stones formerly
+laid.  At noon the writer, with the seamen and artificers,
+proceeded to the tender, leaving on the beacon the joiners, and
+several of those who were troubled with sea-sickness--among whom
+was Mr. Logan, who remained with Mr. Watt--counting altogether
+eleven persons.  During the first and middle parts of these twenty-
+four hours the wind was from the east, blowing what the seamen term
+'fresh breezes'; but in the afternoon it shifted to E.N.E.,
+accompanied with so heavy a swell of sea that the Smeaton and
+tender struck their topmasts, launched in their bolt-sprits, and
+'made all snug' for a gale.  At four p.m. the Smeaton was obliged
+to slip her moorings, and passed the tender, drifting before the
+wind, with only the foresail set.  In passing, Mr. Pool hailed that
+he must run for the Firth of Forth to prevent the vessel from
+'riding under.'
+
+On board of the tender the writer's chief concern was about the
+eleven men left upon the beacon.  Directions were accordingly given
+that everything about the vessel should be put in the best possible
+state, to present as little resistance to the wind as possible,
+that she might have the better chance of riding out the gale.
+Among these preparations the best bower cable was bent, so as to
+have a second anchor in readiness in case the mooring-hawser should
+give way, that every means might be used for keeping the vessel
+within sight of the prisoners on the beacon, and thereby keep them
+in as good spirits as possible.  From the same motive the boats
+were kept afloat that they might be less in fear of the vessel
+leaving her station.  The landing-master had, however, repeatedly
+expressed his anxiety for the safety of the boats, and wished much
+to have them hoisted on board.  At seven p.m. one of the boats, as
+he feared, was unluckily filled with sea from a wave breaking into
+her, and it was with great difficulty that she could be baled out
+and got on board, with the loss of her oars, rudder, and loose
+thwarts.  Such was the motion of the ship that in taking this boat
+on board her gunwale was stove in, and she otherwise received
+considerable damage.  Night approached, but it was still found
+quite impossible to go near the rock.  Consulting, therefore, the
+safety of the second boat, she also was hoisted on board of the
+tender.
+
+At this time the cabins of the beacon were only partially covered,
+and had neither been provided with bedding nor a proper fireplace,
+while the stock of provisions was but slender.  In these
+uncomfortable circumstances the people on the beacon were left for
+the night, nor was the situation of those on board of the tender
+much better.  The rolling and pitching motion of the ship was
+excessive; and, excepting to those who had been accustomed to a
+residence in the floating light, it seemed quite intolerable.
+Nothing was heard but the hissing of the winds and the creaking of
+the bulkheads or partitions of the ship; the night was, therefore,
+spent in the most unpleasant reflections upon the condition of the
+people on the beacon, especially in the prospect of the tender
+being driven from her moorings.  But, even in such a case, it
+afforded some consolation that the stability of the fabric was
+never doubted, and that the boats of the floating light were at no
+great distance, and ready to render the people on the rock the
+earliest assistance which the weather would permit.  The writer's
+cabin being in the sternmost part of the ship, which had what
+sailors term a good entry, or was sharp built, the sea, as before
+noticed, struck her counter with so much violence that the water,
+with a rushing noise, continually forced its way up the rudder-
+case, lifted the valve of the water-closet, and overran the cabin
+floor.  In these circumstances daylight was eagerly looked for, and
+hailed with delight, as well by those afloat as by the artificers
+upon the rock.
+
+[Friday, 2nd June]
+
+In the course of the night the writer held repeated conversations
+with the officer on watch, who reported that the weather continued
+much in the same state, and that the barometer still indicated
+29.20 inches.  At six a.m. the landing-master considered the
+weather to have somewhat moderated; and, from certain appearances
+of the sky, he was of opinion that a change for the better would
+soon take place.  He accordingly proposed to attempt a landing at
+low-water, and either get the people off the rock, or at least
+ascertain what state they were in.  At nine a.m. he left the vessel
+with a boat well manned, carrying with him a supply of cooked
+provisions and a tea-kettle full of mulled port wine for the people
+on the beacon, who had not had any regular diet for about thirty
+hours, while they were exposed during that period, in a great
+measure, both to the winds and the sprays of the sea.  The boat
+having succeeded in landing, she returned at eleven a.m. with the
+artificers, who had got off with considerable difficulty, and who
+were heartily welcomed by all on board.
+
+Upon inquiry it appeared that three of the stones last laid upon
+the building had been partially lifted from their beds by the force
+of the sea, and were now held only by the trenails, and that the
+cast-iron sheer-crane had again been thrown down and completely
+broken.  With regard to the beacon, the sea at high-water had
+lifted part of the mortar gallery or lowest floor, and washed away
+all the lime-casks and other movable articles from it; but the
+principal parts of this fabric had sustained no damage.  On
+pressing Messrs. Logan and Watt on the situation of things in the
+course of the night, Mr. Logan emphatically said:  'That the beacon
+had an ILL-FAURED {171a} TWIST when the sea broke upon it at high-
+water, but that they were not very apprehensive of danger.'  On
+inquiring as to how they spent the night, it appeared that they had
+made shift to keep a small fire burning, and by means of some old
+sails defended themselves pretty well from the sea sprays.
+
+It was particularly mentioned that by the exertions of James Glen,
+one of the joiners, a number of articles were saved from being
+washed off the mortar gallery.  Glen was also very useful in
+keeping up the spirits of the forlorn party.  In the early part of
+life he had undergone many curious adventures at sea, which he now
+recounted somewhat after the manner of the tales of the Arabian
+Nights.  When one observed that the beacon was a most comfortless
+lodging, Glen would presently introduce some of his exploits and
+hardships, in comparison with which the state of things at the
+beacon bore an aspect of comfort and happiness.  Looking to their
+slender stock of provisions, and their perilous and uncertain
+chance of speedy relief, he would launch out into an account of one
+of his expeditions in the North Sea, when the vessel, being much
+disabled in a storm, was driven before the wind with the loss of
+almost all their provisions; and the ship being much infested with
+rats, the crew hunted these vermin with great eagerness to help
+their scanty allowance.  By such means Glen had the address to make
+his companions, in some measure, satisfied, or at least passive,
+with regard to their miserable prospects upon this half-tide rock
+in the middle of the ocean.  This incident is noticed, more
+particularly, to show the effects of such a happy turn of mind,
+even under the most distressing and ill-fated circumstances.
+
+[Saturday, 17th June]
+
+At eight a.m. the artificers and sailors, forty-five in number,
+landed on the rock, and after four hours' work seven stones were
+laid.  The remainder of this tide, from the threatening appearance
+of the weather, was occupied in trenailing and making all things as
+secure as possible.  At twelve noon the rock and building were
+again overflowed, when the masons and seamen went on board of the
+tender, but Mr. Watt, with his squad of ten men, remained on the
+beacon throughout the day.  As it blew fresh from the N.W. in the
+evening, it was found impracticable either to land the building
+artificers or to take the artificers off the beacon, and they were
+accordingly left there all night, but in circumstances very
+different from those of the 1st of this month.  The house, being
+now in a more complete state, was provided with bedding, and they
+spent the night pretty well, though they complained of having been
+much disturbed at the time of high-water by the shaking and
+tremulous motion of their house and by the plashing noise of the
+sea upon mortar gallery.  Here James Glen's versatile powers were
+again at work in cheering up those who seemed to be alarmed, and in
+securing everything as far as possible.  On this occasion he had
+only to recall to the recollections of some of them the former
+night which they had spent on the beacon, the wind and sea being
+then much higher, and their habitation in a far less comfortable
+state.
+
+The wind still continuing to blow fresh from the N.W., at five p.m.
+the writer caused a signal to be made from the tender for the
+Smeaton and Patriot to slip their moorings, when they ran for Lunan
+Bay, an anchorage on the east side of the Redhead.  Those on board
+of the tender spent but a very rough night, and perhaps slept less
+soundly than their companions on the beacon, especially as the wind
+was at N.W., which caused the vessel to ride with her stern towards
+the Bell Rock; so that, in the event of anything giving way, she
+could hardly have escaped being stranded upon it.
+
+[Sunday, 18th June]
+
+The weather having moderated to-day, the wind shifted to the
+westward.  At a quarter-past nine a.m. the artificers landed from
+the tender and had the pleasure to find their friends who had been
+left on the rock quite hearty, alleging that the beacon was the
+preferable quarters of the two.
+
+[Saturday, 24th June]
+
+Mr. Peter Logan, the foreman builder, and his squad, twenty-one in
+number, landed this morning at three o'clock, and continued at work
+four hours and a quarter, and after laying seventeen stones
+returned to the tender.  At six a.m. Mr. Francis Watt and his squad
+of twelve men landed, and proceeded with their respective
+operations at the beacon and railways, and were left on the rock
+during the whole day without the necessity of having any
+communication with the tender, the kitchen of the beacon-house
+being now fitted up.  It was to-day, also, that Peter Fortune--a
+most obliging and well-known character in the Lighthouse service--
+was removed from the tender to the beacon as cook and steward, with
+a stock of provisions as ample as his limited store-room would
+admit.
+
+When as many stones were built as comprised this day's work, the
+demand for mortar was proportionally increased, and the task of the
+mortar-makers on these occasions was both laborious and severe.
+This operation was chiefly performed by John Watt--a strong, active
+quarrier by profession,--who was a perfect character in his way,
+and extremely zealous in his department.  While the operations of
+the mortar-makers continued, the forge upon the gallery was not
+generally in use; but, as the working hours of the builders
+extended with the height of the building, the forge could not be so
+long wanted, and then a sad confusion often ensued upon the
+circumscribed floor of the mortar gallery, as the operations of
+Watt and his assistants trenched greatly upon those of the smiths.
+Under these circumstances the boundary of the smiths was much
+circumscribed, and they were personally annoyed, especially in
+blowy weather, with the dust of the lime in its powdered state.
+The mortar-makers, on the other hand, were often not a little
+distressed with the heat of the fire and the sparks elicited on the
+anvil, and not unaptly complained that they were placed between the
+'devil and the deep sea.'
+
+[Sunday, 25th June]
+
+The work being now about ten feet in height, admitted of a rope-
+ladder being distended {174a} between the beacon and the building.
+By this 'Jacob's Ladder,' as the seamen termed it, a communication
+was kept up with the beacon while the rock was considerably under
+water.  One end of it being furnished with tackle-blocks, was fixed
+to the beams of the beacon, at the level of the mortar gallery,
+while the further end was connected with the upper course of the
+building by means of two Lewis bats which were lifted from course
+to course as the work advanced.  In the same manner a rope
+furnished with a travelling pulley was distended for the purpose of
+transporting the mortar-buckets, and other light articles between
+the beacon and the building, which also proved a great conveniency
+to the work.  At this period the rope-ladder and tackle for the
+mortar had a descent from the beacon to the building; by and by
+they were on a level, and towards the end of the season, when the
+solid part had attained its full height, the ascent was from the
+mortar gallery to the building.
+
+[Friday, 30th June]
+
+The artificers landed on the rock this morning at a quarter-past
+six, and remained at work five hours.  The cooking apparatus being
+now in full operation, all hands had breakfast on the beacon at the
+usual hour, and remained there throughout the day.  The crane upon
+the building had to be raised to-day from the eighth to the ninth
+course, an operation which now required all the strength that could
+be mustered for working the guy-tackles; for as the top of the
+crane was at this time about thirty-five feet above the rock, it
+became much more unmanageable.  While the beam was in the act of
+swinging round from one guy to another, a great strain was suddenly
+brought upon the opposite tackle, with the end of which the
+artificers had very improperly neglected to take a turn round some
+stationary object, which would have given them the complete command
+of the tackle.  Owing to this simple omission, the crane got a
+preponderancy to one side, and fell upon the building with a
+terrible crash.  The surrounding artificers immediately flew in
+every direction to get out of its way; but Michael Wishart, the
+principal builder, having unluckily stumbled upon one of the uncut
+trenails, fell upon his back.  His body fortunately got between the
+movable beam and the upright shaft of the crane, and was thus
+saved; but his feet got entangled with the wheels of the crane and
+were severely injured.  Wishart, being a robust young man, endured
+his misfortune with wonderful firmness; he was laid upon one of the
+narrow framed beds of the beacon and despatched in a boat to the
+tender, where the writer was when this accident happened, not a
+little alarmed on missing the crane from the top of the building,
+and at the same time seeing a boat rowing towards the vessel with
+great speed.  When the boat came alongside with poor Wishart,
+stretched upon a bed covered with blankets, a moment of great
+anxiety followed, which was, however, much relieved when, on
+stepping into the boat, he was accosted by Wishart, though in a
+feeble voice, and with an aspect pale as death from excessive
+bleeding.  Directions having been immediately given to the coxswain
+to apply to Mr. Kennedy at the workyard to procure the best
+surgical aid, the boat was sent off without delay to Arbroath.  The
+writer then landed at the rock, when the crane was in a very short
+time got into its place and again put in a working state.
+
+[Monday, 3rd July]
+
+The writer having come to Arbroath with the yacht, had an
+opportunity of visiting Michael Wishart, the artificer who had met
+with so severe an accident at the rock on the 30th ult., and had
+the pleasure to find him in a state of recovery.  From Dr.
+Stevenson's account, under whose charge he had been placed, hopes
+were entertained that amputation would not be necessary, as his
+patient still kept free of fever or any appearance of
+mortification; and Wishart expressed a hope that he might, at
+least, be ultimately capable of keeping the light at the Bell Rock,
+as it was not now likely that he would assist further in building
+the house.
+
+[Saturday, 8th July]
+
+It was remarked to-day, with no small demonstration of joy, that
+the tide, being neap, did not, for the first time, overflow the
+building at high-water.  Flags were accordingly hoisted on the
+beacon-house, and crane on the top of the building, which were
+repeated from the floating light, Lighthouse yacht, tender,
+Smeaton, Patriot, and the two praams.  A salute of three guns was
+also fired from the yacht at high-water, when, all the artificers
+being collected on the top of the building, three cheers were given
+in testimony of this important circumstance.  A glass of rum was
+then served out to all hands on the rock and on board of the
+respective ships.
+
+[Sunday, 16th July]
+
+Besides laying, boring, trenailing, wedging, and grouting thirty-
+two stones, several other operations were proceeded with on the
+rock at low-water, when some of the artificers were employed at the
+railways, and at high-water at the beacon-house.  The seamen having
+prepared a quantity of tarpaulin, or cloth laid over with
+successive coats of hot tar, the joiners had just completed the
+covering of the roof with it.  This sort of covering was lighter
+and more easily managed than sheet-lead in such a situation.  As a
+further defence against the weather the whole exterior of this
+temporary residence was painted with three coats of white-lead
+paint.  Between the timber framing of the habitable part of the
+beacon the interstices were to be stuffed with moss, as a light
+substance that would resist dampness and check sifting winds; the
+whole interior was then to be lined with green baize cloth, so that
+both without and within the cabins were to have a very comfortable
+appearance.
+
+Although the building artificers generally remained on the rock
+throughout the day, and the millwrights, joiners, and smiths, while
+their number was considerable, remained also during the night, yet
+the tender had hitherto been considered as their night quarters.
+But the wind having in the course of the day shifted to the N.W.,
+and as the passage to the tender, in the boats, was likely to be
+attended with difficulty, the whole of the artificers, with Mr.
+Logan, the foreman, preferred remaining all night on the beacon,
+which had of late become the solitary abode of George-Forsyth, a
+jobbing upholsterer, who had been employed in lining the beacon-
+house with cloth and in fitting up the bedding.  Forsyth was a
+tall, thin, and rather loose-made man, who had an utter aversion at
+climbing upon the trap-ladders of the beacon, but especially at the
+process of boating, and the motion of the ship, which he said 'was
+death itself.'  He therefore pertinaciously insisted with the
+landing-master in being left upon the beacon, with a small black
+dog as his only companion.  The writer, however, felt some delicacy
+in leaving a single individual upon the rock, who must have been so
+very helpless in case of accident.  This fabric had, from the
+beginning, been rather intended by the writer to guard against
+accident from the loss or damage of a boat, and as a place for
+making mortar, a smith's shop, and a store for tools during the
+working months, than as permanent quarters; nor was it at all meant
+to be possessed until tile joiner-work was completely finished, and
+his own cabin, and that for the foreman, in readiness, when it was
+still to be left to the choice of the artificers to occupy the
+tender or the beacon.  He, however, considered Forsyth's partiality
+and confidence in the latter as rather a fortunate occurrence.
+
+[Wednesday, 19th July]
+
+The whole of the artificers, twenty-three in number, now removed of
+their own accord from the tender, to lodge in the beacon, together
+with Peter Fortune, a person singularly adapted for a residence of
+this kind, both from the urbanity of his manners and the
+versatility of his talents.  Fortune, in his person, was of small
+stature, and rather corpulent.  Besides being a good Scots cook, he
+had acted both as groom and house-servant; he had been a soldier, a
+sutler, a writer's clerk, and an apothecary, from which he
+possessed the art of writing and suggesting recipes, and had hence,
+also, perhaps, acquired a turn for making collections in natural
+history.  But in his practice in surgery on the Bell Rock, for
+which he received an annual fee of three guineas, he is supposed to
+have been rather partial to the use of the lancet.  In short, Peter
+was the factotum of the beacon-house, where he ostensibly acted in
+the several capacities of cook, steward, surgeon, and barber, and
+kept a statement of the rations or expenditure of the provisions
+with the strictest integrity.
+
+In the present important state of the building, when it had just
+attained the height of sixteen feet, and the upper courses, and
+especially the imperfect one, were in the wash of the heaviest
+seas, an express boat arrived at the rock with a letter from Mr.
+Kennedy, of the workyard, stating that in consequence of the
+intended expedition to Walcheren, an embargo had been laid on
+shipping at all the ports of Great Britain:  that both the Smeaton
+and Patriot were detained at Arbroath, and that but for the proper
+view which Mr. Ramsey, the port officer, had taken of his orders,
+neither the express boat nor one which had been sent with
+provisions and necessaries for the floating light would have been
+permitted to leave the harbour.  The writer set off without delay
+for Arbroath, and on landing used every possible means with the
+official people, but their orders were deemed so peremptory that
+even boats were not permitted to sail from any port upon the coast.
+In the meantime, the collector of the Customs at Montrose applied
+to the Board at Edinburgh, but could, of himself, grant no relief
+to the Bell Rock shipping.
+
+At this critical period Mr. Adam Duff, then Sheriff of Forfarshire,
+now of the county of Edinburgh, and ex officio one of the
+Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouses, happened to be at
+Arbroath.  Mr. Duff took an immediate interest in representing the
+circumstances of the case to the Board of Customs at Edinburgh.
+But such were the doubts entertained on the subject that, on having
+previously received the appeal from the collector at Montrose, the
+case had been submitted to the consideration of the Lords of the
+Treasury, whose decision was now waited for.
+
+In this state of things the writer felt particularly desirous to
+get the thirteenth course finished, that the building might be in a
+more secure state in the event of bad weather.  An opportunity was
+therefore embraced on the 25th, in sailing with provisions for the
+floating light, to carry the necessary stones to the rock for this
+purpose, which were landed and built on the 26th and 27th.  But so
+closely was the watch kept up that a Custom-house officer was
+always placed on board of the Smeaton and Patriot while they were
+afloat, till the embargo was especially removed from the lighthouse
+vessels.  The artificers at the Bell Rock had been reduced to
+fifteen, who were regularly supplied with provisions, along with
+the crew of the floating light, mainly through the port officer's
+liberal interpretation of his orders.
+
+[Tuesday, 1st Aug.]
+
+There being a considerable swell and breach of sea upon the rock
+yesterday, the stones could not be got landed till the day
+following, when the wind shifted to the southward and the weather
+improved.  But to-day no less than seventy-eight blocks of stone
+were landed, of which forty were built, which completed the
+fourteenth and part of the fifteenth courses.  The number of
+workmen now resident in the beacon-house was augmented to twenty-
+four, including the landing-master's crew from the tender and the
+boat's crew from the floating light, who assisted at landing the
+stones.  Those daily at work upon the rock at this period amounted
+to forty-six.  A cabin had been laid out for the writer on the
+beacon, but his apartment had been the last which was finished, and
+he had not yet taken possession of it; for though he generally
+spent the greater part of the day, at this time, upon the rock, yet
+he always slept on board of the tender.
+
+[Friday, 11th Aug.]
+
+The wind was at S. E. on the 11th, and there was so very heavy a
+swell of sea upon the rock that no boat could approach it.
+
+[Saturday, 12th Aug.]
+
+The gale still continuing from the S.E., the sea broke with great
+violence both upon the building and the beacon.  The former being
+twenty-three feet in height, the upper part of the crane erected on
+it having been lifted from course to course as the building
+advanced, was now about thirty-six feet above the rock.  From
+observations made on the rise of the sea by this crane, the
+artificers were enabled to estimate its height to be about fifty
+feet above the rock, while the sprays fell with a most alarming
+noise upon their cabins.  At low-water, in the evening, a signal
+was made from the beacon, at the earnest desire of some of the
+artificers, for the boats to come to the rock; and although this
+could not be effected without considerable hazard, it was, however,
+accomplished, when twelve of their number, being much afraid,
+applied to the foreman to be relieved, and went on board of the
+tender.  But the remaining fourteen continued on the rock, with Mr.
+Peter Logan, the foreman builder.  Although this rule of allowing
+an option to every man either to remain on the rock or return to
+the tender was strictly adhered to, yet, as it would have been
+extremely inconvenient to have the men parcelled out in this
+manner, it became necessary to embrace the first opportunity of
+sending those who had left the beacon to the workyard, with as
+little appearance of intention as possible, lest it should hurt
+their feelings, or prevent others from acting according to their
+wishes, either in landing on the rock or remaining on the beacon.
+
+[Tuesday, 15th Aug.]
+
+The wind had fortunately shifted to the S.W. this morning, and
+though a considerable breach was still upon the rock, yet the
+landing-master's crew were enabled to get one praam-boat, lightly
+loaded with five stones, brought in safety to the western creek;
+these stones were immediately laid by the artificers, who gladly
+embraced the return of good weather to proceed with their
+operations.  The writer had this day taken possession of his cabin
+in the beacon-house.  It was small, but commodious, and was found
+particularly convenient in coarse and blowing weather, instead of
+being obliged to make a passage to the tender in an open boat at
+all times, both during the day and the night, which was often
+attended with much difficulty and danger.
+
+[Saturday, 19th Aug.]
+
+For some days past the weather had been occasionally so thick and
+foggy that no small difficulty was experienced in going even
+between the rock and the tender, though quite at hand.  But the
+floating light's boat lost her way so far in returning on board
+that the first land she made, after rowing all night, was Fifeness,
+a distance of about fourteen miles.  The weather having cleared in
+the morning, the crew stood off again for the floating light, and
+got on board in a half-famished and much exhausted state, having
+been constantly rowing for about sixteen hours.
+
+[Sunday, 20th Aug.]
+
+The weather being very favourable to-day, fifty-three stones were
+landed, and the builders were not a little gratified in having
+built the twenty-second course, consisting of fifty-one stones,
+being the first course which had been completed in one day.  This,
+as a matter of course, produced three hearty cheers.  At twelve
+noon prayers were read for the first time on the Bell Rock; those
+present, counting thirty, were crowded into the upper apartment of
+the beacon, where the writer took a central position, while two of
+the artificers, joining hands, supported the Bible.
+
+[Friday, 25th Aug.]
+
+To-day the artificers laid forty-five stones, which completed the
+twenty-fourth course, reckoning above the first entire one, and the
+twenty-sixth above the rock.  This finished the solid part of the
+building, and terminated the height of the outward casing of
+granite, which is thirty-one feet six inches above the rock or site
+of the foundation-stone, and about seventeen feet above high-water
+of spring-tides.  Being a particular crisis in the progress of the
+lighthouse, the landing and laying of the last stone for the season
+was observed with the usual ceremonies.
+
+From observations often made by the writer, in so far as such can
+be ascertained, it appears that no wave in the open seas, in an
+unbroken state, rises more than from seven to nine feet above the
+general surface of the ocean.  The Bell Rock Lighthouse may
+therefore now be considered at from eight to ten feet above the
+height of the waves; and, although the sprays and heavy seas have
+often been observed, in the present state of the building, to rise
+to the height of fifty feet, and fall with a tremendous noise on
+the beacon-house, yet such seas were not likely to make any
+impression on a mass of solid masonry, containing about 1400 tons,
+
+[Wednesday, 30th Aug.]
+
+The whole of the artificers left the rock at mid-day, when the
+tender made sail for Arbroath, which she reached about six p.m.
+The vessel being decorated with colours, and having fired a salute
+of three guns on approaching the harbour, the workyard artificers,
+with a multitude of people, assembled at the harbour, when mutual
+cheering and congratulations took place between those afloat and
+those on the quays.  The tender had now, with little exception,
+been six months on the station at the Bell Rock, and during the
+last four months few of the squad of builders had been ashore.  In
+particular, Mr. Peter Logan, the foreman, and Mr. Robert Selkirk,
+principal builder, had never once left the rock.  The artificers,
+having made good wages during their stay, like seamen upon a return
+voyage, were extremely happy, and spent the evening with much
+innocent mirth and jollity.
+
+In reflecting upon the state of the matters at the Bell Rock during
+the working months, when the writer was much with the artificers,
+nothing can equal the happy manner in which these excellent workmen
+spent their time.  They always went from Arbroath to their arduous
+task cheering and they generally returned in the same hearty state.
+While at the rock, between the tides, they amused themselves in
+reading, fishing, music, playing cards, draughts, etc., or in
+sporting with one another.  In the workyard at Arbroath the young
+men were almost, without exception, employed in the evening at
+school, in writing and arithmetic, and not a few were learning
+architectural drawing, for which they had every convenience and
+facility, and were, in a very obliging manner, assisted in their
+studies by Mr. David Logan, clerk of the works.  It therefore
+affords the most pleasing reflections to look back upon the
+pursuits of about sixty individuals who for years conducted
+themselves, on all occasions, in a sober and rational manner.
+
+
+IV--OPERATIONS OF 1810
+
+
+[Thursday, 10th May]
+
+The wind had shifted to-day to W.N.W., when the writer, with
+considerable difficulty, was enabled to land upon the rock for the
+first time this season, at ten a.m.  Upon examining the state of
+the building, and apparatus in general, he had the satisfaction to
+find everything in good order.  The mortar in all the joints was
+perfectly entire.  The building, now thirty feet in height, was
+thickly coated with fuci to the height of about fifteen feet,
+calculating from the rock:  on the eastern side, indeed, the growth
+of seaweed was observable to the full height of thirty feet, and
+even on the top or upper bed of the last-laid course, especially
+towards the eastern side, it had germinated, so as to render
+walking upon it somewhat difficult.
+
+The beacon-house was in a perfectly sound state, and apparently
+just as it had been left in the month of November.  But the tides
+being neap, the lower parts, particularly where the beams rested on
+the rock, could not now be seen.  The floor of the mortar gallery
+having been already laid down by Mr. Watt and his men on a former
+visit, was merely soaked with the sprays; but the joisting-beams
+which supported it had, in the course of the winter, been covered
+with a fine downy conferva produced by the range of the sea.  They
+were also a good deal whitened with the mute of the cormorant and
+other sea-fowls, which had roosted upon the beacon in winter.  Upon
+ascending to the apartments, it was found that the motion of the
+sea had thrown open the door of the cook-house:  this was only shut
+with a single latch, that in case of shipwreck at the Bell Rock the
+mariner might find ready access to the shelter of this forlorn
+habitation, where a supply of provisions was kept; and being within
+two miles and a half of the floating light, a signal could readily
+be observed, when a boat might be sent to his relief as the weather
+permitted.  An arrangement for this purpose formed one of the
+instructions on board of the floating light, but happily no
+instance occurred for putting it in practice.  The hearth or
+fireplace of the cook-house was built of brick in as secure a
+manner as possible, to prevent accident from fire; but some of the
+plaster-work had shaken loose, from its damp state and the
+tremulous motion of the beacon in stormy weather.  The writer next
+ascended to the floor which was occupied by the cabins of himself
+and his assistants, which were in tolerably good order, having only
+a damp and musty smell.  The barrack for the artificers, over all,
+was next visited; it had now a very dreary and deserted appearance
+when its former thronged state was recollected.  In some parts the
+water had come through the boarding, and had discoloured the lining
+of green cloth, but it was, nevertheless, in a good habitable
+condition.  While the seamen were employed in landing a stock of
+provisions, a few of the artificers set to work with great
+eagerness to sweep and clean the several apartments.  The exterior
+of the beacon was, in the meantime, examined, and found in perfect
+order.  The painting, though it had a somewhat blanched appearance,
+adhered firmly both on the sides and roof, and only two or three
+panes of glass were broken in the cupola, which had either been
+blown out by the force of the wind, or perhaps broken by sea-fowl.
+
+Having on this occasion continued upon the building and beacon a
+considerable time after the tide had begun to flow, the artificers
+were occupied in removing the forge from the top of the building,
+to which the gangway or wooden bridge gave great facility; and,
+although it stretched or had a span of forty-two feet, its
+construction was extremely simple, while the road-way was perfectly
+firm and steady.  In returning from this visit to the rock every
+one was pretty well soused in spray before reaching the tender at
+two o'clock p.m., where things awaited the landing party in as
+comfortable a way as such a situation would admit.
+
+[Friday, 11th May]
+
+The wind was still easterly, accompanied with rather a heavy swell
+of sea for the operations in hand.  A landing was, however, made
+this morning, when the artificers were immediately employed in
+scraping the seaweed off the upper course of the building, in order
+to apply the moulds of the first course of the staircase, that the
+joggle-holes might be marked off in the upper course of the solid.
+This was also necessary previously to the writer's fixing the
+position of the entrance door, which was regulated chiefly by the
+appearance of the growth of the seaweed on the building, indicating
+the direction of the heaviest seas, on the opposite side of which
+the door was placed.  The landing-master's crew succeeded in towing
+into the creek on the western side of the rock the praam-boat with
+the balance-crane, which had now been on board of the praam for
+five days.  The several pieces of this machine, having been
+conveyed along the railways upon the waggons to a position
+immediately under the bridge, were elevated to its level, or thirty
+feet above the rock, in the following manner.  A chain-tackle was
+suspended over a pulley from the cross-beam connecting the tops of
+the kingposts of the bridge, which was worked by a winch-machine
+with wheel, pinion, and barrel, round which last the chain was
+wound.  This apparatus was placed on the beacon side of the bridge,
+at the distance of about twelve feet from the cross-beam and pulley
+in the middle of the bridge.  Immediately under the cross-beam a
+hatch was formed in the roadway of the bridge, measuring seven feet
+in length and five feet in breadth, made to shut with folding
+boards like a double door, through which stones and other articles
+were raised; the folding doors were then let down, and the stone or
+load was gently lowered upon a waggon which was wheeled on railway
+trucks towards the lighthouse.  In this manner the several castings
+of the balance-crane were got up to the top of the solid of the
+building.
+
+The several apartments of the beacon-house having been cleaned out
+and supplied with bedding, a sufficient stock of provisions was put
+into the store, when Peter Fortune, formerly noticed, lighted his
+fire in the beacon for the first time this season.  Sixteen
+artificers at the same time mounted to their barrack-room, and all
+the foremen of the works also took possession of their cabin, all
+heartily rejoiced at getting rid of the trouble of boating and the
+sickly motion of the tender.
+
+[Saturday, 12th May]
+
+The wind was at E.N.E., blowing so fresh, and accompanied with so
+much sea, that no stones could be landed to-day.  The people on the
+rock, however, were busily employed in screwing together the
+balance-crane, cutting out the joggle-holes in the upper course,
+and preparing all things for commencing the building operations.
+
+[Sunday, 13th May]
+
+The weather still continues boisterous, although the barometer has
+all the while stood at about 30 inches.  Towards evening the wind
+blew so fresh at E. by S. that the boats both of the Smeaton and
+tender were obliged to be hoisted in, and it was feared that the
+Smeaton would have to slip her moorings.  The people on the rock
+were seen busily employed, and had the balance-crane apparently
+ready for use, but no communication could be had with them to-day.
+
+[Monday, 14th May]
+
+The wind continued to blow so fresh, and the Smeaton rode so
+heavily with her cargo, that at noon a signal was made for her
+getting under weigh, when she stood towards Arbroath; and on board
+of the tender we are still without any communication with the
+people on the rock, where the sea was seen breaking over the top of
+the building in great sprays, and raging with much agitation among
+the beams of the beacon.
+
+[Thursday, 17th May]
+
+The wind, in the course of the day, had shifted from north to west;
+the sea being also considerably less, a boat landed on the rock at
+six p.m., for the first time since the 11th, with the provisions
+and water brought off by the Patriot.  The inhabitants of the
+beacon were all well, but tired above measure for want of
+employment, as the balance-crane and apparatus was all in
+readiness.  Under these circumstances they felt no less desirous of
+the return of good weather than those afloat, who were continually
+tossed with the agitation of the sea.  The writer, in particular,
+felt himself almost as much fatigued and worn-out as he had been at
+any period since the commencement of the work.  The very backward
+state of the weather at so advanced a period of the season
+unavoidably created some alarm, lest he should be overtaken with
+bad weather at a late period of the season, with the building
+operations in an unfinished state.  These apprehensions were, no
+doubt, rather increased by the inconveniences of his situation
+afloat, as the tender rolled and pitched excessively at times.
+This being also his first off-set for the season, every bone of his
+body felt sore with preserving a sitting posture while he
+endeavoured to pass away the time in reading; as for writing, it
+was wholly impracticable.  He had several times entertained
+thoughts of leaving the station for a few days and going into
+Arbroath with the tender till the weather should improve; but as
+the artificers had been landed on the rock he was averse to this at
+the commencement of the season, knowing also that he would be
+equally uneasy in every situation till the first cargo was landed:
+and he therefore resolved to continue at his post until this should
+be effected.
+
+[Friday, 18th May]
+
+The wind being now N.W., the sea was considerably run down, and
+this morning at five o'clock the landing-master's crew, thirteen in
+number, left the tender; and having now no detention with the
+landing of artificers, they proceeded to unmoor the Hedderwick
+praam-boat, and towed her alongside of the Smeaton:  and in the
+course of the day twenty-three blocks of stone, three casks of
+pozzolano, three of sand, three of lime, and one of Roman cement,
+together with three bundles of trenails and three of wedges, were
+all landed on the rock and raised the top of the building by means
+of the tackle suspended from the cross-beam on the middle of the
+bridge.  The stones were then moved along the bridge on the waggon
+to the building within reach of the balance-crane, with which they
+were laid in their respective places on the building.  The masons
+immediately thereafter proceeded to bore the trenail-holes into the
+course below, and otherwise to complete the one in hand.  When the
+first stone was to be suspended by the balance-crane, the bell on
+the beacon was rung, and all the artificers and seamen were
+collected on the building.  Three hearty cheers were given while it
+was lowered into its place, and the steward served round a glass of
+rum, when success was drunk to the further progress of the
+building.
+
+[Sunday, 20th May]
+
+The wind was southerly to-day, but there was much less sea than
+yesterday, and the landing-master's crew were enabled to discharge
+and land twenty-three pieces of stone and other articles for the
+work.  The artificers had completed the laying of the twenty-
+seventh or first course of the staircase this morning, and in the
+evening they finished the boring, trenailing, wedging, and grouting
+it with mortar.  At twelve o'clock noon the beacon-house bell was
+rung, and all hands were collected on the top of the building,
+where prayers were read for the first time on the lighthouse, which
+forcibly struck every one, and had, upon the whole, a very
+impressive effect.
+
+From the hazardous situation of the beacon-house with regard to
+fire, being composed wholly of timber, there was no small risk from
+accident:  and on this account one of the most steady of the
+artificers was appointed to see that the fire of the cooking-house,
+and the lights in general, were carefully extinguished at stated
+hours.
+
+[Monday, 4th June]
+
+This being the birthday of our much-revered Sovereign King George
+III, now in the fiftieth year of his reign, the shipping of the
+Lighthouse service were this morning decorated with colours
+according to the taste of their respective captains.  Flags were
+also hoisted upon the beacon-house and balance-crane on the top of
+the building.  At twelve noon a salute was fired from the tender,
+when the King's health was drunk, with all the honours, both on the
+rock and on board of the shipping.
+
+[Tuesday, 5th June]
+
+As the lighthouse advanced in height, the cubical contents of the
+stones were less, but they had to be raised to a greater height;
+and the walls, being thinner, were less commodious for the
+necessary machinery and the artificers employed, which considerably
+retarded the work.  Inconvenience was also occasionally experienced
+from the men dropping their coats, hats, mallets, and other tools,
+at high-water, which were carried away by the tide; and the danger
+to the people themselves was now greatly increased.  Had any of
+them fallen from the beacon or building at high-water, while the
+landing-master's crew were generally engaged with the craft at a
+distance, it must have rendered the accident doubly painful to
+those on the rock, who at this time had no boat, and consequently
+no means of rendering immediate and prompt assistance.  In such
+cases it would have been too late to have got a boat by signal from
+the tender.  A small boat, which could be lowered at pleasure, was
+therefore suspended by a pair of davits projected from the cook-
+house, the keel being about thirty feet from the rock.  This boat,
+with its tackle was put under the charge of James Glen, of whose
+exertions on the beacon mention has already been made, and who,
+having in early life been a seaman, was also very expert in the
+management of a boat.  A life-buoy was likewise suspended from the
+bridge, to which a coil of line two hundred fathoms in length was
+attached, which could be let out to a person falling into the
+water, or to the people in the boat, should they not be able to
+work her with the oars.
+
+[Tuesday, 7th June]
+
+To-day twelve stones were landed on the rock, being the remainder
+of the Patriot's cargo; and the artificers built the thirty-ninth
+course, consisting of fourteen stones.  The Bell Rock works had now
+a very busy appearance, as the lighthouse was daily getting more
+into form.  Besides the artificers and their cook, the writer and
+his servant were also lodged on the beacon, counting in all twenty-
+nine; and at low-water the landing-master's crew, consisting of
+from twelve to fifteen seamen, were employed in transporting the
+building materials, working the landing apparatus on the rock, and
+dragging the stone waggons along the railways.
+
+[Friday, 8th June]
+
+In the course of this day the weather varied much.  In the morning
+it was calm, in the middle part of the day there were light airs of
+wind from the south, and in the evening fresh breezes from the
+east.  The barometer in the writer's cabin in the beacon-house
+oscillated from 30 inches to 30.42, and the weather was extremely
+pleasant.  This, in any situation, forms one of the chief comforts
+of life; but, as may easily be conceived, it was doubly so to
+people stuck, as it were, upon a pinnacle in the middle of the
+ocean.
+
+[Sunday, 10th June]
+
+One of the praam-boats had been brought to the rock with eleven
+stones, notwithstanding the perplexity which attended the getting
+of those formerly landed taken up to the building.  Mr. Peter
+Logan, the foreman builder, interposed, and prevented this cargo
+from being delivered; but the landing-master's crew were
+exceedingly averse to this arrangement, from an idea that "ill
+luck" would in future attend the praam, her cargo, and those who
+navigated her, from thus reversing her voyage.  It may be noticed
+that this was the first instance of a praam-boat having been sent
+from the Bell Rock with any part of her cargo on board, and was
+considered so uncommon an occurrence that it became a topic of
+conversation among the seamen and artificers.
+
+[Tuesday, 12th June]
+
+To-day the stones formerly sent from the rock were safely landed,
+notwithstanding the augury of the seamen in consequence of their
+being sent away two days before.
+
+[Thursday, 14th June]
+
+To-day twenty-seven stones and eleven joggle-pieces were landed,
+part of which consisted of the forty-seventh course, forming the
+storeroom floor.  The builders were at work this morning by four
+o'clock, in the hopes of being able to accomplish the laying of the
+eighteen stones of this course.  But at eight o'clock in the
+evening they had still two to lay, and as the stones of this course
+were very unwieldy, being six feet in length, they required much
+precaution and care both in lifting and laying them.  It was only
+on the writer's suggestion to Mr. Logan that the artificers were
+induced to leave off, as they had intended to complete this floor
+before going to bed.  The two remaining stones were, however, laid
+in their places without mortar when the bell on the beacon was
+rung, and, all hands being collected on the top of the building,
+three hearty cheers were given on covering the first apartment.
+The steward then served out a dram to each, when the whole retired
+to their barrack much fatigued, but with the anticipation of the
+most perfect repose even in the "hurricane-house," amidst the
+dashing seas on the Bell Rock.
+
+While the workmen were at breakfast and dinner it was the writer's
+usual practice to spend his time on the walls of the building,
+which, notwithstanding the narrowness of the track, nevertheless
+formed his principal walk when the rock was under water.  But this
+afternoon he had his writing-desk set upon the storeroom floor,
+when he wrote to Mrs. Stevenson--certainly the first letter dated
+from the Bell Rock LIGHTHOUSE--giving a detail of the fortunate
+progress of the work with an assurance that the lighthouse would
+soon be completed at the rate at which it now proceeded; and, the
+Patriot having sailed for Arbroath in the evening, he felt no small
+degree of pleasure in despatching this communication to his family.
+
+The weather still continuing favourable for the operations at the
+rock, the work proceeded with much energy, through the exertions
+both of the seamen and artificers.  For the more speedy and
+effectual working of the several tackles in raising the materials
+as the building advanced in height, and there being a great extent
+of railway to attend to, which required constant repairs, two
+additional millwrights were added to the complement on the rock,
+which, including the writer, now counted thirty-one in all.  So
+crowded was the men's barrack that the beds were ranged five tier
+in height, allowing only about one foot eight inches for each bed.
+The artificers commenced this morning at five o'clock, and, in the
+course of the day, they laid the forty-eighth and forty-ninth
+courses, consisting each of sixteen blocks.  From the favourable
+state of the weather, and the regular manner in which the work now
+proceeded, the artificers had generally from four to seven extra
+hours' work, which, including their stated wages of 3s. 4d.,
+yielded them from 5s. 4d. to about 6s. 10d. per day besides their
+board; even the postage of their letters was paid while they were
+at the Bell Rock.  In these advantages the foremen also shared,
+having about double the pay and amount of premiums of the
+artificers.  The seamen being less out of their element in the Bell
+Rock operations than the landsmen, their premiums consisted in a
+slump sum payable at the end of the season, which extended from
+three to ten guineas.
+
+As the laying of the floors was somewhat tedious, the landing-
+master and his crew had got considerably beforehand with the
+building artificers in bringing materials faster to the rock than
+they could be built.  The seamen having, therefore, some spare
+time, were occasionally employed during fine weather in dredging or
+grappling for the several mushroom anchors and mooring-chains which
+had been lost in the vicinity of the Bell Rock during the progress
+of the work by the breaking loose and drifting of the floating
+buoys.  To encourage their exertions in this search, five guineas
+were offered as a premium for each set they should find; and, after
+much patient application, they succeeded to-day in hooking one of
+these lost anchors with its chain.
+
+It was a general remark at the Bell Rock, as before noticed, that
+fish were never plenty in its neighbourhood excepting in good
+weather.  Indeed, the seamen used to speculate about the state of
+the weather from their success in fishing.  When the fish
+disappeared at the rock, it was considered a sure indication that a
+gale was not far off, as the fish seemed to seek shelter in deeper
+water from the roughness of the sea during these changes in the
+weather.  At this time the rock, at high-water, was completely
+covered with podlies, or the fry of the coal-fish, about six or
+eight inches in length.  The artificers sometimes occupied half an
+hour after breakfast and dinner in catching these little fishes,
+but were more frequently supplied from the boats of the tender.
+
+[Saturday, 16th June]
+
+The landing-master having this day discharged the Smeaton and
+loaded the Hedderwick and Dickie praam-boats with nineteen stones,
+they were towed to their respective moorings, when Captain Wilson,
+in consequence of the heavy swell of sea, came in his boat to the
+beacon-house to consult with the writer as to the propriety of
+venturing the loaded praam-boats with their cargoes to the rock
+while so much sea was running.  After some dubiety expressed on the
+subject, in which the ardent mind of the landing-master suggested
+many arguments in favour of his being able to convey the praams in
+perfect safety, it was acceded to.  In bad weather, and especially
+on occasions of difficulty like the present, Mr. Wilson, who was an
+extremely active seaman, measuring about five feet three inches in
+height, of a robust habit, generally dressed himself in what he
+called a MONKEY JACKET, made of thick duffle cloth, with a pair of
+Dutchman's petticoat trousers, reaching only to his knees, where
+they were met with a pair of long water-tight boots; with this
+dress, his glazed hat, and his small brass speaking trumpet in his
+hand, he bade defiance to the weather.  When he made his appearance
+in this most suitable attire for the service his crew seemed to
+possess additional life, never failing to use their utmost
+exertions when the captain put on his STORM RIGGING.  They had this
+morning commenced loading the praam-boats at four o'clock, and
+proceeded to tow them into the eastern landing-place, which was
+accomplished with much dexterity, though not without the risk of
+being thrown, by the force of the sea, on certain projecting ledges
+of the rock.  In such a case the loss even of a single stone would
+have greatly retarded the work.  For the greater safety in entering
+the creek it was necessary to put out several warps and guy-ropes
+to guide the boats into its narrow and intricate entrance; and it
+frequently happened that the sea made a clean breach over the
+praams, which not only washed their decks, but completely drenched
+the crew in water.
+
+[Sunday, 17th June]
+
+It was fortunate, in the present state of the weather, that the
+fiftieth course was in a sheltered spot, within the reach of the
+tackle of the winch-machine upon the bridge; a few stones were
+stowed upon the bridge itself, and the remainder upon the building,
+which kept the artificers at work.  The stowing of the materials
+upon the rock was the department of Alexander Brebner, mason, who
+spared no pains in attending to the safety of the stones, and who,
+in the present state of the work, when the stones were landed
+faster than could be built, generally worked till the water rose to
+his middle.  At one o'clock to-day the bell rung for prayers, and
+all hands were collected into the upper barrack-room of the beacon-
+house, when the usual service was performed.
+
+The wind blew very hard in the course of last night from N.E., and
+to-day the sea ran so high that no boat could approach the rock.
+During the dinner-hour, when the writer was going to the top of the
+building as usual, but just as he had entered the door and was
+about to ascend the ladder, a great noise was heard overhead, and
+in an instant he was soused in water from a sea which had most
+unexpectedly come over the walls, though now about fifty-eight feet
+in height.  On making his retreat he found himself completely
+whitened by the lime, which had mixed with the water while dashing
+down through the different floors; and, as nearly as he could
+guess, a quantity equal to about a hogshead had come over the
+walls, and now streamed out at the door.  After having shifted
+himself, he again sat down in his cabin, the sea continuing to run
+so high that the builders did not resume their operations on the
+walls this afternoon.  The incident just noticed did not create
+more surprise in the mind of the writer than the sublime appearance
+of the waves as they rolled majestically over the rock.  This scene
+he greatly enjoyed while sitting at his cabin window; each wave
+approached the beacon like a vast scroll unfolding; and in passing
+discharged a quantity of air, which he not only distinctly felt,
+but was even sufficient to lift the leaves of a book which lay
+before him.  These waves might be ten or twelve feet in height, and
+about 250 feet in length, their smaller end being towards the
+north, where the water was deep, and they were opened or cut
+through by the interposition of the building and beacon.  The
+gradual manner in which the sea, upon these occasions, is observed
+to become calm or to subside, is a very remarkable feature of this
+phenomenon.  For example, when a gale is succeeded by a calm, every
+third or fourth wave forms one of these great seas, which occur in
+spaces of from three to five minutes, as noted by the writer's
+watch; but in the course of the next tide they become less
+frequent, and take off so as to occur only in ten or fifteen
+minutes; and, singular enough, at the third tide after such gales,
+the writer has remarked that only one or two of these great waves
+appear in the course of the whole tide.
+
+[Tuesday, 19th June]
+
+The 19th was a very unpleasant and disagreeable day, both for the
+seamen and artificers, as it rained throughout with little
+intermission from four a.m. till eleven p.m., accompanied with
+thunder and lightning, during which period the work nevertheless
+continued unremittingly, and the builders laid the fifty-first and
+fifty-second courses.  This state of weather was no less severe
+upon the mortar-makers, who required to temper or prepare the
+mortar of a thicker or thinner consistency, in some measure,
+according to the state of the weather.  From the elevated position
+of the building, the mortar gallery on the beacon was now much
+lower, and the lime-buckets were made to traverse upon a rope
+distended between it and the building.  On occasions like the
+present, however, there was often a difference of opinion between
+the builders and the mortar-makers.  John Watt, who had the
+principal charge of the mortar, was a most active worker, but,
+being somewhat of an irascible temper, the builders occasionally
+amused themselves at his expense; for while he was eagerly at work
+with his large iron-shod pestle in the mortar-tub, they often sent
+down contradictory orders, some crying, 'Make it a little stiffer,
+or thicker, John,' while others called out to make it 'thinner,' to
+which he generally returned very speedy and sharp replies, so that
+these conversations at times were rather amusing.
+
+During wet weather the situation of the artificers on the top of
+the building was extremely disagreeable; for although their work
+did not require great exertion, yet, as each man had his particular
+part to perform, either in working the crane or in laying the
+stones, it required the closest application and attention, not only
+on the part of Mr. Peter Logan, the foreman, who was constantly on
+the walls, but also of the chief workmen.  Robert Selkirk, the
+principal builder, for example, had every stone to lay in its
+place.  David Cumming, a mason, had the charge of working the
+tackle of the balance-weight, and James Scott, also a mason, took
+charge of the purchase with which the stones were laid; while the
+pointing the joints of the walls with cement was intrusted to
+William Reid and William Kennedy, who stood upon a scaffold
+suspended over the walls in rather a frightful manner.  The least
+act of carelessness or inattention on the part of any of these men
+might have been fatal, not only to themselves, but also to the
+surrounding workmen, especially if any accident had happened to the
+crane itself, while the material damage or loss of a single stone
+would have put an entire stop to the operations until another could
+have been brought from Arbroath.  The artificers, having wrought
+seven and a half hours of extra time to-day, had 3s. 9d. of extra
+pay, while the foremen had 7s. 6d. over and above their stated pay
+and board.  Although, therefore, the work was both hazardous and
+fatiguing, yet, the encouragement being considerable, they were
+always very cheerful, and perfectly reconciled to the confinement
+and other disadvantages of the place.
+
+During fine weather, and while the nights were short, the duty on
+board of the floating light was literally nothing but a waiting on,
+and therefore one of her boats, with a crew of five men, daily
+attended the rock, but always returned to the vessel at night.  The
+carpenter, however, was one of those who was left on board of the
+ship, as he also acted in the capacity of assistant lightkeeper,
+being, besides, a person who was apt to feel discontent and to be
+averse to changing his quarters, especially to work with the
+millwrights and joiners at the rock, who often, for hours together,
+wrought knee-deep, and not unfrequently up to the middle, in water.
+Mr. Watt having about this time made a requisition for another
+hand, the carpenter was ordered to attend the rock in the floating
+light's boat.  This he did with great reluctance, and found so much
+fault that he soon got into discredit with his messmates.  On this
+occasion he left the Lighthouse service, and went as a sailor in a
+vessel bound for America--a step which, it is believed, he soon
+regretted, as, in the course of things, he would, in all
+probability, have accompanied Mr. John Reid, the principal
+lightkeeper of the floating light, to the Bell Rock Lighthouse as
+his principal assistant.  The writer had a wish to be of service to
+this man, as he was one of those who came off to the floating light
+in the month of September 1807, while she was riding at single
+anchor after the severe gale of the 7th, at a time when it was
+hardly possible to make up this vessel's crew; but the crossness of
+his manner prevented his reaping the benefit of such intentions.
+
+[Friday, 22nd June]
+
+The building operations had for some time proceeded more slowly,
+from the higher parts of the lighthouse requiring much longer time
+than an equal tonnage of the lower courses.  The duty of the
+landing-master's crew had, upon the whole, been easy of late; for
+though the work was occasionally irregular, yet the stones being
+lighter, they were more speedily lifted from the hold of the stone
+vessel to the deck of the praam-boat, and again to the waggons on
+the railway, after which they came properly under the charge of the
+foreman builder.  It is, however, a strange, though not an
+uncommon, feature in the human character, that, when people have
+least to complain of, they are most apt to become dissatisfied, as
+was now the case with the seamen employed in the Bell Rock service
+about their rations of beer.  Indeed, ever since the carpenter of
+the floating light, formerly noticed, had been brought to the rock,
+expressions of discontent had been manifested upon various
+occasions.  This being represented to the writer, he sent for
+Captain Wilson, the landing-master, and Mr. Taylor, commander of
+the tender, with whom he talked over the subject.  They stated that
+they considered the daily allowance of the seamen in every respect
+ample, and that, the work being now much lighter than formerly,
+they had no just ground for complaint; Mr. Taylor adding that, if
+those who now complained 'were even to be fed upon soft bread and
+turkeys, they would not think themselves right.'  At twelve noon
+the work of the landing-master's crew was completed for the day;
+but at four o'clock, while the rock was under water, those on the
+beacon were surprised by the arrival of a boat from the tender
+without any signal having been made from the beacon.  It brought
+the following note to the writer from the landing-master's crew:-
+
+
+'Sir Joseph Banks Tender.
+
+'SIR,--We are informed by our masters that our allowance is to be
+as before, and it is not sufficient to serve us, for we have been
+at work since four o'clock this morning, and we have come on board
+to dinner, and there is no beer for us before to-morrow morning, to
+which a sufficient answer is required before we go from the beacon;
+and we are, Sir, your most obedient servants.'
+
+
+On reading this, the writer returned a verbal message, intimating
+that an answer would be sent on board of the tender, at the same
+time ordering the boat instantly to quit the beacon.  He then
+addressed the following note to the landing-master:-
+
+
+'Beacon-house, 22nd June 1810,
+Five o'clock p.m.
+
+'SIR,--I have just now received a letter purporting to be from the
+landing-master's crew and seamen on board of the Sir Joseph Banks,
+though without either date or signature; in answer to which I
+enclose a statement of the daily allowance of provisions for the
+seamen in this service, which you will post up in the ship's
+galley, and at seven o'clock this evening I will come on board to
+inquire into this unexpected and most unnecessary demand for an
+additional allowance of beer.  In the enclosed you will not find
+any alteration from the original statement, fixed in the galley at
+the beginning of the season.  I have, however, judged this mode of
+giving your people an answer preferable to that of conversing with
+them on the beacon. --I am, Sir, your most obedient servant, ROBERT
+STEVENSON.
+
+'To CAPTAIN WILSON.'
+
+'Beacon House, 22nd June 1810.--Schedule of the daily allowance of
+provisions to be served out on board of the Sir Joseph Banks
+tender:  "1.5 lb. beef; 1 lb. bread; 8 oz. oatmeal; 2 oz. barley; 2
+oz. butter; 3 quarts beer; vegetables and salt no stated allowance.
+When the seamen are employed in unloading the Smeaton and Patriot,
+a draught of beer is, as formerly, to be allowed from the stock of
+these vessels.  Further, in wet and stormy weather, or when the
+work commences very early in the morning, or continues till a late
+hour at night, a glass of spirits will also be served out to the
+crew as heretofore, on the requisition of the landing-master."
+ROBERT STEVENSON.'
+
+
+On writing this letter and schedule, a signal was made on the
+beacon for the landing-master's boat, which immediately came to the
+rock, and the schedule was afterwards stuck up in the tender's
+galley.  When sufficient time had been allowed to the crew to
+consider of their conduct, a second signal was made for a boat, and
+at seven o'clock the writer left the Bell Rock, after a residence
+of four successive weeks in the beacon-house.  The first thing
+which occupied his attention on board of the tender was to look
+round upon the lighthouse, which he saw, with some degree of
+emotion and surprise, now vying in height with the beacon-house;
+for although he had often viewed it from the extremity of the
+western railway on the rock, yet the scene, upon the whole, seemed
+far more interesting from the tender's moorings at the distance of
+about half a mile.
+
+The Smeaton having just arrived at her moorings with a cargo, a
+signal was made for Captain Pool to come on board of the tender,
+that he might be at hand to remove from the service any of those
+who might persist in their discontented conduct.  One of the two
+principal leaders in this affair, the master of one of the praam-
+boats, who had also steered the boat which brought the letter to
+the beacon, was first called upon deck, and asked if he had read
+the statement fixed up in the galley this afternoon, and whether he
+was satisfied with it.  He replied that he had read the paper, but
+was not satisfied, as it held out no alteration in the allowance,
+on which he was immediately ordered into the Smeaton's boat.  The
+next man called had but lately entered the service, and, being also
+interrogated as to his resolution, he declared himself to be of the
+same mind with the praam-master, and was also forthwith ordered
+into the boat.  The writer, without calling any more of the seamen,
+went forward to the gangway, where they were collected and
+listening to what was passing upon deck.  He addressed them at the
+hatchway, and stated that two of their companions had just been
+dismissed the service and sent on board of the Smeaton to be
+conveyed to Arbroath.  He therefore wished each man to consider for
+himself how far it would be proper, by any unreasonableness of
+conduct, to place themselves in a similar situation, especially as
+they were aware that it was optional in him either to dismiss them
+or send them on board a man-of-war.  It might appear that much
+inconveniency would be felt at the rock by a change of hands at
+this critical period, by checking for a time the progress of a
+building so intimately connected with the best interests of
+navigation; yet this would be but of a temporary nature, while the
+injury to themselves might be irreparable.  It was now therefore,
+required of any man who, in this disgraceful manner, chose to leave
+the service, that he should instantly make his appearance on deck
+while the Smeaton's boat was alongside.  But those below having
+expressed themselves satisfied with their situation-viz., William
+Brown, George Gibb, Alexander Scott, John Dick, Robert Couper,
+Alexander Shephard, James Grieve, David Carey, William Pearson,
+Stuart Eaton, Alexander Lawrence, and John Spink--were accordingly
+considered as having returned to their duty.  This disposition to
+mutiny, which had so strongly manifested itself, being now happily
+suppressed, Captain Pool got orders to proceed for Arbroath Bay,
+and land the two men he had on board, and to deliver the following
+letter at the office of the workyard:-
+
+
+'On board of the Tender off the Bell Rock,
+22nd June 1810, eight o'clock p.m.
+
+'DEAR SIR,--A discontented and mutinous spirit having manifested
+itself of late among the landing-master's crew, they struck work
+to-day and demanded an additional allowance of beer, and I have
+found it necessary to dismiss D-d and M-e, who are now sent on
+shore with the Smeaton.  You will therefore be so good as to pay
+them their wages, including this day only.  Nothing can be more
+unreasonable than the conduct of the seamen on this occasion, as
+the landing-master's crew not only had their allowance on board of
+the tender, but, in the course of this day, they had drawn no fewer
+than twenty-four quart pots of beer from the stock of the Patriot
+while unloading her. --I remain, yours truly, ROBERT STEVENSON.
+
+'To Mr. LACHLAN KENNEDY,
+Bell Rock Office, Arbroath.'
+
+
+On despatching this letter to Mr. Kennedy, the writer returned to
+the beacon about nine o'clock, where this afternoon's business had
+produced many conjectures, especially when the Smeaton got under
+weigh, instead of proceeding to land her cargo.  The bell on the
+beacon being rung, the artificers were assembled on the bridge,
+when the affair was explained to them.  He, at the same time,
+congratulated them upon the first appearance of mutiny being
+happily set at rest by the dismissal of its two principal abettors.
+
+[Sunday, 24th June]
+
+At the rock the landing of the materials and the building
+operations of the light-room store went on successfully, and in a
+way similar to those of the provision store.  To-day it blew fresh
+breezes; but the seamen nevertheless landed twenty-eight stones,
+and the artificers built the fifty-eighth and fifty-ninth courses.
+The works were visited by Mr. Murdoch, junior, from Messrs. Boulton
+and Watt's works of Soho.  He landed just as the bell rung for
+prayers, after which the writer enjoyed much pleasure from his very
+intelligent conversation; and, having been almost the only stranger
+he had seen for some weeks, he parted with him, after a short
+interview, with much regret.
+
+[Thursday, 28th June]
+
+Last night the wind had shifted to north-east, and, blowing fresh,
+was accompanied with a heavy surf upon the rock.  Towards high-
+water it had a very grand and wonderful appearance.  Waves of
+considerable magnitude rose as high as the solid or level of the
+entrance-door, which, being open to the south-west, was fortunately
+to the leeward; but on the windward side the sprays flew like
+lightning up the sloping sides of the building; and although the
+walls were now elevated sixty-four feet above the rock, and about
+fifty-two feet from high-water mark, yet the artificers were
+nevertheless wetted, and occasionally interrupted, in their
+operations on the top of the walls.  These appearances were, in a
+great measure, new at the Bell Rock, there having till of late been
+no building to conduct the seas, or object to compare with them.
+Although, from the description of the Eddystone Lighthouse, the
+mind was prepared for such effects, yet they were not expected to
+the present extent in the summer season; the sea being most awful
+to-day, whether observed from the beacon or the building.  To
+windward, the sprays fell from the height above noticed in the most
+wonderful cascades, and streamed down the walls of the building in
+froth as white as snow.  To leeward of the lighthouse the collision
+or meeting of the waves produced a pure white kind of DRIFT; it
+rose about thirty feet in height, like a fine downy mist, which, in
+its fall, fell upon the face and hands more like a dry powder than
+a liquid substance.  The effect of these seas, as they raged among
+the beams and dashed upon the higher parts of the beacon, produced
+a temporary tremulous motion throughout the whole fabric, which to
+a stranger must have been frightful.
+
+[Sunday, 1st July]
+
+The writer had now been at the Bell Rock since the latter end of
+May, or about six weeks, during four of which he had been a
+constant inhabitant of the beacon without having been once off the
+rock.  After witnessing the laying of the sixty-seventh or second
+course of the bedroom apartment, he left the rock with the tender
+and went ashore, as some arrangements were to be made for the
+future conduct of the works at Arbroath, which were soon to be
+brought to a close; the landing-master's crew having, in the
+meantime, shifted on board of the Patriot.  In leaving the rock,
+the writer kept his eyes fixed upon the lighthouse, which had
+recently got into the form of a house, having several tiers or
+stories of windows.  Nor was he unmindful of his habitation in the
+beacon--now far overtopped by the masonry,--where he had spent
+several weeks in a kind of active retirement, making practical
+experiment of the fewness of the positive wants of man.  His cabin
+measured not more than four feet three inches in breadth on the
+floor; and though, from the oblique direction of the beams of the
+beacon, it widened towards the top, yet it did not admit of the
+full extension of his arms when he stood on the floor; while its
+length was little more than sufficient for suspending a cot-bed
+during the night, calculated for being triced up to the roof
+through the day, which left free room for the admission of
+occasional visitants.  His folding table was attached with hinges,
+immediately under the small window of the apartment, and his books,
+barometer, thermometer, portmanteau, and two or three camp-stools,
+formed the bulk of his movables.  His diet being plain, the
+paraphernalia of the table were proportionally simple; though
+everything had the appearance of comfort, and even of neatness, the
+walls being covered with green cloth formed into panels with red
+tape, and his bed festooned with curtains of yellow cotton-stuff.
+If, in speculating upon the abstract wants of man in such a state
+of exclusion, one were reduced to a single book, the Sacred Volume-
+-whether considered for the striking diversity of its story, the
+morality of its doctrine, or the important truths of its gospel--
+would have proved by far the greatest treasure.
+
+[Monday, 2nd July]
+
+In walking over the workyard at Arbroath this morning, the writer
+found that the stones of the course immediately under the cornice
+were all in hand, and that a week's work would now finish the
+whole, while the intermediate courses lay ready numbered and marked
+for shipping to the rock.  Among other subjects which had occupied
+his attention to-day was a visit from some of the relations of
+George Dall, a young man who had been impressed near Dundee in the
+month of February last; a dispute had arisen between the
+magistrates of that burgh and the Regulating Officer as to his
+right of impressing Dall, who was bona fide one of the protected
+seamen in the Bell Rock service.  In the meantime, the poor lad was
+detained, and ultimately committed to the prison of Dundee, to
+remain until the question should be tried before the Court of
+Session.  His friends were naturally very desirous to have him
+relieved upon bail.  But, as this was only to be done by the
+judgment of the Court, all that could be said was that his pay and
+allowances should be continued in the same manner as if he had been
+upon the sick-list.  The circumstances of Dall's case were briefly
+these:- He had gone to see some of his friends in the neighbourhood
+of Dundee, in winter, while the works were suspended, having got
+leave of absence from Mr. Taylor, who commanded the Bell Rock
+tender, and had in his possession one of the Protection Medals.
+Unfortunately, however, for Dall, the Regulating Officer thought
+proper to disregard these documents, as, according to the strict
+and literal interpretation of the Admiralty regulations, a seaman
+does not stand protected unless he is actually on board of his
+ship, or in a boat belonging to her, or has the Admiralty
+protection in his possession.  This order of the Board, however,
+cannot be rigidly followed in practice; and therefore, when the
+matter is satisfactorily stated to the Regulating Officer, the
+impressed man is generally liberated.  But in Dall's case this was
+peremptorily refused, and he was retained at the instance of the
+magistrates.  The writer having brought the matter under the
+consideration of the Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouses,
+they authorised it to be tried on the part of the Lighthouse Board,
+as one of extreme hardship.  The Court, upon the first hearing,
+ordered Dall to be liberated from prison; and the proceedings never
+went further.
+
+[Wednesday, 4th July]
+
+Being now within twelve courses of being ready for building the
+cornice, measures were taken for getting the stones of it and the
+parapet-wall of the light-room brought from Edinburgh, where, as
+before noticed, they had been prepared and were in readiness for
+shipping.  The honour of conveying the upper part of the
+lighthouse, and of landing the last stone of the building on the
+rock, was considered to belong to Captain Pool of the Smeaton, who
+had been longer in the service than the master of the Patriot.  The
+Smeaton was, therefore, now partly loaded with old iron, consisting
+of broken railways and other lumber which had been lying about the
+rock.  After landing these at Arbroath, she took on board James
+Craw, with his horse and cart, which could now be spared at the
+workyard, to be employed in carting the stones from Edinburgh to
+Leith.  Alexander Davidson and William Kennedy, two careful masons,
+were also sent to take charge of the loading of the stones at
+Greenside, and stowing them on board of the vessel at Leith.  The
+writer also went on board, with a view to call at the Bell Rock and
+to take his passage up the Firth of Forth.  The wind, however,
+coming to blow very fresh from the eastward, with thick and foggy
+weather, it became necessary to reef the mainsail and set the
+second jib.  When in the act of making a tack towards the tender,
+the sailors who worked the head-sheets were, all of a sudden,
+alarmed with the sound of the smith's hammer and anvil on the
+beacon, and had just time to put the ship about to save her from
+running ashore on the northwestern point of the rock, marked 'James
+Craw's Horse.'  On looking towards the direction from whence the
+sound came, the building and beacon-house were seen, with
+consternation, while the ship was hailed by those on the rock, who
+were no less confounded at seeing the near approach of the Smeaton;
+and, just as the vessel cleared the danger, the smith and those in
+the mortar gallery made signs in token of their happiness at our
+fortunate escape.  From this occurrence the writer had an
+experimental proof of the utility of the large bells which were in
+preparation to be rung by the machinery of the revolving light;
+for, had it not been the sound of the smith's anvil, the Smeaton,
+in all probability, would have been wrecked upon the rock.  In case
+the vessel had struck, those on board might have been safe, having
+now the beacon-house, as a place of refuge; but the vessel, which
+was going at a great velocity, must have suffered severely, and it
+was more than probable that the horse would have been drowned,
+there being no means of getting him out of the vessel.  Of this
+valuable animal and his master we shall take an opportunity of
+saying more in another place.
+
+[Thursday, 5th July]
+
+The weather cleared up in the course of the night, but the wind
+shifted to the N.E. and blew very fresh.  From the force of the
+wind, being now the period of spring-tides, a very heavy swell was
+experienced at the rock.  At two o'clock on the following morning
+the people on the beacon were in a state of great alarm about their
+safety, as the sea had broke up part of the floor of the mortar
+gallery!, which was thus cleared of the lime-casks and other
+buoyant articles; and, the alarm-bell being rung, all hands were
+called to render what assistance was in their power for the safety
+of themselves and the materials.  At this time some would willingly
+have left the beacon and gone into the building:  the sea, however,
+ran so high that there was no passage along the bridge of
+communication, and, when the interior of the lighthouse came to be
+examined in the morning, it appeared that great quantities of water
+had come over the walls--now eighty feet in height--and had run
+down through the several apartments and out at the entrance door.
+
+The upper course of the lighthouse at the workyard of Arbroath was
+completed on the 6th, and the whole of the stones were, therefore,
+now ready for being shipped to the rock.  From the present state of
+the works it was impossible that the two squads of artificers at
+Arbroath and the Bell Rock could meet together at this period; and
+as in public works of this kind, which had continued for a series
+of years, it is not customary to allow the men to separate without
+what is termed a "finishing-pint," five guineas were for this
+purpose placed at the disposal of Mr. David Logan, clerk of works.
+With this sum the stone-cutters at Arbroath had a merry meeting in
+their barrack, collected their sweethearts and friends, and
+concluded their labours with a dance.  It was remarked, however,
+that their happiness on this occasion was not without alloy.  The
+consideration of parting and leaving a steady and regular
+employment, to go in quest of work and mix with other society,
+after having been harmoniously lodged for years together in one
+large "guildhall or barrack," was rather painful.
+
+[Friday, 6th July]
+
+While the writer was at Edinburgh he was fortunate enough to meet
+with Mrs. Dickson, only daughter of the late celebrated Mr.
+Smeaton, whose works at the Eddystone Lighthouse had been of such
+essential consequence to the operations at the Bell Rock.  Even her
+own elegant accomplishments are identified with her father's work,
+she having herself made the drawing of the vignette on the title-
+page of the Narrative of the Eddystone Lighthouse.  Every admirer
+of the works of that singularly eminent man must also feel an
+obligation to her for the very comprehensive and distinct account
+given of his life, which is attached to his reports, published, in
+three volumes quarto, by the Society of Civil Engineers.  Mrs.
+Dickson, being at this time returning from a tour to the Hebrides
+and Western Highlands of Scotland, had heard of the Bell Rock
+works, and from their similarity to those of the Eddystone was
+strongly impressed with a desire of visiting the spot.  But on
+inquiring for the writer at Edinburgh, and finding from him that
+the upper part of the lighthouse, consisting of nine courses, might
+be seen in the immediate vicinity, and also that one of the vessels
+which, in compliment to her father's memory, had been named the
+Smeaton, might also now be seen in Leith, she considered herself
+extremely fortunate; and having first visited the works at
+Greenside, she afterwards went to Leith to see the Smeaton, then
+loading for the Bell Rock.  On stepping on board, Mrs. Dickson
+seemed to be quite overcome with so many concurrent circumstances,
+tending in a peculiar manner to revive and enliven the memory of
+her departed father, and, on leaving the vessel, she would not be
+restrained from presenting the crew with a piece of money.  The
+Smeaton had been named spontaneously, from a sense of the
+obligation which a public work of the description of the Bell Rock
+owed to the labours and abilities of Mr. Smeaton.  The writer
+certainly never could have anticipated the satisfaction which he
+this day felt in witnessing the pleasure it afforded to the only
+representative of this great man's family.
+
+[Friday, 20th July]
+
+The gale from the N.E. still continued so strong, accompanied with
+a heavy sea, that the Patriot could not approach her moorings; and
+although the tender still kept her station, no landing was made to-
+day at the rock.  At high-water it was remarked that the spray rose
+to the height of about sixty feet upon the building.  The Smeaton
+now lay in Leith loaded, but, the wind and weather being so
+unfavourable for her getting down the Firth, she did not sail till
+this afternoon.  It may be here proper to notice that the loading
+of the centre of the light-room floor, or last principal stone of
+the building, did not fail, when put on board, to excite an
+interest among those connected with the work.  When the stone was
+laid upon the cart to be conveyed to Leith, the seamen fixed an
+ensign-staff and flag into the circular hole in the centre of the
+stone, and decorated their own hats, and that of James Craw, the
+Bell Rock carter, with ribbons; even his faithful and trusty horse
+Brassey was ornamented with bows and streamers of various colours.
+The masons also provided themselves with new aprons, and in this
+manner the cart was attended in its progress to the ship.  When the
+cart came opposite the Trinity House of Leith, the officer of that
+corporation made his appearance dressed in his uniform, with his
+staff of office; and when it reached the harbour, the shipping in
+the different tiers where the Smeaton lay hoisted their colours,
+manifesting by these trifling ceremonies the interest with which
+the progress of this work was regarded by the public, as ultimately
+tending to afford safety and protection to the mariner.  The wind
+had fortunately shifted to the S.W., and about five o'clock this
+afternoon the Smeaton reached the Bell Rock.
+
+[Friday, 27th July]
+
+The artificers had finished the laying of the balcony course,
+excepting the centre-stone of the light-room floor, which, like the
+centres of the other floors, could not be laid in its place till
+after the removal of the foot and shaft of the balance-crane.
+During the dinner-hour, when the men were off work the writer
+generally took some exercise by walking round the walls when the
+rock was under water; but to-day his boundary was greatly enlarged,
+for, instead of the narrow wall as a path, he felt no small degree
+of pleasure in walking round the balcony and passing out and in at
+the space allotted for the light-room door.  In the labours of this
+day both the artificers and seamen felt their work to be extremely
+easy compared with what it had been for some days past.
+
+[Sunday, 29th July]
+
+Captain Wilson and his crew had made preparations for landing the
+last stone, and, as may well be supposed, this was a day of great
+interest at the Bell Rock.  'That it might lose none of its
+honours,' as he expressed himself, the Hedderwick praam-boat, with
+which the first stone of the building had been landed, was
+appointed also to carry the last.  At seven o'clock this evening
+the seamen hoisted three flags upon the Hedderwick, when the
+colours of the Dickie praam-boat, tender, Smeaton, floating light,
+beacon-house, and lighthouse were also displayed; and, the weather
+being remarkably fine, the whole presented a very gay appearance,
+and, in connection with the associations excited, the effect was
+very pleasing.  The praam which carried the stone was towed by the
+seamen in gallant style to the rock, and, on its arrival, cheers
+were given as a finale to the landing department.
+
+[Monday, 30th July]
+
+The ninetieth or last course of the building having been laid to-
+day, which brought the masonry to the height of one hundred and two
+feet six inches, the lintel of the light-room door, being the
+finishing-stone of the exterior walls, was laid with due formality
+by the writer, who, at the same time, pronounced the following
+benediction:  "May the Great Architect of the Universe, under whose
+blessing this perilous work has prospered, preserve it as a guide
+to the mariner."
+
+[Friday, 3rd Aug.]
+
+At three p.m., the necessary preparations having been made, the
+artificers commenced the completing of the floors of the several
+apartments, and at seven o'clock the centre-stone of the light-room
+floor was laid, which may be held as finishing the masonry of this
+important national edifice.  After going through the usual
+ceremonies observed by the brotherhood on occasions of this kind,
+the writer, addressing himself to the artificers and seamen who
+were present, briefly alluded to the utility of the undertaking as
+a monument of the wealth of British commerce, erected through the
+spirited measures of the Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouses
+by means of the able assistance of those who now surrounded him.
+He then took an opportunity of stating that toward those connected
+with this arduous work he would ever retain the most heartfelt
+regard in all their interests.
+
+[Saturday, 4th Aug.]
+
+When the bell was rung as usual on the beacon this morning, every
+one seemed as if he were at a loss what to make of himself.  At
+this period the artificers at the rock consisted of eighteen
+masons, two joiners, one millwright, one smith, and one mortar-
+maker, besides Messrs. Peter Logan and Francis Watt, foremen,
+counting in all twenty-five; and matters were arranged for
+proceeding to Arbroath this afternoon with all hands.  The Sir
+Joseph Banks tender had by this time been afloat, with little
+intermission, for six months, during greater part of which the
+artificers had been almost constantly off at the rock, and were now
+much in want of necessaries of almost every description.  Not a few
+had lost different articles of clothing, which had dropped into the
+sea from the beacon and building.  Some wanted jackets; others,
+from want of hats, wore nightcaps; each was, in fact, more or less
+curtailed in his wardrobe, and it must be confessed that at best
+the party were but in a very tattered condition.  This morning was
+occupied in removing the artificers and their bedding on board of
+the tender; and although their personal luggage was easily shifted,
+the boats had, nevertheless, many articles to remove from the
+beacon-house, and were consequently employed in this service till
+eleven a.m.  All hands being collected and just ready to embark, as
+the water had nearly overflowed the rock, the writer, in taking
+leave, after alluding to the harmony which had ever marked the
+conduct of those employed on the Bell Rock, took occasion to
+compliment the great zeal, attention, and abilities of Mr. Peter
+Logan and Mr. Francis Watt, foremen; Captain James Wilson, landing-
+master; and Captain David Taylor, commander of the tender, who, in
+their several departments, had so faithfully discharged the duties
+assigned to them, often under circumstances the most difficult and
+trying.  The health of these gentlemen was drunk with much warmth
+of feeling by the artificers and seamen, who severally expressed
+the satisfaction they had experienced in acting under them; after
+which the whole party left the rock.
+
+In sailing past the floating light mutual compliments were made by
+a display of flags between that vessel and the tender; and at five
+p.m. the latter vessel entered the harbour of Arbroath, where the
+party were heartily welcomed by a numerous company of spectators,
+who had collected to see the artificers arrive after so long an
+absence from the port.  In the evening the writer invited the
+foremen and captains of the service, together with Mr. David Logan,
+clerk of works at Arbroath, and Mr. Lachlan Kennedy, engineer's
+clerk and book-keeper, and some of their friends, to the principal
+inn, where the evening was spent very happily; and after 'His
+Majesty's Health' and 'The Commissioners of the Northern
+Lighthouses' had been given, 'Stability to the Bell Rock
+Lighthouse' was hailed as a standing toast in the Lighthouse
+service.
+
+[Sunday, 5th Aug.]
+
+The author has formerly noticed the uniformly decent and orderly
+deportment of the artificers who were employed at the Bell Rock
+Lighthouse, and to-day, it is believed, they very generally
+attended church, no doubt with grateful hearts for the narrow
+escapes from personal danger which all of them had more or less
+experienced during their residence at the rock.
+
+[Tuesday, 14th Aug.]
+
+The Smeaton sailed to-day at one p.m., having on board sixteen
+artificers, with Mr. Peter Logan, together with a supply of
+provisions and necessaries, who left the harbour pleased and happy
+to find themselves once more afloat in the Bell Rock service.  At
+seven o'clock the tender was made fast to her moorings, when the
+artificers landed on the rock and took possession of their old
+quarters in the beacon-house, with feelings very different from
+those of 1807, when the works commenced.
+
+The barometer for some days past had been falling from 29.90, and
+to-day it was 29.50, with the wind at N.E., which, in the course of
+this day, increased to a strong gale accompanied with a sea which
+broke with great violence upon the rock.  At twelve noon the tender
+rode very heavily at her moorings, when her chain broke at about
+ten fathoms from the ships bows. The kedge-anchor was immediately
+let go, to hold her till the floating buoy and broken chain should
+be got on board.  But while this was in operation the hawser of the
+kedge was chafed through on the rocky bottom and parted, when the
+vessel was again adrift.  Most fortunately, however, she cast off
+with her head from the rock, and narrowly cleared it, when she
+sailed up the Firth of Forth to wait the return of better weather.
+The artificers were thus left upon the rock with so heavy a sea
+running that it was ascertained to have risen to a height of eighty
+feet on the building.  Under such perilous circumstances it would
+be difficult to describe the feelings of those who, at this time,
+were cooped up in the beacon in so forlorn a situation, with the
+sea not only raging under them, but occasionally falling from a
+great height upon the roof of their temporary lodging, without even
+the attending vessel in view to afford the least gleam of hope in
+the event of any accident.  It is true that they now had the
+masonry of the lighthouse to resort to, which, no doubt, lessened
+the actual danger of their situation; but the building was still
+without a roof, and the deadlights, or storm-shutters, not being
+yet fitted, the windows of the lower story were stove in and
+broken, and at high-water the sea ran in considerable quantities
+out at the entrance door.
+
+[Thursday, 16th Aug.]
+
+The gale continues with unabated violence to-day, and the sprays
+rise to a still greater height, having been carried over the
+masonry of the building, or about ninety feet above the level of
+the sea.  At four o'clock this morning it was breaking into the
+cook's berth, when he rang the alarm-bell, and all hands turned out
+to attend to their personal safety.  The floor of the smith's, or
+mortar gallery, was now completely burst up by the force of the
+sea, when the whole of the deals and the remaining articles upon
+the floor were swept away, such as the cast-iron mortar-tubs, the
+iron hearth of the forge, the smith's bellows, and even his anvil
+were thrown down upon the rock.  Before the tide rose to its full
+height to-day some of the artificers passed along the bridge into
+the lighthouse, to observe the effects of the sea upon it, and they
+reported that they had felt a slight tremulous motion in the
+building when great seas struck it in a certain direction, about
+high-water mark.  On this occasion the sprays were again observed
+to wet the balcony, and even to come over the parapet wall into the
+interior of the light-room.
+
+[Thursday, 23rd Aug.]
+
+The wind being at W.S.W., and the weather more moderate, both the
+tender and the Smeaton got to their moorings on the 23rd, when all
+hands were employed in transporting the sash-frames from on board
+of the Smeaton to the rock.  In the act of setting up one of these
+frames upon the bridge, it was unguardedly suffered to lose its
+balance, and in saving it from damage Captain Wilson met with a
+severe bruise in the groin, on the seat of a gun-shot wound
+received in the early part of his life.  This accident laid him
+aside for several days.
+
+[Monday, 27th Aug.]
+
+The sash-frames of the light-room, eight in number, and weighing
+each 254 pounds, having been got safely up to the top of the
+building, were ranged on the balcony in the order in which they
+were numbered for their places on the top of the parapet-wall; and
+the balance-crane, that useful machine having now lifted all the
+heavier articles, was unscrewed and lowered, to use the landing-
+master's phrase, 'in mournful silence.'
+
+[Sunday, 2nd Sept.]
+
+The steps of the stair being landed, and all the weightier articles
+of the light-room got up to the balcony, the wooden bridge was now
+to be removed, as it had a very powerful effect upon the beacon
+when a heavy sea struck it, and could not possibly have withstood
+the storms of a winter.  Everything having been cleared from the
+bridge, and nothing left but the two principal beams with their
+horizontal braces, James Glen, at high-water, proceeded with a saw
+to cut through the beams at the end next the beacon, which likewise
+disengaged their opposite extremity, inserted a few inches into the
+building.  The frame was then gently lowered into the water, and
+floated off to the Smeaton to be towed to Arbroath, to be applied
+as part of the materials in the erection of the lightkeepers'
+houses.  After the removal of the bridge, the aspect of things at
+the rock was much altered.  The beacon-house and building had both
+a naked look to those accustomed to their former appearance; a
+curious optical deception was also remarked, by which the
+lighthouse seemed to incline from the perpendicular towards the
+beacon.  The horizontal rope-ladder before noticed was again
+stretched to preserve the communication, and the artificers were
+once more obliged to practise the awkward and straddling manner of
+their passage between them during 1809.
+
+At twelve noon the bell rung for prayers, after which the
+artificers went to dinner, when the writer passed along the rope-
+ladder to the lighthouse, and went through the several apartments,
+which were now cleared of lumber.  In the afternoon all hands were
+summoned to the interior of the house, when he had the satisfaction
+of laying the upper step of the stair, or last stone of the
+building.  This ceremony concluded with three cheers, the sound of
+which had a very loud and strange effect within the walls of the
+lighthouse.  At six o'clock Mr. Peter Logan and eleven of the
+artificers embarked with the writer for Arbroath, leaving Mr. James
+Glen with the special charge of the beacon and railways, Mr. Robert
+Selkirk with the building, with a few artificers to fit the
+temporary windows to render the house habitable.
+
+[Sunday, 14th Oct.]
+
+On returning from his voyage to the Northern Lighthouses, the
+writer landed at the Bell Rock on Sunday, the 14th of October, and
+had the pleasure to find, from the very favourable state of the
+weather, that the artificers had been enabled to make great
+progress with the fitting-up of the light-room.
+
+[Friday, 19th Oct.]
+
+The light-room work had proceeded, as usual, to-day under the
+direction of Mr. Dove, assisted in the plumber-work by Mr. John
+Gibson, and in the brazier-work by Mr. Joseph Fraser; while Mr.
+James Slight, with the joiners, were fitting up the storm-shuttters
+of the windows.  In these several departments the artificers were
+at work till seven o'clock p.m., and it being then dark, Mr. Dove
+gave orders to drop work in the light-room; and all hands proceeded
+from thence to the beacon-house, when Charles Henderson, smith, and
+Henry Dickson, brazier, left the work together.  Being both young
+men, who had been for several weeks upon the rock, they had become
+familiar, and even playful, on the most difficult parts about the
+beacon and building.  This evening they were trying to outrun each
+other in descending from the light-room, when Henderson led the
+way; but they were in conversation with each other till they came
+to the rope-ladder distended between the entrance-door of the
+lighthouse and the beacon.  Dickson, on reaching the cook-room, was
+surprised at not seeing his companion, and inquired hastily for
+Henderson.  Upon which the cook replied, 'Was he before you upon
+the rope-ladder?'  Dickson answered, 'Yes; and I thought I heard
+something fall.'  Upon this the alarm was given, and links were
+immediately lighted, with which the artificers descended on the
+legs of the beacon, as near the surface of the water as possible,
+it being then about full tide, and the sea breaking to a
+considerable height upon the building, with the wind at S.S.E.
+But, after watching till low-water, and searching in every
+direction upon the rock, it appeared that poor Henderson must have
+unfortunately fallen through the rope-ladder, and been washed into
+the deep water.
+
+The deceased had passed along this rope-ladder many hundred times,
+both by day and night, and the operations in which he was employed
+being nearly finished, he was about to leave the rock when this
+melancholy catastrophe took place.  The unfortunate loss of
+Henderson cast a deep gloom upon the minds of all who were at the
+rock, and it required some management on the part of those who had
+charge to induce the people to remain patiently at their work; as
+the weather now became more boisterous, and the nights long, they
+found their habitation extremely cheerless, while the winds were
+howling about their ears, and the waves lashing with fury against
+the beams of their insulated habitation.
+
+[Tuesday, 23rd Oct.]
+
+The wind had shifted in the night to N.W., and blew a fresh gale,
+while the sea broke with violence upon the rock.  It was found
+impossible to land, but the writer, from the boat, hailed Mr. Dove,
+and directed the ball to be immediately fixed.  The necessary
+preparations were accordingly made, while the vessel made short
+tacks on the southern side of the rock, in comparatively smooth
+water.  At noon Mr. Dove, assisted by Mr. James Slight, Mr. Robert
+Selkirk, Mr. James Glen, and Mr. John Gibson, plumber, with
+considerable difficulty, from the boisterous state of the weather,
+got the gilded ball screwed on, measuring two feet in diameter, and
+forming the principal ventilator at the upper extremity of the
+cupola of the light-room.  At Mr. Hamilton's desire, a salute of
+seven guns was fired on this occasion, and, all hands being called
+to the quarter-deck, 'Stability to the Bell Rock Lighthouse' was
+not forgotten.
+
+[Tuesday, 30th Oct.]
+
+On reaching the rock it was found that a very heavy sea still ran
+upon it; but the writer having been disappointed on two former
+occasions, and, as the erection of the house might now be
+considered complete, there being nothing wanted externally,
+excepting some of the storm-shutters for the defence of the
+windows, he was the more anxious at this time to inspect it.  Two
+well-manned boats were therefore ordered to be in attendance; and,
+after some difficulty, the wind being at N.N.E., they got safely
+into the western creek, though not without encountering plentiful
+sprays.  It would have been impossible to have attempted a landing
+to-day, under any other circumstances than with boats perfectly
+adapted to the purpose, and with seamen who knew every ledge of the
+rock, and even the length of the sea-weeds at each particular spot,
+so as to dip their oars into the water accordingly, and thereby
+prevent them from getting entangled.  But what was of no less
+consequence to the safety of the party, Captain Wilson, who always
+steered the boat, had a perfect knowledge of the set of the
+different waves, while the crew never shifted their eyes from
+observing his motions, and the strictest silence was preserved by
+every individual except himself.
+
+On entering the house, the writer had the pleasure to find it in a
+somewhat habitable condition, the lower apartments being closed in
+with temporary windows, and fitted with proper storm-shutters.  The
+lowest apartment at the head of the staircase was occupied with
+water, fuel, and provisions, put up in a temporary way until the
+house could be furnished with proper utensils.  The second, or
+light-room store, was at present much encumbered with various tools
+and apparatus for the use of the workmen.  The kitchen immediately
+over this had, as yet, been supplied only with a common ship's
+caboose and plate-iron funnel, while the necessary cooking utensils
+had been taken from the beacon.  The bedroom was for the present
+used as the joiners' workshop, and the strangers' room, immediately
+under the light-room, was occupied by the artificers, the beds
+being ranged in tiers, as was done in the barrack of the beacon.
+The light-room, though unprovided with its machinery, being now
+covered over with the cupola, glazed and painted, had a very
+complete and cleanly appearance.  The balcony was only as yet
+fitted with a temporary rail, consisting of a few iron stanchions,
+connected with ropes; and in this state it was necessary to leave
+it during the winter.
+
+Having gone over the whole of the low-water works on the rock, the
+beacon, and lighthouse, and being satisfied that only the most
+untoward accident in the landing of the machinery could prevent the
+exhibition of the light in the course of the winter, Mr. John Reid,
+formerly of the floating light, was now put in charge of the
+lighthouse as principal keeper; Mr. James Slight had charge of the
+operations of the artificers, while Mr. James Dove and the smiths,
+having finished the frame of the light-room, left the rock for the
+present.  With these arrangements the writer bade adieu to the
+works for the season.  At eleven a.m. the tide was far advanced;
+and there being now little or no shelter for the boats at the rock,
+they had to be pulled through the breach of sea, which came on
+board in great quantities, and it was with extreme difficulty that
+they could be kept in the proper direction of the landing-creek.
+On this occasion he may be permitted to look back with gratitude on
+the many escapes made in the course of this arduous undertaking,
+now brought so near to a successful conclusion.
+
+[Monday, 5th Nov.]
+
+On Monday, the 5th, the yacht again visited the rock, when Mr.
+Slight and the artificers returned with her to the workyard, where
+a number of things were still to prepare connected with the
+temporary fitting up of the accommodation for the lightkeepers.
+Mr. John Reid and Peter Fortune were now the only inmates of the
+house.  This was the smallest number of persons hitherto left in
+the lighthouse.  As four lightkeepers were to be the complement, it
+was intended that three should always be at the rock.  Its present
+inmates, however, could hardly have been better selected for such a
+situation; Mr. Reid being a person possessed of the strictest
+notions of duty and habits of regularity from long service on board
+of a man-of-war, while Mr. Fortune had one of the most happy and
+contented dispositions imaginable.
+
+[Tuesday, 13th Nov.]
+
+From Saturday the 10th till Tuesday the 13th, the wind had been
+from N.E. blowing a heavy gale; but to-day, the weather having
+greatly moderated, Captain Taylor, who now commanded the Smeaton,
+sailed at two o'clock a.m. for the Bell Rock.  At five the floating
+light was hailed and found to be all well.  Being a fine moonlight
+morning, the seamen were changed from the one ship to the other.
+At eight, the Smeaton being off the rock, the boats were manned,
+and taking a supply of water, fuel, and other necessaries, landed
+at the western side, when Mr. Reid and Mr. Fortune were found in
+good health and spirits.
+
+Mr. Reid stated that during the late gales, particularly on Friday,
+the 30th, the wind veering from S.E. to N.E., both he and Mr.
+Fortune sensibly felt the house tremble when particular seas
+struck, about the time of high-water; the former observing that it
+was a tremor of that sort which rather tended to convince him that
+everything about the building was sound, and reminded him of the
+effect produced when a good log of timber is struck sharply with a
+mallet; but, with every confidence in the stability of the
+building, he nevertheless confessed that, in so forlorn a
+situation, they were not insensible to those emotions which, he
+emphatically observed, 'made a man look back upon his former life.'
+
+[1881 Friday, 1st Feb.]
+
+The day, long wished for, on which the mariner was to see a light
+exhibited on the Bell Rock at length arrived.  Captain Wilson, as
+usual, hoisted the float's lanterns to the topmast on the evening
+of the 1st of February; but the moment that the light appeared on
+the rock, the crew, giving three cheers, lowered them, and finally
+extinguished the lights.
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+
+
+{2a}  An error:  Stevensons owned at this date the barony of
+Dolphingston in Haddingtonshire, Montgrennan in Ayrshire, and
+several other lesser places.
+
+{3a}  Pitcairn's Criminal Trials, at large.--[R. L. S.]
+
+{4a}  Fountainhall's Decisions, vol. i. pp. 56, 132, 186, 204,
+368.- [R. L. S.]
+
+{4b}  Ibid. pp. 158, 299.--[R. L. S.]
+
+{4c}  Working farmer:   Fr. laboureur.
+
+{7a}  This John Stevenson was not the only 'witness' of the name;
+other Stevensons were actually killed during the persecutions, in
+the Glen of Trool, on Pentland, etc.; and it is very possible that
+the author's own ancestor was one of the mounted party embodied by
+Muir of Caldwell, only a day too late for Pentland.
+
+{7b}  Wodrow Society's Select Biographies, vol. ii.- [R. L. S.]
+
+{9a}  Though the districts here named are those in which the name
+of Stevenson is most common, it is in point of fact far more wide-
+spread than the text indicates, and occurs from Dumfries and
+Berwickshire to Aberdeen and Orkney.
+
+{12a}  Mr. J. H. Stevenson is satisfied that these speculations as
+to a possible Norse, Highland, or French origin are vain.  All we
+know about the engineer family is that it was sprung from a stock
+of Westland Whigs settled in the latter part of the seventeenth
+century in the parish of Neilston, as mentioned at the beginning of
+the next chapter.  It may be noted that the Ayrshire parish of
+Stevenston, the lands of which are said to have received the name
+in the twelfth century, lies within thirteen miles south-west of
+this place.  The lands of Stevenson in Lanarkshire first mentioned
+in the next century, in the Ragman Roll, lie within twenty miles
+east.
+
+{54a}  This is only a probable hypothesis; I have tried to identify
+my father's anecdote in my grandfather's diary, and may very well
+have been deceived.--[R. L. S.]
+
+{91a}  This is, of course, the tradition commemorated by Southey in
+his ballad of 'The Inchcape Bell.'  Whether true or not, it points
+to the fact that from the infancy of Scottish navigation, the
+seafaring mind had been fully alive to the perils of this reef.
+Repeated attempts had been made to mark the place with beacons, but
+all efforts were unavailing (one such beacon having been carried
+away within eight days of its erection) until Robert Stevenson
+conceived and carried out the idea of the stone tower.  But the
+number of vessels actually lost upon the reef was as nothing to
+those that were cast away in fruitless efforts to avoid it.  Placed
+right in the fairway of two navigations, and one of these the
+entrance to the only harbour of refuge between the Downs and the
+Moray Firth, it breathed abroad along the whole coast an atmosphere
+of terror and perplexity; and no ship sailed that part of the North
+Sea at night, but what the ears of those on board would be strained
+to catch the roaring of the seas on the Bell Rock.
+
+{92a}  The particular event which concentrated Mr. Stevenson's
+attention on the problem of the Bell Rock was the memorable gale of
+December 1799, when, among many other vessels, H.M.S. York, a
+seventy-four-gun ship, went down with all hands on board.  Shortly
+after this disaster Mr. Stevenson made a careful survey, and
+prepared his models for a stone tower, the idea of which was at
+first received with pretty general scepticism, Smeaton's Eddystone
+tower could not be cited as affording a parallel, for there the
+rock is not submerged even at high-water, while the problem of the
+Bell Rock was to build a tower of masonry on a sunken reef far
+distant from land, covered at every tide to a depth of twelve feet
+or more, and having thirty-two fathoms' depth of water within a
+mile of its eastern edge.
+
+{94a}  The grounds for the rejection of the Bill by the House of
+Lords in 1802-3 had been that the extent of coast over which dues
+were proposed to be levied would be too great.  Before going to
+Parliament again, the Board of Northern Lights, desiring to obtain
+support and corroboration for Mr. Stevenson's views, consulted
+first Telford, who was unable to give the matter his attention, and
+then (on Stevenson's suggestion) Rennie, who concurred in affirming
+the practicability of a stone tower, and supported the Bill when it
+came again before Parliament in 1806.  Rennie was afterwards
+appointed by the Commissioners as advising engineer, whom Stevenson
+might consult in cases of emergency.  It seems certain that the
+title of chief engineer had in this instance no more meaning than
+the above.  Rennie, in point of fact, proposed certain
+modifications in Stevenson's plans, which the latter did not
+accept; nevertheless Rennie continued to take a kindly interest in
+the work, and the two engineers remained in friendly correspondence
+during its progress.  The official view taken by the Board as to
+the quarter in which lay both the merit and the responsibility of
+the work may be gathered from a minute of the Commissioners at
+their first meeting held after Stevenson died; in which they record
+their regret 'at the death of this zealous, faithful, and able
+officer, TO WHOM IS DUE THE HONOUR OF CONCEIVING AND EXECUTING THE
+BELL ROCK LIGHTHOUSE.'  The matter is briefly summed up in the Life
+of Robert Stevenson by his son David Stevenson (A. & C. Black,
+1878), and fully discussed, on the basis of official facts and
+figures, by the same writer in a letter to the Civil Engineers' and
+Architects' Journal, 1862.
+
+{122a}  'Nothing was said, but I was LOOKED OUT OF COUNTENANCE,' he
+says in a letter.
+
+{171a}  Ill-formed--ugly.--[R. L. S.]
+
+{174a}  This is an incurable illusion of my grandfather's; he
+always writes 'distended' for 'extended.'--[R. L. S.]
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, RECORDS OF A FAMILY OF ENGINEERS ***
+
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+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
+<html>
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII">
+<title>Records of a Family of Engineers</title>
+</head>
+<body>
+<h2>
+<a href="#startoftext">Records of a Family of Engineers, by Robert Louis Stevenson</a>
+</h2>
+<pre>
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Records of a Family of Engineers
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+Title: Records of a Family of Engineers
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Release Date: June, 1995  [EBook #280]
+[This file was first posted on July 9, 1995]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+</pre>
+<p>
+<a name="startoftext"></a>
+Transcribed from the 1912 Chatto &amp; Windus edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk&nbsp; Additional proofing by Peter Barnes.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+RECORDS OF A FAMILY OF ENGINEERS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+INTRODUCTION: THE SURNAME OF STEVENSON<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+From the thirteenth century onwards, the name, under the various disguises
+of Stevinstoun, Stevensoun, Stevensonne, Stenesone, and Stewinsoune,
+spread across Scotland from the mouth of the Firth of Forth to the mouth
+of the Firth of Clyde.&nbsp; Four times at least it occurs as a place-name.&nbsp;
+There is a parish of Stevenston in Cunningham; a second place of the
+name in the Barony of Bothwell in Lanark; a third on Lyne, above Drochil
+Castle; the fourth on the Tyne, near Traprain Law.&nbsp; Stevenson of
+Stevenson (co. Lanark) swore fealty to Edward I in 1296, and the last
+of that family died after the Restoration.&nbsp; Stevensons of Hirdmanshiels,
+in Midlothian, rode in the Bishops&rsquo; Raid of Aberlady, served as
+jurors, stood bail for neighbours - Hunter of Polwood, for instance
+- and became extinct about the same period, or possibly earlier.&nbsp;
+A Stevenson of Luthrie and another of Pitroddie make their bows, give
+their names, and vanish.&nbsp; And by the year 1700 it does not appear
+that any acre of Scots land was vested in any Stevenson. <a name="citation2a"></a><a href="#footnote2a">{2a}</a><br>
+<br>
+Here is, so far, a melancholy picture of backward progress, and a family
+posting towards extinction.&nbsp; But the law (however administered,
+and I am bound to aver that, in Scotland, &lsquo;it couldna weel be
+waur&rsquo;) acts as a kind of dredge, and with dispassionate impartiality
+brings up into the light of day, and shows us for a moment, in the jury-box
+or on the gallows, the creeping things of the past.&nbsp; By these broken
+glimpses we are able to trace the existence of many other and more inglorious
+Stevensons, picking a private way through the brawl that makes Scots
+history.&nbsp; They were members of Parliament for Peebles, Stirling,
+Pittenweem, Kilrenny, and Inverurie.&nbsp; We find them burgesses of
+Edinburgh; indwellers in Biggar, Perth, and Dalkeith.&nbsp; Thomas was
+the forester of Newbattle Park, Gavin was a baker, John a maltman, Francis
+a chirurgeon, and &lsquo;Schir William&rsquo; a priest.&nbsp; In the
+feuds of Humes and Heatleys, Cunninghams, Montgomeries, Mures, Ogilvies,
+and Turnbulls, we find them inconspicuously involved, and apparently
+getting rather better than they gave.&nbsp; Schir William (reverend
+gentleman) was cruellie slaughtered on the Links of Kincraig in 1582;
+James (&lsquo;in the mill-town of Roberton&rsquo;), murdered in 1590;
+Archibald (&lsquo;in Gallowfarren&rsquo;), killed with shots of pistols
+and hagbuts in 1608.&nbsp; Three violent deaths in about seventy years,
+against which we can only put the case of Thomas, servant to Hume of
+Cowden Knowes, who was arraigned with his two young masters for the
+death of the Bastard of Mellerstanes in 1569.&nbsp; John (&lsquo;in
+Dalkeith&rsquo;) stood sentry without Holyrood while the banded lords
+were despatching Rizzio within.&nbsp; William, at the ringing of Perth
+bell, ran before Gowrie House &lsquo;with ane sword, and, entering to
+the yearde, saw George Craiggingilt with ane twa-handit sword and utheris
+nychtbouris; at quilk time James Boig cryit ower ane wynds, &ldquo;Awa
+hame! ye will all be hangit&rdquo;&rsquo; - a piece of advice which
+William took, and immediately &lsquo;depairtit.&rsquo;&nbsp; John got
+a maid with child to him in Biggar, and seemingly deserted her; she
+was hanged on the Castle Hill for infanticide, June 1614; and Martin,
+elder in Dalkeith, eternally disgraced the name by signing witness in
+a witch trial, 1661.&nbsp; These are two of our black sheep. <a name="citation3a"></a><a href="#footnote3a">{3a}</a>&nbsp;
+Under the Restoration, one Stevenson was a bailie in Edinburgh, and
+another the lessee of the Canonmills.&nbsp; There were at the same period
+two physicians of the name in Edinburgh, one of whom, Dr. Archibald,
+appears to have been a famous man in his day and generation.&nbsp; The
+Court had continual need of him; it was he who reported, for instance,
+on the state of Rumbold; and he was for some time in the enjoyment of
+a pension of a thousand pounds Scots (about eighty pounds sterling)
+at a time when five hundred pounds is described as &lsquo;an opulent
+future.&rsquo;&nbsp; I do not know if I should be glad or sorry that
+he failed to keep favour; but on 6th January 1682 (rather a cheerless
+New Year&rsquo;s present) his pension was expunged. <a name="citation4a"></a><a href="#footnote4a">{4a}</a>&nbsp;
+There need be no doubt, at least, of my exultation at the fact that
+he was knighted and recorded arms.&nbsp; Not quite so genteel, but still
+in public life, Hugh was Under-Clerk to the Privy Council, and liked
+being so extremely.&nbsp; I gather this from his conduct in September
+1681, when, with all the lords and their servants, he took the woful
+and soul-destroying Test, swearing it &lsquo;word by word upon his knees.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And, behold! it was in vain, for Hugh was turned out of his small post
+in 1684. <a name="citation4b"></a><a href="#footnote4b">{4b}</a>&nbsp;
+Sir Archibald and Hugh were both plainly inclined to be trimmers; but
+there was one witness of the name of Stevenson who held high the banner
+of the Covenant - John, &lsquo;Land-Labourer, <a name="citation4c"></a><a href="#footnote4c">{4c}</a>
+in the parish of Daily, in Carrick,&rsquo; that &lsquo;eminently pious
+man.&rsquo;&nbsp; He seems to have been a poor sickly soul, and shows
+himself disabled with scrofula, and prostrate and groaning aloud with
+fever; but the enthusiasm of the martyr burned high within him.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I was made to take joyfully the spoiling of my goods, and with
+pleasure for His name&rsquo;s sake wandered in deserts and in mountains,
+in dens and caves of the earth.&nbsp; I lay four months in the coldest
+season of the year in a haystack in my father&rsquo;s garden, and a
+whole February in the open fields not far from Camragen, and this I
+did without the least prejudice from the night air; one night, when
+lying in the fields near to the Carrick-Miln, I was all covered with
+snow in the morning.&nbsp; Many nights have I lain with pleasure in
+the churchyard of Old Daily, and made a grave my pillow; frequently
+have I resorted to the old walls about the glen, near to Camragen, and
+there sweetly rested.&rsquo;&nbsp; The visible band of God protected
+and directed him.&nbsp; Dragoons were turned aside from the bramble-bush
+where he lay hidden.&nbsp; Miracles were performed for his behoof.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I got a horse and a woman to carry the child, and came to the
+same mountain, where I wandered by the mist before; it is commonly known
+by the name of Kellsrhins: when we came to go up the mountain, there
+came on a great rain, which we thought was the occasion of the child&rsquo;s
+weeping, and she wept so bitterly, that all we could do could not divert
+her from it, so that she was ready to burst.&nbsp; When we got to the
+top of the mountain, where the Lord had been formerly kind to my soul
+in prayer, I looked round me for a stone, and espying one, I went and
+brought it.&nbsp; When the woman with me saw me set down the stone,
+she smiled, and asked what I was going to do with it.&nbsp; I told her
+I was going to set it up as my Ebenezer, because hitherto, and in that
+place, the Lord had formerly helped, and I hoped would yet help.&nbsp;
+The rain still continuing, the child weeping bitterly, I went to prayer,
+and no sooner did I cry to God, but the child gave over weeping, and
+when we got up from prayer, the rain was pouring down on every side,
+but in the way where we were to go there fell not one drop; the place
+not rained on was as big as an ordinary avenue.&rsquo;&nbsp; And so
+great a saint was the natural butt of Satan&rsquo;s persecutions.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I retired to the fields for secret prayer about mid-night.&nbsp;
+When I went to pray I was much straitened, and could not get one request,
+but &ldquo;Lord pity,&rdquo; &ldquo;Lord help&rdquo;; this I came over
+frequently; at length the terror of Satan fell on me in a high degree,
+and all I could say even then was - &ldquo;Lord help.&rdquo;&nbsp; I
+continued in the duty for some time, notwithstanding of this terror.&nbsp;
+At length I got up to my feet, and the terror still increased; then
+the enemy took me by the arm-pits, and seemed to lift me up by my arms.&nbsp;
+I saw a loch just before me, and I concluded he designed to throw me
+there by force; and had he got leave to do so, it might have brought
+a great reproach upon religion. <a name="citation7a"></a><a href="#footnote7a">{7a}</a>&nbsp;
+But it was otherwise ordered, and the cause of piety escaped that danger.
+<a name="citation7b"></a><a href="#footnote7b">{7b}</a><br>
+<br>
+On the whole, the Stevensons may be described as decent, reputable folk,
+following honest trades - millers, maltsters, and doctors, playing the
+character parts in the Waverley Novels with propriety, if without distinction;
+and to an orphan looking about him in the world for a potential ancestry,
+offering a plain and quite unadorned refuge, equally free from shame
+and glory.&nbsp; John, the land-labourer, is the one living and memorable
+figure, and he, alas! cannot possibly be more near than a collateral.&nbsp;
+It was on August 12, 1678, that he heard Mr. John Welsh on the Craigdowhill,
+and &lsquo;took the heavens, earth, and sun in the firmament that was
+shining on us, as also the ambassador who made the offer, and <i>the
+clerk who raised the</i> <i>psalms</i>, to witness that I did give myself
+away to the Lord in a personal and perpetual covenant never to be forgotten&rsquo;;
+and already, in 1675, the birth of my direct ascendant was registered
+in Glasgow.&nbsp; So that I have been pursuing ancestors too far down;
+and John the land-labourer is debarred me, and I must relinquish from
+the trophies of my house his <i>rare soul-strengthening</i> <i>and</i>
+<i>comforting cordial</i>.&nbsp; It is the same case with the Edinburgh
+bailie and the miller of the Canonmills, worthy man! and with that public
+character, Hugh the Under-Clerk, and, more than all, with Sir Archibald,
+the physician, who recorded arms.&nbsp; And I am reduced to a family
+of inconspicuous maltsters in what was then the clean and handsome little
+city on the Clyde.<br>
+<br>
+The name has a certain air of being Norse.&nbsp; But the story of Scottish
+nomenclature is confounded by a continual process of translation and
+half-translation from the Gaelic which in olden days may have been sometimes
+reversed.&nbsp; Roy becomes Reid; Gow, Smith.&nbsp; A great Highland
+clan uses the name of Robertson; a sept in Appin that of Livingstone;
+Maclean in Glencoe answers to Johnstone at Lockerby.&nbsp; And we find
+such hybrids as Macalexander for Macallister.&nbsp; There is but one
+rule to be deduced: that however uncompromisingly Saxon a name may appear,
+you can never be sure it does not designate a Celt.&nbsp; My great-grandfather
+wrote the name <i>Stevenson</i> but pronounced it <i>Steenson</i>, after
+the fashion of the immortal minstrel in <i>Redgauntlet</i>; and this
+elision of a medial consonant appears a Gaelic process; and, curiously
+enough, I have come across no less than two Gaelic forms: <i>John Macstophane
+cordinerius in</i> <i>Crossraguel</i>, 1573, and <i>William M&rsquo;Steen</i>
+in Dunskeith (co. Ross), 1605.&nbsp; Stevenson, Steenson, Macstophane,
+M&rsquo;Steen: which is the original? which the translation?&nbsp; Or
+were these separate creations of the patronymic, some English, some
+Gaelic?&nbsp; The curiously compact territory in which we find them
+seated - Ayr, Lanark, Peebles, Stirling, Perth, Fife, and the Lothians
+- would seem to forbid the supposition. <a name="citation9a"></a><a href="#footnote9a">{9a}</a><br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;STEVENSON - or according to tradition of one of the proscribed
+of the clan MacGregor, who was born among the willows or in a hill-side
+sheep-pen - &ldquo;Son of my love,&rdquo; a heraldic bar sinister, but
+history reveals a reason for the birth among the willows far other than
+the sinister aspect of the name&rsquo;: these are the dark words of
+Mr. Cosmo Innes; but history or tradition, being interrogated, tells
+a somewhat tangled tale.&nbsp; The heir of Macgregor of Glenorchy, murdered
+about 1858 by the Argyll Campbells, appears to have been the original
+&lsquo;Son of my love&rsquo;; and his more loyal clansmen took the name
+to fight under.&nbsp; It may be supposed the story of their resistance
+became popular, and the name in some sort identified with the idea of
+opposition to the Campbells.&nbsp; Twice afterwards, on some renewed
+aggression, in 1502 and 1552, we find the Macgregors again banding themselves
+into a sept of &lsquo;Sons of my love&rsquo;; and when the great disaster
+fell on them in 1603, the whole original legend reappears, and we have
+the heir of Alaster of Glenstrae born &lsquo;among the willows&rsquo;
+of a fugitive mother, and the more loyal clansmen again rallying under
+the name of Stevenson.&nbsp; A story would not be told so often unless
+it had some base in fact; nor (if there were no bond at all between
+the Red Macgregors and the Stevensons) would that extraneous and somewhat
+uncouth name be so much repeated in the legends of the Children of the
+Mist.<br>
+<br>
+But I am enabled, by my very lively and obliging correspondent, Mr.
+George A. Macgregor Stevenson of New York, to give an actual instance.&nbsp;
+His grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and great-great-great-grandfather,
+all used the names of Macgregor and Stevenson as occasion served; being
+perhaps Macgregor by night and Stevenson by day.&nbsp; The great-great-great-grandfather
+was a mighty man of his hands, marched with the clan in the &lsquo;Forty-five,
+and returned with <i>spolia opima</i> in the shape of a sword, which
+he had wrested from an officer in the retreat, and which is in the possession
+of my correspondent to this day.&nbsp; His great-grandson (the grandfather
+of my correspondent), being converted to Methodism by some wayside preacher,
+discarded in a moment his name, his old nature, and his political principles,
+and with the zeal of a proselyte sealed his adherence to the Protestant
+Succession by baptising his next son George.&nbsp; This George became
+the publisher and editor of the <i>Wesleyan Times</i>.&nbsp; His children
+were brought up in ignorance of their Highland pedigree; and my correspondent
+was puzzled to overhear his father speak of him as a true Macgregor,
+and amazed to find, in rummaging about that peaceful and pious house,
+the sword of the Hanoverian officer.&nbsp; After he was grown up and
+was better informed of his descent, &lsquo;I frequently asked my father,&rsquo;
+he writes, &lsquo;why he did not use the name of Macgregor; his replies
+were significant, and give a picture of the man: &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t
+a good <i>Methodist</i> name.&nbsp; You can use it, but it will do you
+no <i>good</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yet the old gentleman, by way of pleasantry,
+used to announce himself to friends as &ldquo;Colonel Macgregor.&rdquo;&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Here, then, are certain Macgregors habitually using the name of Stevenson,
+and at last, under the influence of Methodism, adopting it entirely.&nbsp;
+Doubtless a proscribed clan could not be particular; they took a name
+as a man takes an umbrella against a shower; as Rob Roy took Campbell,
+and his son took Drummond.&nbsp; But this case is different; Stevenson
+was not taken and left - it was consistently adhered to.&nbsp; It does
+not in the least follow that all Stevensons are of the clan Alpin; but
+it does follow that some may be.&nbsp; And I cannot conceal from myself
+the possibility that James Stevenson in Glasgow, my first authentic
+ancestor, may have had a Highland <i>alias</i> upon his conscience and
+a claymore in his back parlour.<br>
+<br>
+To one more tradition I may allude, that we are somehow descended from
+a French barber-surgeon who came to St. Andrews in the service of one
+of the Cardinal Beatons.&nbsp; No details were added.&nbsp; But the
+very name of France was so detested in my family for three generations,
+that I am tempted to suppose there may be something in it. <a name="citation12a"></a><a href="#footnote12a">{12a}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER I: DOMESTIC ANNALS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+It is believed that in 1665, James Stevenson in Nether Carsewell, parish
+of Neilston, county of Renfrew, and presumably a tenant farmer, married
+one Jean Keir; and in 1675, without doubt, there was born to these two
+a son Robert, possibly a maltster in Glasgow.&nbsp; In 1710, Robert
+married, for a second time, Elizabeth Cumming, and there was born to
+them, in 1720, another Robert, certainly a maltster in Glasgow.&nbsp;
+In 1742, Robert the second married Margaret Fulton (Margret, she called
+herself), by whom he had ten children, among whom were Hugh, born February
+1749, and Alan, born June 1752.<br>
+<br>
+With these two brothers my story begins.&nbsp; Their deaths were simultaneous;
+their lives unusually brief and full.&nbsp; Tradition whispered me in
+childhood they were the owners of an islet near St. Kitts; and it is
+certain they had risen to be at the head of considerable interests in
+the West Indies, which Hugh managed abroad and Alan at home, at an age
+when others are still curveting a clerk&rsquo;s stool.&nbsp; My kinsman,
+Mr. Stevenson of Stirling, has heard his father mention that there had
+been &lsquo;something romantic&rsquo; about Alan&rsquo;s marriage: and,
+alas! he has forgotten what.&nbsp; It was early at least.&nbsp; His
+wife was Jean, daughter of David Lillie, a builder in Glasgow, and several
+times &lsquo;Deacon of the Wrights&rsquo;: the date of the marriage
+has not reached me; but on 8th June 1772, when Robert, the only child
+of the union, was born, the husband and father had scarce passed, or
+had not yet attained, his twentieth year.&nbsp; Here was a youth making
+haste to give hostages to fortune.&nbsp; But this early scene of prosperity
+in love and business was on the point of closing.<br>
+<br>
+There hung in the house of this young family, and successively in those
+of my grandfather and father, an oil painting of a ship of many tons
+burthen.&nbsp; Doubtless the brothers had an interest in the vessel;
+I was told she had belonged to them outright; and the picture was preserved
+through years of hardship, and remains to this day in the possession
+of the family, the only memorial of my great-grandsire Alan.&nbsp; It
+was on this ship that he sailed on his last adventure, summoned to the
+West Indies by Hugh.&nbsp; An agent had proved unfaithful on a serious
+scale; and it used to be told me in my childhood how the brothers pursued
+him from one island to another in an open boat, were exposed to the
+pernicious dews of the tropics, and simultaneously struck down.&nbsp;
+The dates and places of their deaths (now before me) would seem to indicate
+a more scattered and prolonged pursuit: Hugh, on the 16th April 1774,
+in Tobago, within sight of Trinidad; Alan, so late as 26th May, and
+so far away as &lsquo;Santt Kittes,&rsquo; in the Leeward Islands -
+both, says the family Bible, &lsquo;of a fiver&rsquo;(!).&nbsp; The
+death of Hugh was probably announced by Alan in a letter, to which we
+may refer the details of the open boat and the dew.&nbsp; Thus, at least,
+in something like the course of post, both were called away, the one
+twenty-five, the other twenty-two; their brief generation became extinct,
+their short-lived house fell with them; and &lsquo;in these lawless
+parts and lawless times&rsquo; - the words are my grandfather&rsquo;s
+- their property was stolen or became involved.&nbsp; Many years later,
+I understand some small recovery to have been made; but at the moment
+almost the whole means of the family seem to have perished with the
+young merchants.&nbsp; On the 27th April, eleven days after Hugh Stevenson,
+twenty-nine before Alan, died David Lillie, the Deacon of the Wrights;
+so that mother and son were orphaned in one month.&nbsp; Thus, from
+a few scraps of paper bearing little beyond dates, we construct the
+outlines of the tragedy that shadowed the cradle of Robert Stevenson.<br>
+<br>
+Jean Lillie was a young woman of strong sense, well fitted to contend
+with poverty, and of a pious disposition, which it is like that these
+misfortunes heated.&nbsp; Like so many other widowed Scots-women, she
+vowed her son should wag his head in a pulpit; but her means were inadequate
+to her ambition.&nbsp; A charity school, and some time under a Mr. M&rsquo;Intyre,
+&lsquo;a famous linguist,&rsquo; were all she could afford in the way
+of education to the would-be minister.&nbsp; He learned no Greek; in
+one place he mentions that the Orations of Cicero were his highest book
+in Latin; in another that he had &lsquo;delighted&rsquo; in Virgil and
+Horace; but his delight could never have been scholarly.&nbsp; This
+appears to have been the whole of his training previous to an event
+which changed his own destiny and moulded that of his descendants -
+the second marriage of his mother.<br>
+<br>
+There was a Merchant-Burgess of Edinburgh of the name of Thomas Smith.&nbsp;
+The Smith pedigree has been traced a little more particularly than the
+Stevensons&rsquo;, with a similar dearth of illustrious names.&nbsp;
+One character seems to have appeared, indeed, for a moment at the wings
+of history: a skipper of Dundee who smuggled over some Jacobite big-wig
+at the time of the &lsquo;Fifteen, and was afterwards drowned in Dundee
+harbour while going on board his ship.&nbsp; With this exception, the
+generations of the Smiths present no conceivable interest even to a
+descendant; and Thomas, of Edinburgh, was the first to issue from respectable
+obscurity.&nbsp; His father, a skipper out of Broughty Ferry, was drowned
+at sea while Thomas was still young.&nbsp; He seems to have owned a
+ship or two - whalers, I suppose, or coasters - and to have been a member
+of the Dundee Trinity House, whatever that implies.&nbsp; On his death
+the widow remained in Broughty, and the son came to push his future
+in Edinburgh.&nbsp; There is a story told of him in the family which
+I repeat here because I shall have to tell later on a similar, but more
+perfectly authenticated, experience of his stepson, Robert Stevenson.&nbsp;
+Word reached Thomas that his mother was unwell, and he prepared to leave
+for Broughty on the morrow.&nbsp; It was between two and three in the
+morning, and the early northern daylight was already clear, when he
+awoke and beheld the curtains at the bed-foot drawn aside and his mother
+appear in the interval, smile upon him for a moment, and then vanish.&nbsp;
+The sequel is stereo-type; he took the time by his watch, and arrived
+at Broughty to learn it was the very moment of her death.&nbsp; The
+incident is at least curious in having happened to such a person - as
+the tale is being told of him.&nbsp; In all else, he appears as a man
+ardent, passionate, practical, designed for affairs and prospering in
+them far beyond the average.&nbsp; He founded a solid business in lamps
+and oils, and was the sole proprietor of a concern called the Greenside
+Company&rsquo;s Works - &lsquo;a multifarious concern it was,&rsquo;
+writes my cousin, Professor Swan, &lsquo;of tinsmiths, coppersmiths,
+brass-founders, blacksmiths, and japanners.&rsquo;&nbsp; He was also,
+it seems, a shipowner and underwriter.&nbsp; He built himself &lsquo;a
+land&rsquo; - Nos. 1 and 2 Baxter&rsquo;s Place, then no such unfashionable
+neighbourhood - and died, leaving his only son in easy circumstances,
+and giving to his three surviving daughters portions of five thousand
+pounds and upwards.&nbsp; There is no standard of success in life; but
+in one of its meanings, this is to succeed.<br>
+<br>
+In what we know of his opinions, he makes a figure highly characteristic
+of the time.&nbsp; A high Tory and patriot, a captain - so I find it
+in my notes - of Edinburgh Spearmen, and on duty in the Castle during
+the Muir and Palmer troubles, he bequeathed to his descendants a bloodless
+sword and a somewhat violent tradition, both long preserved.&nbsp; The
+judge who sat on Muir and Palmer, the famous Braxfield, let fall from
+the bench the <i>obiter dictum</i> - &lsquo;I never liked the French
+all my days, but now I hate them.&rsquo;&nbsp; If Thomas Smith, the
+Edinburgh Spearman, were in court, he must have been tempted to applaud.&nbsp;
+The people of that land were his abhorrence; he loathed Buonaparte like
+Antichrist.&nbsp; Towards the end he fell into a kind of dotage; his
+family must entertain him with games of tin soldiers, which he took
+a childish pleasure to array and overset; but those who played with
+him must be upon their guard, for if his side, which was always that
+of the English against the French, should chance to be defeated, there
+would be trouble in Baxter&rsquo;s Place.&nbsp; For these opinions he
+may almost be said to have suffered.&nbsp; Baptised and brought up in
+the Church of Scotland, he had, upon some conscientious scruple, joined
+the communion of the Baptists.&nbsp; Like other Nonconformists, these
+were inclined to the Liberal side in politics, and, at least in the
+beginning, regarded Buonaparte as a deliverer.&nbsp; From the time of
+his joining the Spearmen, Thomas Smith became in consequence a bugbear
+to his brethren in the faith.&nbsp;  &lsquo;They that take the sword
+shall perish with the sword,&rsquo; they told him; they gave him &lsquo;no
+rest&rsquo;; &lsquo;his position became intolerable&rsquo;; it was plain
+he must choose between his political and his religious tenets; and in
+the last years of his life, about 1812, he returned to the Church of
+his fathers.<br>
+<br>
+August 1786 was the date of his chief advancement, when, having designed
+a system of oil lights to take the place of the primitive coal fires
+before in use, he was dubbed engineer to the newly-formed Board of Northern
+Lighthouses.&nbsp; Not only were his fortunes bettered by the appointment,
+but he was introduced to a new and wider field for the exercise of his
+abilities, and a new way of life highly agreeable to his active constitution.&nbsp;
+He seems to have rejoiced in the long journeys, and to have combined
+them with the practice of field sports.&nbsp; &lsquo;A tall, stout man
+coming ashore with his gun over his arm&rsquo; - so he was described
+to my father - the only description that has come down to me by a light-keeper
+old in the service.&nbsp; Nor did this change come alone.&nbsp; On the
+9th July of the same year, Thomas Smith had been left for the second
+time a widower.&nbsp; As he was still but thirty-three years old, prospering
+in his affairs, newly advanced in the world, and encumbered at the time
+with a family of children, five in number, it was natural that he should
+entertain the notion of another wife.&nbsp; Expeditious in business,
+he was no less so in his choice; and it was not later than June 1787
+- for my grandfather is described as still in his fifteenth year - that
+he married the widow of Alan Stevenson.<br>
+<br>
+The perilous experiment of bringing together two families for once succeeded.&nbsp;
+Mr. Smith&rsquo;s two eldest daughters, Jean and Janet, fervent in piety,
+unwearied in kind deeds, were well qualified both to appreciate and
+to attract the stepmother; and her son, on the other hand, seems to
+have found immediate favour in the eyes of Mr. Smith.&nbsp; It is, perhaps,
+easy to exaggerate the ready-made resemblances; the tired woman must
+have done much to fashion girls who were under ten; the man, lusty and
+opinionated, must have stamped a strong impression on the boy of fifteen.&nbsp;
+But the cleavage of the family was too marked, the identity of character
+and interest produced between the two men on the one hand, and the three
+women on the other, was too complete to have been the result of influence
+alone.&nbsp; Particular bonds of union must have pre-existed on each
+side.&nbsp; And there is no doubt that the man and the boy met with
+common ambitions, and a common bent, to the practice of that which had
+not so long before acquired the name of civil engineering.<br>
+<br>
+For the profession which is now so thronged, famous, and influential,
+was then a thing of yesterday.&nbsp; My grandfather had an anecdote
+of Smeaton, probably learned from John Clerk of Eldin, their common
+friend.&nbsp; Smeaton was asked by the Duke of Argyll to visit the West
+Highland coast for a professional purpose.&nbsp; He refused, appalled,
+it seems, by the rough travelling.&nbsp; &lsquo;You can recommend some
+other fit person?&rsquo; asked the Duke.&nbsp; &lsquo;No,&rsquo; said
+Smeaton, &lsquo;I&rsquo;m sorry I can&rsquo;t.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;What!&rsquo;
+cried the Duke, &lsquo;a profession with only one man in it!&nbsp; Pray,
+who taught you?&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Why,&rsquo; said Smeaton, &lsquo;I
+believe I may say I was self-taught, an&rsquo;t please your grace.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Smeaton, at the date of Thomas Smith&rsquo;s third marriage, was yet
+living; and as the one had grown to the new profession from his place
+at the instrument-maker&rsquo;s, the other was beginning to enter it
+by the way of his trade.&nbsp; The engineer of to-day is confronted
+with a library of acquired results; tables and formulae to the value
+of folios full have been calculated and recorded; and the student finds
+everywhere in front of him the footprints of the pioneers.&nbsp; In
+the eighteenth century the field was largely unexplored; the engineer
+must read with his own eyes the face of nature; he arose a volunteer,
+from the workshop or the mill, to undertake works which were at once
+inventions and adventures.&nbsp; It was not a science then - it was
+a living art; and it visibly grew under the eyes and between the hands
+of its practitioners.<br>
+<br>
+The charm of such an occupation was strongly felt by stepfather and
+stepson.&nbsp; It chanced that Thomas Smith was a reformer; the superiority
+of his proposed lamp and reflectors over open fires of coal secured
+his appointment; and no sooner had he set his hand to the task than
+the interest of that employment mastered him.&nbsp; The vacant stage
+on which he was to act, and where all had yet to be created - the greatness
+of the difficulties, the smallness of the means intrusted him - would
+rouse a man of his disposition like a call to battle.&nbsp; The lad
+introduced by marriage under his roof was of a character to sympathise;
+the public usefulness of the service would appeal to his judgment, the
+perpetual need for fresh expedients stimulate his ingenuity.&nbsp; And
+there was another attraction which, in the younger man at least, appealed
+to, and perhaps first aroused, a profound and enduring sentiment of
+romance: I mean the attraction of the life.&nbsp; The seas into which
+his labours carried the new engineer were still scarce charted, the
+coasts still dark; his way on shore was often far beyond the convenience
+of any road; the isles in which he must sojourn were still partly savage.&nbsp;
+He must toss much in boats; he must often adventure on horseback by
+the dubious bridle-track through unfrequented wildernesses; he must
+sometimes plant his lighthouse in the very camp of wreckers; and he
+was continually enforced to the vicissitudes of outdoor life.&nbsp;
+The joy of my grandfather in this career was strong as the love of woman.&nbsp;
+It lasted him through youth and manhood, it burned strong in age, and
+at the approach of death his last yearning was to renew these loved
+experiences.&nbsp; What he felt himself he continued to attribute to
+all around him.&nbsp; And to this supposed sentiment in others I find
+him continually, almost pathetically, appealing; often in vain.<br>
+<br>
+Snared by these interests, the boy seems to have become almost at once
+the eager confidant and adviser of his new connection; the Church, if
+he had ever entertained the prospect very warmly, faded from his view;
+and at the age of nineteen I find him already in a post of some authority,
+superintending the construction of the lighthouse on the isle of Little
+Cumbrae, in the Firth of Clyde.&nbsp; The change of aim seems to have
+caused or been accompanied by a change of character.&nbsp; It sounds
+absurd to couple the name of my grandfather with the word indolence;
+but the lad who had been destined from the cradle to the Church, and
+who had attained the age of fifteen without acquiring more than a moderate
+knowledge of Latin, was at least no unusual student.&nbsp; And from
+the day of his charge at Little Cumbrae he steps before us what he remained
+until the end, a man of the most zealous industry, greedy of occupation,
+greedy of knowledge, a stern husband of time, a reader, a writer, unflagging
+in his task of self-improvement.&nbsp; Thenceforward his summers were
+spent directing works and ruling workmen, now in uninhabited, now in
+half-savage islands; his winters were set apart, first at the Andersonian
+Institution, then at the University of Edinburgh to improve himself
+in mathematics, chemistry, natural history, agriculture, moral philosophy,
+and logic; a bearded student - although no doubt scrupulously shaved.&nbsp;
+I find one reference to his years in class which will have a meaning
+for all who have studied in Scottish Universities.&nbsp; He mentions
+a recommendation made by the professor of logic.&nbsp; &lsquo;The high-school
+men,&rsquo; he writes, &lsquo;and <i>bearded men like myself</i>, were
+all attention.&rsquo;&nbsp; If my grandfather were throughout life a
+thought too studious of the art of getting on, much must be forgiven
+to the bearded and belated student who looked across, with a sense of
+difference, at &lsquo;the high-school men.&rsquo;&nbsp; Here was a gulf
+to be crossed; but already he could feel that he had made a beginning,
+and that must have been a proud hour when he devoted his earliest earnings
+to the repayment of the charitable foundation in which he had received
+the rudiments of knowledge.<br>
+<br>
+In yet another way he followed the example of his father-in-law, and
+from 1794 to 1807, when the affairs of the Bell Rock made it necessary
+for him to resign, he served in different corps of volunteers.&nbsp;
+In the last of these he rose to a position of distinction, no less than
+captain of the Grenadier Company, and his colonel, in accepting his
+resignation, entreated he would do them &lsquo;the favour of continuing
+as an honorary member of a corps which has been so much indebted for
+your zeal and exertions.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+To very pious women the men of the house are apt to appear worldly.&nbsp;
+The wife, as she puts on her new bonnet before church, is apt to sigh
+over that assiduity which enabled her husband to pay the milliner&rsquo;s
+bill.&nbsp; And in the household of the Smiths and Stevensons the women
+were not only extremely pious, but the men were in reality a trifle
+worldly.&nbsp; Religious they both were; conscious, like all Scots,
+of the fragility and unreality of that scene in which we play our uncomprehended
+parts; like all Scots, realising daily and hourly the sense of another
+will than ours and a perpetual direction in the affairs of life.&nbsp;
+But the current of their endeavours flowed in a more obvious channel.&nbsp;
+They had got on so far; to get on further was their next ambition -
+to gather wealth, to rise in society, to leave their descendants higher
+than themselves, to be (in some sense) among the founders of families.&nbsp;
+Scott was in the same town nourishing similar dreams.&nbsp; But in the
+eyes of the women these dreams would be foolish and idolatrous.<br>
+<br>
+I have before me some volumes of old letters addressed to Mrs. Smith
+and the two girls, her favourites, which depict in a strong light their
+characters and the society in which they moved.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;My very dear and much esteemed Friend,&rsquo; writes one correspondent,
+&lsquo;this day being the anniversary of our acquaintance, I feel inclined
+to address you; but where shall I find words to express the fealings
+of a graitful <i>Heart</i>, first to the Lord who graiciously inclined
+you on this day last year to notice an afflicted Strainger providentially
+cast in your way far from any Earthly friend? . . .&nbsp; Methinks I
+shall hear him say unto you, &ldquo;Inasmuch as ye shewed kindness to
+my afflicted handmaiden, ye did it unto me.&rdquo;&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+This is to Jean; but the same afflicted lady wrote indifferently to
+Jean, to Janet, and to Ms. Smith, whom she calls &lsquo;my Edinburgh
+mother.&rsquo;&nbsp; It is plain the three were as one person, moving
+to acts of kindness, like the Graces, inarmed.&nbsp; Too much stress
+must not be laid on the style of this correspondence; Clarinda survived,
+not far away, and may have met the ladies on the Calton Hill; and many
+of the writers appear, underneath the conventions of the period, to
+be genuinely moved.&nbsp; But what unpleasantly strikes a reader is,
+that these devout unfortunates found a revenue in their devotion.&nbsp;
+It is everywhere the same tale; on the side of the soft-hearted ladies,
+substantial acts of help; on the side of the correspondents, affection,
+italics, texts, ecstasies, and imperfect spelling.&nbsp; When a midwife
+is recommended, not at all for proficiency in her important art, but
+because she has &lsquo;a sister whom I [the correspondent] esteem and
+respect, and [who] is a spiritual daughter of my Hond Father in the
+Gosple,&rsquo; the mask seems to be torn off, and the wages of godliness
+appear too openly.&nbsp; Capacity is a secondary matter in a midwife,
+temper in a servant, affection in a daughter, and the repetition of
+a shibboleth fulfils the law.&nbsp; Common decency is at times forgot
+in the same page with the most sanctified advice and aspiration.&nbsp;
+Thus I am introduced to a correspondent who appears to have been at
+the time the housekeeper at Invermay, and who writes to condole with
+my grandmother in a season of distress.&nbsp; For nearly half a sheet
+she keeps to the point with an excellent discretion in language then
+suddenly breaks out:<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;It was fully my intention to have left this at Martinmass, but
+the Lord fixes the bounds of our habitation.&nbsp; I have had more need
+of patience in my situation here than in any other, partly from the
+very violent, unsteady, deceitful temper of the Mistress of the Family,
+and also from the state of the house.&nbsp; It was in a train of repair
+when I came here two years ago, and is still in Confusion.&nbsp; There
+is above six Thousand Pounds&rsquo; worth of Furniture come from London
+to be put up when the rooms are completely finished; and then, woe be
+to the Person who is Housekeeper at Invermay!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+And by the tail of the document, which is torn, I see she goes on to
+ask the bereaved family to seek her a new place.&nbsp; It is extraordinary
+that people should have been so deceived in so careless an impostor;
+that a few sprinkled &lsquo;God willings&rsquo; should have blinded
+them to the essence of this venomous letter; and that they should have
+been at the pains to bind it in with others (many of them highly touching)
+in their memorial of harrowing days.&nbsp; But the good ladies were
+without guile and without suspicion; they were victims marked for the
+axe, and the religious impostors snuffed up the wind as they drew near.<br>
+<br>
+I have referred above to my grandmother; it was no slip of the pen:
+for by an extraordinary arrangement, in which it is hard not to suspect
+the managing hand of a mother, Jean Smith became the wife of Robert
+Stevenson.&nbsp; Mrs. Smith had failed in her design to make her son
+a minister, and she saw him daily more immersed in business and worldly
+ambition.&nbsp; One thing remained that she might do: she might secure
+for him a godly wife, that great means of sanctification; and she had
+two under her hand, trained by herself, her dear friends and daughters
+both in law and love - Jean and Janet.&nbsp; Jean&rsquo;s complexion
+was extremely pale, Janet&rsquo;s was florid; my grandmother&rsquo;s
+nose was straight, my great-aunt&rsquo;s aquiline; but by the sound
+of the voice, not even a son was able to distinguish one from other.&nbsp;
+The marriage of a man of twenty-seven and a girl of twenty who have
+lived for twelve years as brother and sister, is difficult to conceive.&nbsp;
+It took place, however, and thus in 1799 the family was still further
+cemented by the union of a representative of the male or worldly element
+with one of the female and devout.<br>
+<br>
+This essential difference remained unbridged, yet never diminished the
+strength of their relation.&nbsp; My grandfather pursued his design
+of advancing in the world with some measure of success; rose to distinction
+in his calling, grew to be the familiar of members of Parliament, judges
+of the Court of Session, and &lsquo;landed gentlemen&rsquo;; learned
+a ready address, had a flow of interesting conversation, and when he
+was referred to as &lsquo;a highly respectable <i>bourgeois</i>,&rsquo;
+resented the description.&nbsp; My grandmother remained to the end devout
+and unambitious, occupied with her Bible, her children, and her house;
+easily shocked, and associating largely with a clique of godly parasites.&nbsp;
+I do not know if she called in the midwife already referred to; but
+the principle on which that lady was recommended, she accepted fully.&nbsp;
+The cook was a godly woman, the butcher a Christian man, and the table
+suffered.&nbsp; The scene has been often described to me of my grandfather
+sawing with darkened countenance at some indissoluble joint - &lsquo;Preserve
+me, my dear, what kind of a reedy, stringy beast is this?&rsquo; - of
+the joint removed, the pudding substituted and uncovered; and of my
+grandmother&rsquo;s anxious glance and hasty, deprecatory comment, &lsquo;Just
+mismanaged!&rsquo;&nbsp; Yet with the invincible obstinacy of soft natures,
+she would adhere to the godly woman and the Christian man, or find others
+of the same kidney to replace them.&nbsp; One of her confidants had
+once a narrow escape; an unwieldy old woman, she had fallen from an
+outside stair in a close of the Old Town; and my grandmother rejoiced
+to communicate the providential circumstance that a baker had been passing
+underneath with his bread upon his head.&nbsp; &lsquo;I would like to
+know what kind of providence the baker thought it!&rsquo; cried my grandfather.<br>
+<br>
+But the sally must have been unique.&nbsp; In all else that I have heard
+or read of him, so far from criticising, he was doing his utmost to
+honour and even to emulate his wife&rsquo;s pronounced opinions.&nbsp;
+In the only letter which has come to my hand of Thomas Smith&rsquo;s,
+I find him informing his wife that he was &lsquo;in time for afternoon
+church&rsquo;; similar assurances or cognate excuses abound in the correspondence
+of Robert Stevenson; and it is comical and pretty to see the two generations
+paying the same court to a female piety more highly strung: Thomas Smith
+to the mother of Robert Stevenson - Robert Stevenson to the daughter
+of Thomas Smith.&nbsp; And if for once my grandfather suffered himself
+to be hurried, by his sense of humour and justice, into that remark
+about the case of Providence and the Baker, I should be sorry for any
+of his children who should have stumbled into the same attitude of criticism.&nbsp;
+In the apocalyptic style of the housekeeper of Invermay, woe be to that
+person!&nbsp; But there was no fear; husband and sons all entertained
+for the pious, tender soul the same chivalrous and moved affection.&nbsp;
+I have spoken with one who remembered her, and who had been the intimate
+and equal of her sons, and I found this witness had been struck, as
+I had been, with a sense of disproportion between the warmth of the
+adoration felt and the nature of the woman, whether as described or
+observed.&nbsp; She diligently read and marked her Bible; she was a
+tender nurse; she had a sense of humour under strong control; she talked
+and found some amusement at her (or rather at her husband&rsquo;s) dinner-parties.&nbsp;
+It is conceivable that even my grandmother was amenable to the seductions
+of dress; at least, I find her husband inquiring anxiously about &lsquo;the
+gowns from Glasgow,&rsquo; and very careful to describe the toilet of
+the Princess Charlotte, whom he had seen in church &lsquo;in a Pelisse
+and Bonnet of the same colour of cloth as the Boys&rsquo; Dress jackets,
+trimmed with blue satin ribbons; the hat or Bonnet, Mr. Spittal said,
+was a Parisian slouch, and had a plume of three white feathers.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+But all this leaves a blank impression, and it is rather by reading
+backward in these old musty letters, which have moved me now to laughter
+and now to impatience, that I glean occasional glimpses of how she seemed
+to her contemporaries, and trace (at work in her queer world of godly
+and grateful parasites) a mobile and responsive nature.&nbsp; Fashion
+moulds us, and particularly women, deeper than we sometimes think; but
+a little while ago, and, in some circles, women stood or fell by the
+degree of their appreciation of old pictures; in the early years of
+the century (and surely with more reason) a character like that of my
+grandmother warmed, charmed, and subdued, like a strain of music, the
+hearts of the men of her own household.&nbsp; And there is little doubt
+that Mrs. Smith, as she looked on at the domestic life of her son and
+her stepdaughter, and numbered the heads in their increasing nursery,
+must have breathed fervent thanks to her Creator.<br>
+<br>
+Yet this was to be a family unusually tried; it was not for nothing
+that one of the godly women saluted Miss Janet Smith as &lsquo;a veteran
+in affliction&rsquo;; and they were all before middle life experienced
+in that form of service.&nbsp; By the 1st of January 1808, besides a
+pair of still-born twins, children had been born and still survived
+to the young couple.&nbsp; By the 11th two were gone; by the 28th a
+third had followed, and the two others were still in danger.&nbsp; In
+the letters of a former nurserymaid - I give her name, Jean Mitchell,
+<i>honoris causa</i> - we are enabled to feel, even at this distance
+of time, some of the bitterness of that month of bereavement.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I have this day received,&rsquo; she writes to Miss Janet, &lsquo;the
+melancholy news of my dear babys&rsquo; deaths.&nbsp; My heart is like
+to break for my dear Mrs. Stevenson.&nbsp; O may she be supported on
+this trying occasion!&nbsp; I hope her other three babys will be spared
+to her.&nbsp; O, Miss Smith, did I think when I parted from my sweet
+babys that I never was to see them more?&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;I received,&rsquo;
+she begins her next, &lsquo;the mournful news of my dear Jessie&rsquo;s
+death.&nbsp; I also received the hair of my three sweet babys, which
+I will preserve as dear to their memorys and as a token of Mr. and Mrs.
+Stevenson&rsquo;s friendship and esteem.&nbsp; At my leisure hours,
+when the children are in bed, they occupy all my thoughts, I dream of
+them.&nbsp; About two weeks ago I dreamed that my sweet little Jessie
+came running to me in her usual way, and I took her in my arms.&nbsp;
+O my dear babys, were mortal eyes permitted to see them in heaven, we
+would not repine nor grieve for their loss.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+By the 29th of February, the Reverend John Campbell, a man of obvious
+sense and human value, but hateful to the present biographer, because
+he wrote so many letters and conveyed so little information, summed
+up this first period of affliction in a letter to Miss Smith: &lsquo;Your
+dear sister but a little while ago had a full nursery, and the dear
+blooming creatures sitting around her table filled her breast with hope
+that one day they should fill active stations in society and become
+an ornament in the Church below.&nbsp; But ah!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Near a hundred years ago these little creatures ceased to be, and for
+not much less a period the tears have been dried.&nbsp; And to this
+day, looking in these stitched sheaves of letters, we hear the sound
+of many soft-hearted women sobbing for the lost.&nbsp; Never was such
+a massacre of the innocents; teething and chincough and scarlet fever
+and smallpox ran the round; and little Lillies, and Smiths, and Stevensons
+fell like moths about a candle; and nearly all the sympathetic correspondents
+deplore and recall the little losses of their own.&nbsp; &lsquo;It is
+impossible to describe the Heavnly looks of the Dear Babe the three
+last days of his life,&rsquo; writes Mrs. Laurie to Mrs. Smith.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Never - never, my dear aunt, could I wish to eface the rememberance
+of this Dear Child.&nbsp; Never, never, my dear aunt!&rsquo;&nbsp; And
+so soon the memory of the dead and the dust of the survivors are buried
+in one grave.<br>
+<br>
+There was another death in 1812; it passes almost unremarked; a single
+funeral seemed but a small event to these &lsquo;veterans in affliction&rsquo;;
+and by 1816 the nursery was full again.&nbsp; Seven little hopefuls
+enlivened the house; some were growing up; to the elder girl my grandfather
+already wrote notes in current hand at the tail of his letters to his
+wife: and to the elder boys he had begun to print, with laborious care,
+sheets of childish gossip and pedantic applications.&nbsp; Here, for
+instance, under date of 26th May 1816, is part of a mythological account
+of London, with a moral for the three gentlemen, &lsquo;Messieurs Alan,
+Robert, and James Stevenson,&rsquo; to whom the document is addressed:<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;There are many prisons here like Bridewell, for, like other large
+towns, there are many bad men here as well as many good men.&nbsp; The
+natives of London are in general not so tall and strong as the people
+of Edinburgh, because they have not so much pure air, and instead of
+taking porridge they eat cakes made with sugar and plums.&nbsp; Here
+you have thousands of carts to draw timber, thousands of coaches to
+take you to all parts of the town, and thousands of boats to sail on
+the river Thames.&nbsp; But you must have money to pay, otherwise you
+can get nothing.&nbsp; Now the way to get money is, become clever men
+and men of education, by being good scholars.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+From the same absence, he writes to his wife on a Sunday:<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;It is now about eight o&rsquo;clock with me, and I imagine you
+to be busy with the young folks, hearing the questions [<i>Anglic&eacute;</i>,
+catechism], and indulging the boys with a chapter from the large Bible,
+with their interrogations and your answers in the soundest doctrine.&nbsp;
+I hope James is getting his verse as usual, and that Mary is not forgetting
+her little <i>hymn</i>.&nbsp; While Jeannie will be reading Wotherspoon,
+or some other suitable and instructive book, I presume our friend, Aunt
+Mary, will have just arrived with the news of <i>a throng kirk</i> [a
+crowded church] and a great sermon.&nbsp; You may mention, with my compliments
+to my mother, that I was at St. Paul&rsquo;s to-day, and attended a
+very excellent service with Mr. James Lawrie.&nbsp; The text was &ldquo;Examine
+and see that ye be in the faith.&rdquo;&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+A twinkle of humour lights up this evocation of the distant scene -
+the humour of happy men and happy homes.&nbsp; Yet it is penned upon
+the threshold of fresh sorrow.&nbsp; James and Mary - he of the verse
+and she of the hymn - did not much more than survive to welcome their
+returning father.&nbsp; On the 25th, one of the godly women writes to
+Janet:<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;My dearest beloved madam, when I last parted from you, you was
+so affected with your affliction [you? or I?] could think of nothing
+else.&nbsp; But on Saturday, when I went to inquire after your health,
+how was I startled to hear that dear James was gone!&nbsp; Ah, what
+is this?&nbsp; My dear benefactors, doing so much good to many, to the
+Lord, suddenly to be deprived of their most valued comforts!&nbsp; I
+was thrown into great perplexity, could do nothing but murmur, why these
+things were done to such a family.&nbsp; I could not rest, but at midnight,
+whether spoken [or not] it was presented to my mind - &ldquo;Those whom
+ye deplore are walking with me in white.&rdquo;&nbsp; I conclude from
+this the Lord saying to sweet Mrs. Stevenson: &ldquo;I gave them to
+be brought up for me: well done, good and faithful! they are fully prepared,
+and now I must present them to my father and your father, to my God
+and your God.&rdquo;&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+It would be hard to lay on flattery with a more sure and daring hand.&nbsp;
+I quote it as a model of a letter of condolence; be sure it would console.&nbsp;
+Very different, perhaps quite as welcome, is this from a lighthouse
+inspector to my grandfather:<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;In reading your letter the trickling tear ran down ray cheeks
+in silent sorrow for your departed dear ones, my sweet little friends.&nbsp;
+Well do I remember, and you will call to mind, their little innocent
+and interesting stories.&nbsp; Often have they come round me and taken
+me by the hand, but alas!&nbsp; I am no more destined to behold them.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+The child who is taken becomes canonised, and the looks of the homeliest
+babe seem in the retrospect &lsquo;heavenly the three last days of his
+life.&rsquo;&nbsp; But it appears that James and Mary had indeed been
+children more than usually engaging; a record was preserved a long while
+in the family of their remarks and &lsquo;little innocent and interesting
+stories,&rsquo; and the blow and the blank were the more sensible.<br>
+<br>
+Early the next month Robert Stevenson must proceed upon his voyage of
+inspection, part by land, part by sea.&nbsp; He left his wife plunged
+in low spirits; the thought of his loss, and still more of her concern,
+was continually present in his mind, and he draws in his letters home
+an interesting picture of his family relations:<br>
+<br>
+<i>&lsquo;Windygates Inn, Monday (Postmark July 16th)<br>
+<br>
+</i>&lsquo;MY DEAREST JEANNIE, - While the people of the inn are getting
+me a little bit of something to eat, I sit down to tell you that I had
+a most excellent passage across the water, and got to Wemyss at mid-day.&nbsp;
+I hope the children will be very good, and that Robert will take a course
+with you to learn his Latin lessons daily; he may, however, read English
+in company.&nbsp; Let them have strawberries on Saturdays.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<i>&lsquo;Westhaven, 17th July.<br>
+<br>
+</i>&lsquo;I have been occupied to-day at the harbour of Newport, opposite
+Dundee, and am this far on my way to Arbroath.&nbsp; You may tell the
+boys that I slept last night in Mr. Steadman&rsquo;s tent.&nbsp; I found
+my bed rather hard, but the lodgings were otherwise extremely comfortable.&nbsp;
+The encampment is on the Fife side of the Tay, immediately opposite
+to Dundee.&nbsp; From the door of the tent you command the most beautiful
+view of the Firth, both up and down, to a great extent.&nbsp; At night
+all was serene and still, the sky presented the most beautiful appearance
+of bright stars, and the morning was ushered in with the song of many
+little birds.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<i>&lsquo;Aberdeen, July 19th.<br>
+<br>
+</i>&lsquo;I hope, my dear, that you are going out of doors regularly
+and taking much exercise.&nbsp; I would have you to <i>make the markets
+daily</i> - and by all means to take a seat in the coach once or twice
+in the week and see what is going on in town.&nbsp; [The family were
+at the sea-side.]&nbsp; It will be good not to be too great a stranger
+to the house.&nbsp; It will be rather painful at first, but as it is
+to be done, I would have you not to be too strange to the house in town.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Tell the boys that I fell in with a soldier - his name is Henderson
+- who was twelve years with Lord Wellington and other commanders.&nbsp;
+He returned very lately with only eightpence-halfpenny in his pocket,
+and found his father and mother both in life, though they had never
+heard from him, nor he from them.&nbsp; He carried my great-coat and
+umbrella a few miles.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<i>&lsquo;Fraserburgh, July</i> 20th.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Fraserburgh is the same dull place which [Auntie] Mary and Jeannie
+found it.&nbsp; As I am travelling along the coast which they are acquainted
+with, you had better cause Robert bring down the map from Edinburgh;
+and it will be a good exercise in geography for the young folks to trace
+my course.&nbsp; I hope they have entered upon the writing.&nbsp; The
+library will afford abundance of excellent books, which I wish you would
+employ a little.&nbsp; I hope you are doing me the favour to go much
+out with the boys, which will do you much good and prevent them from
+getting so very much overheated.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+[<i>To the Boys - Printed</i>.]<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;When I had last the pleasure of writing to you, your dear little
+brother James and your sweet little sister Mary were still with us.&nbsp;
+But it has pleased God to remove them to another and a better world,
+and we must submit to the will of Providence.&nbsp; I must, however,
+request of you to think sometimes upon them, and to be very careful
+not to do anything that will displease or vex your mother.&nbsp; It
+is therefore proper that you do not roamp [Scottish indeed] too much
+about, and that you learn your lessons.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I went to Fraserburgh and visited Kinnaird Head Lighthouse, which
+I found in good order.&nbsp; All this time I travelled upon good roads,
+and paid many a toll-man by the way; but from Fraserburgh to Banff there
+is no toll-bars, and the road is so bad that I had to walk up and down
+many a hill, and for want of bridges the horses had to drag the chaise
+up to the middle of the wheels in water.&nbsp; At Banff I saw a large
+ship of 300 tons lying on the sands upon her beam-ends, and a wreck
+for want of a good harbour.&nbsp; Captain Wilson - to whom I beg my
+compliments - will show you a ship of 300 tons.&nbsp; At the towns of
+Macduff, Banff, and Portsoy, many of the houses are built of marble,
+and the rocks on this part of the coast or sea-side are marble.&nbsp;
+But, my dear Boys, unless marble be polished and dressed, it is a very
+coarse-looking stone, and has no more beauty than common rock.&nbsp;
+As a proof of this, ask the favour of your mother to take you to Thomson&rsquo;s
+Marble Works in South Leith, and you will see marble in all its stages,
+and perhaps you may there find Portsoy marble!&nbsp; The use I wish
+to make of this is to tell you that, without education, a man is just
+like a block of rough, unpolished marble.&nbsp; Notice, in proof of
+this, how much Mr. Neill and Mr. M&rsquo;Gregor [the tutor] know, and
+observe how little a man knows who is not a good scholar.&nbsp; On my
+way to Fochabers I passed through many thousand acres of Fir timber,
+and saw many deer running in these woods.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+[<i>To Mrs. Stevenson</i>.]<br>
+<br>
+<i>&lsquo;Inverness, July 21st.<br>
+<br>
+</i>&lsquo;I propose going to church in the afternoon, and as I have
+breakfasted late, I shall afterwards take a walk, and dine about six
+o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp; I do not know who is the clergyman here, but I
+shall think of you all.&nbsp; I travelled in the mail-coach [from Banff]
+almost alone.&nbsp; While it was daylight I kept the top, and the passing
+along a country I had never before seen was a considerable amusement.&nbsp;
+But, my dear, you are all much in my thoughts, and many are the objects
+which recall the recollection of our tender and engaging children we
+have so recently lost.&nbsp; We must not, however, repine.&nbsp; I could
+not for a moment wish any change of circumstances in their case; and
+in every comparative view of their state, I see the Lord&rsquo;s goodness
+in removing them from an evil world to an abode of bliss; and I must
+earnestly hope that you may be enabled to take such a view of this affliction
+as to live in the happy prospect of our all meeting again to part no
+more - and that under such considerations you are getting up your spirits.&nbsp;
+I wish you would walk about, and by all means go to town, and do not
+sit much at home.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<i>&lsquo;Inverness, July</i> <i>23rd</i>.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I am duly favoured with your much-valued letter, and I am happy
+to find that you are so much with my mother, because that sort of variety
+has a tendency to occupy the mind, and to keep it from brooding too
+much upon one subject.&nbsp; Sensibility and tenderness are certainly
+two of the most interesting and pleasing qualities of the mind.&nbsp;
+These qualities are also none of the least of the many endearingments
+of the female character.&nbsp; But if that kind of sympathy and pleasing
+melancholy, which is familiar to us under distress, be much indulged,
+it becomes habitual, and takes such a hold of the mind as to absorb
+all the other affections, and unfit us for the duties and proper enjoyments
+of life.&nbsp; Resignation sinks into a kind of peevish discontent.&nbsp;
+I am far, however, from thinking there is the least danger of this in
+your case, my dear; for you have been on all occasions enabled to look
+upon the fortunes of this life as under the direction of a higher power,
+and have always preserved that propriety and consistency of conduct
+in all circumstances which endears your example to your family in particular,
+and to your friends.&nbsp; I am therefore, my dear, for you to go out
+much, and to go to the house up-stairs [he means to go up-stairs in
+the house, to visit the place of the dead children], and to put yourself
+in the way of the visits of your friends.&nbsp; I wish you would call
+on the Miss Grays, and it would be a good thing upon a Saturday to dine
+with my mother, and take Meggy and all the family with you, and let
+them have their strawberries in town.&nbsp; The tickets of one of the
+<i>old-fashioned coaches</i> would take you all up, and if the evening
+were good, they could all walk down, excepting Meggy and little David.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<i>&lsquo;Inverness, July 25th, 11 p.m.<br>
+<br>
+</i>&lsquo;Captain Wemyss, of Wemyss, has come to Inverness to go the
+voyage with me, and as we are sleeping in a double-bedded room, I must
+no longer transgress.&nbsp; You must remember me the best way you can
+to the children.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<i>&lsquo;On board of the Lighthouse Yacht, July 29th.<br>
+<br>
+</i>&lsquo;I got to Cromarty yesterday about mid-day, and went to church.&nbsp;
+It happened to be the sacrament there, and I heard a Mr. Smith at that
+place conclude the service with a very suitable exhortation.&nbsp; There
+seemed a great concourse of people, but they had rather an unfortunate
+day for them at the tent, as it rained a good deal.&nbsp; After drinking
+tea at the inn, Captain Wemyss accompanied me on board, and we sailed
+about eight last night.&nbsp; The wind at present being rather a beating
+one, I think I shall have an opportunity of standing into the bay of
+Wick, and leaving this letter to let you know my progress and that I
+am well.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<i>&lsquo;Lighthouse Yacht, Stornoway, August 4th.<br>
+<br>
+</i>&lsquo;To-day we had prayers on deck as usual when at sea.&nbsp;
+I read the 14th chapter, I think, of Job.&nbsp; Captain Wemyss has been
+in the habit of doing this on board his own ship, agreeably to the Articles
+of War.&nbsp; Our passage round the Cape [Cape Wrath] was rather a cross
+one, and as the wind was northerly, we had a pretty heavy sea, but upon
+the whole have made a good passage, leaving many vessels behind us in
+Orkney.&nbsp; I am quite well, my dear; and Captain Wemyss, who has
+much spirit, and who is much given to observation, and a perfect enthusiast
+in his profession, enlivens the voyage greatly.&nbsp; Let me entreat
+you to move about much, and take a walk with the boys to Leith.&nbsp;
+I think they have still many places to see there, and I wish you would
+indulge them in this respect.&nbsp; Mr. Scales is the best person I
+know for showing them the sailcloth-weaving, etc., and he would have
+great pleasure in undertaking this.&nbsp; My dear, I trust soon to be
+with you, and that through the goodness of God we shall meet all well.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;There are two vessels lying here with emigrants for America,
+each with eighty people on board, at all ages, from a few days to upwards
+of sixty!&nbsp; Their prospects must be very forlorn to go with a slender
+purse for distant and unknown countries.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<i>&lsquo;Lighthouse Yacht, off Greenock, Aug. 18th.<br>
+<br>
+</i>&lsquo;It was after <i>church-time</i> before we got here, but we
+had prayers upon deck on the way up the Clyde.&nbsp; This has, upon
+the whole, been a very good voyage, and Captain Wemyss, who enjoys it
+much, has been an excellent companion; we met with pleasure, and shall
+part with regret.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Strange that, after his long experience, my grandfather should have
+learned so little of the attitude and even the dialect of the spiritually-minded;
+that after forty-four years in a most religious circle, he could drop
+without sense of incongruity from a period of accepted phrases to &lsquo;trust
+his wife was <i>getting up her spirits</i>,&rsquo; or think to reassure
+her as to the character of Captain Wemyss by mentioning that he had
+read prayers on the deck of his frigate &lsquo;<i>agreeably to the Articles</i>
+<i>of War</i>&rsquo;!&nbsp; Yet there is no doubt - and it is one of
+the most agreeable features of the kindly series - that he was doing
+his best to please, and there is little doubt that he succeeded.&nbsp;
+Almost all my grandfather&rsquo;s private letters have been destroyed.&nbsp;
+This correspondence has not only been preserved entire, but stitched
+up in the same covers with the works of the godly women, the Reverend
+John Campbell, and the painful Mrs. Ogle.&nbsp; I did not think to mention
+the good dame, but she comes in usefully as an example.&nbsp; Amongst
+the treasures of the ladies of my family, her letters have been honoured
+with a volume to themselves.&nbsp; I read about a half of them myself;
+then handed over the task to one of stauncher resolution, with orders
+to communicate any fact that should be found to illuminate these pages.&nbsp;
+Not one was found; it was her only art to communicate by post second-rate
+sermons at second-hand; and such, I take it, was the correspondence
+in which my grandmother delighted.&nbsp; If I am right, that of Robert
+Stevenson, with his quaint smack of the contemporary &lsquo;Sandford
+and Merton,&rsquo; his interest in the whole page of experience, his
+perpetual quest, and fine scent of all that seems romantic to a boy,
+his needless pomp of language, his excellent good sense, his unfeigned,
+unstained, unwearied human kindliness, would seem to her, in a comparison,
+dry and trivial and worldly.&nbsp; And if these letters were by an exception
+cherished and preserved, it would be for one or both of two reasons
+- because they dealt with and were bitter-sweet reminders of a time
+of sorrow; or because she was pleased, perhaps touched, by the writer&rsquo;s
+guileless efforts to seem spiritually-minded.<br>
+<br>
+After this date there were two more births and two more deaths, so that
+the number of the family remained unchanged; in all five children survived
+to reach maturity and to outlive their parents.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER II: THE SERVICE OF THE NORTHERN LIGHTS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+I<br>
+<br>
+It were hard to imagine a contrast more sharply defined than that between
+the lives of the men and women of this family: the one so chambered,
+so centred in the affections and the sensibilities; the other so active,
+healthy, and expeditious.&nbsp; From May to November, Thomas Smith and
+Robert Stevenson were on the mail, in the saddle, or at sea; and my
+grandfather, in particular, seems to have been possessed with a demon
+of activity in travel.&nbsp; In 1802, by direction of the Northern Lighthouse
+Board, he had visited the coast of England from St. Bees, in Cumberland,
+and round by the Scilly Islands to some place undecipherable by me;
+in all a distance of 2500 miles.&nbsp; In 1806 I find him starting &lsquo;on
+a tour round the south coast of England, from the Humber to the Severn.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Peace was not long declared ere he found means to visit Holland, where
+he was in time to see, in the navy-yard at Helvoetsluys, &lsquo;about
+twenty of Bonaparte&rsquo;s <i>English flotilla</i> lying in a state
+of decay, the object of curiosity to Englishmen.&rsquo;&nbsp; By 1834
+he seems to have been acquainted with the coast of France from Dieppe
+to Bordeaux; and a main part of his duty as Engineer to the Board of
+Northern Lights was one round of dangerous and laborious travel.<br>
+<br>
+In 1786, when Thomas Smith first received the appointment, the extended
+and formidable coast of Scotland was lighted at a single point - the
+Isle of May, in the jaws of the Firth of Forth, where, on a tower already
+a hundred and fifty years old, an open coal-fire blazed in an iron chauffer.&nbsp;
+The whole archipelago, thus nightly plunged in darkness, was shunned
+by sea-going vessels, and the favourite courses were north about Shetland
+and west about St. Kilda.&nbsp; When the Board met, four new lights
+formed the extent of their intentions - Kinnaird Head, in Aberdeenshire,
+at the eastern elbow of the coast; North Ronaldsay, in Orkney, to keep
+the north and guide ships passing to the south&rsquo;ard of Shetland;
+Island Glass, on Harris, to mark the inner shore of the Hebrides and
+illuminate the navigation of the Minch; and the Mull of Kintyre.&nbsp;
+These works were to be attempted against obstacles, material and financial,
+that might have staggered the most bold.&nbsp; Smith had no ship at
+his command till 1791; the roads in those outlandish quarters where
+his business lay were scarce passable when they existed, and the tower
+on the Mull of Kintyre stood eleven months unlighted while the apparatus
+toiled and foundered by the way among rocks and mosses.&nbsp; Not only
+had towers to be built and apparatus transplanted; the supply of oil
+must be maintained, and the men fed, in the same inaccessible and distant
+scenes; a whole service, with its routine and hierarchy, had to be called
+out of nothing; and a new trade (that of lightkeeper) to be taught,
+recruited, and organised.&nbsp; The funds of the Board were at the first
+laughably inadequate.&nbsp; They embarked on their career on a loan
+of twelve hundred pounds, and their income in 1789, after relief by
+a fresh Act of Parliament, amounted to less than three hundred.&nbsp;
+It must be supposed that the thoughts of Thomas Smith, in these early
+years, were sometimes coloured with despair; and since he built and
+lighted one tower after another, and created and bequeathed to his successors
+the elements of an excellent administration, it may be conceded that
+he was not after all an unfortunate choice for a first engineer.<br>
+<br>
+War added fresh complications.&nbsp; In 1794 Smith came &lsquo;very
+near to be taken&rsquo; by a French squadron.&nbsp; In 1813 Robert Stevenson
+was cruising about the neighbourhood of Cape Wrath in the immediate
+fear of Commodore Rogers.&nbsp; The men, and especially the sailors,
+of the lighthouse service must be protected by a medal and ticket from
+the brutal activity of the press-gang.&nbsp; And the zeal of volunteer
+patriots was at times embarrassing.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I set off on foot,&rsquo; writes my grandfather, &lsquo;for Marazion,
+a town at the head of Mount&rsquo;s Bay, where I was in hopes of getting
+a boat to freight.&nbsp; I had just got that length, and was making
+the necessary inquiry, when a young man, accompanied by several idle-looking
+fellows, came up to me, and in a hasty tone said, &ldquo;Sir, in the
+king&rsquo;s name I seize your person and papers.&rdquo;&nbsp; To which
+I replied that I should be glad to see his authority, and know the reason
+of an address so abrupt.&nbsp; He told me the want of time prevented
+his taking regular steps, but that it would be necessary for me to return
+to Penzance, as I was suspected of being a French spy.&nbsp; I proposed
+to submit my papers to the nearest Justice of Peace, who was immediately
+applied to, and came to the inn where I was.&nbsp; He seemed to be greatly
+agitated, and quite at a loss how to proceed.&nbsp; The complaint preferred
+against me was &ldquo;that I had examined the Longships Lighthouse with
+the most minute attention, and was no less particular in my inquiries
+at the keepers of the lighthouse regarding the sunk rocks lying off
+the Land&rsquo;s End, with the sets of the currents and tides along
+the coast: that I seemed particularly to regret the situation of the
+rocks called the Seven Stones, and the loss of a beacon which the Trinity
+Board had caused to be fixed on the Wolf Rock; that I had taken notes
+of the bearings of several sunk rocks, and a drawing of the lighthouse,
+and of Cape Cornwall.&nbsp; Further, that I had refused the honour of
+Lord Edgecombe&rsquo;s invitation to dinner, offering as an apology
+that I had some particular business on hand.&rdquo;&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+My grandfather produced in answer his credentials and letter of credit;
+but the justice, after perusing them, &lsquo;very gravely observed that
+they were &ldquo;musty bits of paper,&rdquo;&rsquo; and proposed to
+maintain the arrest.&nbsp; Some more enlightened magistrates at Penzance
+relieved him of suspicion and left him at liberty to pursue his journey,
+- &lsquo;which I did with so much eagerness,&rsquo; he adds, &lsquo;that
+I gave the two coal lights on the Lizard only a very transient look.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Lighthouse operations in Scotland differed essentially in character
+from those in England.&nbsp; The English coast is in comparison a habitable,
+homely place, well supplied with towns; the Scottish presents hundreds
+of miles of savage islands and desolate moors.&nbsp; The Parliamentary
+committee of 1834, profoundly ignorant of this distinction, insisted
+with my grandfather that the work at the various stations should be
+let out on contract &lsquo;in the neighbourhood,&rsquo; where sheep
+and deer, and gulls and cormorants, and a few ragged gillies, perhaps
+crouching in a bee-hive house, made up the only neighbours.&nbsp; In
+such situations repairs and improvements could only be overtaken by
+collecting (as my grandfather expressed it) a few &lsquo;lads,&rsquo;
+placing them under charge of a foreman, and despatching them about the
+coast as occasion served.&nbsp; The particular danger of these seas
+increased the difficulty.&nbsp; The course of the lighthouse tender
+lies amid iron-bound coasts, among tide-races, the whirlpools of the
+Pentland Firth, flocks of islands, flocks of reefs, many of them uncharted.&nbsp;
+The aid of steam was not yet.&nbsp; At first in random coasting sloop,
+and afterwards in the cutter belonging to the service, the engineer
+must ply and run amongst these multiplied dangers, and sometimes late
+into the stormy autumn.&nbsp; For pages together my grandfather&rsquo;s
+diary preserves a record of these rude experiences; of hard winds and
+rough seas; and of &lsquo;the try-sail and storm-jib, those old friends
+which I never like to see.&rsquo;&nbsp; They do not tempt to quotation,
+but it was the man&rsquo;s element, in which he lived, and delighted
+to live, and some specimen must be presented.&nbsp; On Friday, September
+10th, 1830, the <i>Regent</i> lying in Lerwick Bay, we have this entry:
+&lsquo;The gale increases, with continued rain.&rsquo;&nbsp; On the
+morrow, Saturday, 11th, the weather appeared to moderate, and they put
+to sea, only to be driven by evening into Levenswick.&nbsp; There they
+lay, &lsquo;rolling much,&rsquo; with both anchors ahead and the square
+yard on deck, till the morning of Saturday, 18th.&nbsp; Saturday and
+Sunday they were plying to the southward with a &lsquo;strong breeze
+and a heavy sea,&rsquo; and on Sunday evening anchored in Otterswick.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Monday, 20th, it blows so fresh that we have no communication
+with the shore.&nbsp; We see Mr. Rome on the beach, but we cannot communicate
+with him.&nbsp; It blows &ldquo;mere fire,&rdquo; as the sailors express
+it.&rsquo;&nbsp; And for three days more the diary goes on with tales
+of davits unshipped, high seas, strong gales from the southward, and
+the ship driven to refuge in Kirkwall or Deer Sound.&nbsp; I have many
+a passage before me to transcribe, in which my grandfather draws himself
+as a man of minute and anxious exactitude about details.&nbsp; It must
+not be forgotten that these voyages in the tender were the particular
+pleasure and reward of his existence; that he had in him a reserve of
+romance which carried him delightedly over these hardships and perils;
+that to him it was &lsquo;great gain&rsquo; to be eight nights and seven
+days in the savage bay of Levenswick - to read a book in the much agitated
+cabin - to go on deck and hear the gale scream in his ears, and see
+the landscape dark with rain and the ship plunge at her two anchors
+- and to turn in at night and wake again at morning, in his narrow berth,
+to the glamorous and continued voices of the gale.<br>
+<br>
+His perils and escapes were beyond counting.&nbsp; I shall only refer
+to two: the first, because of the impression made upon himself; the
+second, from the incidental picture it presents of the north islanders.&nbsp;
+On the 9th October 1794 he took passage from Orkney in the sloop <i>Elizabeth</i>
+of Stromness.&nbsp; She made a fair passage till within view of Kinnaird
+Head, where, as she was becalmed some three miles in the offing, and
+wind seemed to threaten from the south-east, the captain landed him,
+to continue his journey more expeditiously ashore.&nbsp; A gale immediately
+followed, and the <i>Elizabeth</i> was driven back to Orkney and lost
+with all hands.&nbsp; The second escape I have been in the habit of
+hearing related by an eye-witness, my own father, from the earliest
+days of childhood.&nbsp; On a September night, the <i>Regent</i> lay
+in the Pentland Firth in a fog and a violent and windless swell.&nbsp;
+It was still dark, when they were alarmed by the sound of breakers,
+and an anchor was immediately let go.&nbsp; The peep of dawn discovered
+them swinging in desperate proximity to the Isle of Swona <a name="citation54a"></a><a href="#footnote54a">{54a}</a>
+and the surf bursting close under their stern.&nbsp; There was in this
+place a hamlet of the inhabitants, fisher-folk and wreckers; their huts
+stood close about the head of the beach.&nbsp; All slept; the doors
+were closed, and there was no smoke, and the anxious watchers on board
+ship seemed to contemplate a village of the dead.&nbsp; It was thought
+possible to launch a boat and tow the <i>Regent</i> from her place of
+danger; and with this view a signal of distress was made and a gun fired
+with a red-hot poker from the galley.&nbsp; Its detonation awoke the
+sleepers.&nbsp; Door after door was opened, and in the grey light of
+the morning fisher after fisher was seen to come forth, yawning and
+stretching himself, nightcap on head.&nbsp; Fisher after fisher, I wrote,
+and my pen tripped; for it should rather stand wrecker after wrecker.&nbsp;
+There was no emotion, no animation, it scarce seemed any interest; not
+a hand was raised; but all callously awaited the harvest of the sea,
+and their children stood by their side and waited also.&nbsp; To the
+end of his life, my father remembered that amphitheatre of placid spectators
+on the beach; and with a special and natural animosity, the boys of
+his own age.&nbsp; But presently a light air sprang up, and filled the
+sails, and fainted, and filled them again; and little by little the
+<i>Regent</i> fetched way against the swell, and clawed off shore into
+the turbulent firth.<br>
+<br>
+The purpose of these voyages was to effect a landing on open beaches
+or among shelving rocks, not for persons only, but for coals and food,
+and the fragile furniture of light-rooms.&nbsp; It was often impossible.&nbsp;
+In 1831 I find my grandfather &lsquo;hovering for a week&rsquo; about
+the Pentland Skerries for a chance to land; and it was almost always
+difficult.&nbsp; Much knack and enterprise were early developed among
+the seamen of the service; their management of boats is to this day
+a matter of admiration; and I find my grandfather in his diary depicting
+the nature of their excellence in one happily descriptive phrase, when
+he remarks that Captain Soutar had landed &lsquo;the small stores and
+nine casks of oil <i>with all the activity of a</i> <i>smuggler</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And it was one thing to land, another to get on board again.&nbsp; I
+have here a passage from the diary, where it seems to have been touch-and-go.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I landed at Tarbetness, on the eastern side of the point, in
+a <i>mere gale or blast of wind</i> from west-south-west, at 2 p.m.&nbsp;
+It blew so fresh that the captain, in a kind of despair, went off to
+the ship, leaving myself and the steward ashore.&nbsp; While I was in
+the light-room, I felt it shaking and waving, not with the tremor of
+the Bell Rock, but with the <i>waving of a tree</i>!&nbsp; This the
+light-keepers seemed to be quite familiar to, the principal keeper remarking
+that &ldquo;it was very pleasant,&rdquo; perhaps meaning interesting
+or curious.&nbsp; The captain worked the vessel into smooth water with
+admirable dexterity, and I got on board again about 6 p.m. from the
+other side of the point.&rsquo;&nbsp; But not even the dexterity of
+Soutar could prevail always; and my grandfather must at times have been
+left in strange berths and with but rude provision.&nbsp; I may instance
+the case of my father, who was storm-bound three days upon an islet,
+sleeping in the uncemented and unchimneyed houses of the islanders,
+and subsisting on a diet of nettle-soup and lobsters.<br>
+<br>
+The name of Soutar has twice escaped my pen, and I feel I owe him a
+vignette.&nbsp; Soutar first attracted notice as mate of a praam at
+the Bell Rock, and rose gradually to be captain of the <i>Regent</i>.&nbsp;
+He was active, admirably skilled in his trade, and a man incapable of
+fear.&nbsp; Once, in London, he fell among a gang of confidence-men,
+naturally deceived by his rusticity and his prodigious accent.&nbsp;
+They plied him with drink - a hopeless enterprise, for Soutar could
+not be made drunk; they proposed cards, and Soutar would not play.&nbsp;
+At last, one of them, regarding him with a formidable countenance, inquired
+if he were not frightened?&nbsp; &lsquo;I&rsquo;m no&rsquo; very easy
+fleyed,&rsquo; replied the captain.&nbsp; And the rooks withdrew after
+some easier pigeon.&nbsp; So many perils shared, and the partial familiarity
+of so many voyages, had given this man a stronghold in my grandfather&rsquo;s
+estimation; and there is no doubt but he had the art to court and please
+him with much hypocritical skill.&nbsp; He usually dined on Sundays
+in the cabin.&nbsp; He used to come down daily after dinner for a glass
+of port or whisky, often in his full rig of sou&rsquo;-wester, oilskins,
+and long boots; and I have often heard it described how insinuatingly
+he carried himself on these appearances, artfully combining the extreme
+of deference with a blunt and seamanlike demeanour.&nbsp; My father
+and uncles, with the devilish penetration of the boy, were far from
+being deceived; and my father, indeed, was favoured with an object-lesson
+not to be mistaken.&nbsp; He had crept one rainy night into an apple-barrel
+on deck, and from this place of ambush overheard Soutar and a comrade
+conversing in their oilskins.&nbsp; The smooth sycophant of the cabin
+had wholly disappeared, and the boy listened with wonder to a vulgar
+and truculent ruffian.&nbsp; Of Soutar, I may say <i>tantum vidi</i>,
+having met him in the Leith docks now more than thirty years ago, when
+he abounded in the praises of my grandfather, encouraged me (in the
+most admirable manner) to pursue his footprints, and left impressed
+for ever on my memory the image of his own Bardolphian nose.&nbsp; He
+died not long after.<br>
+<br>
+The engineer was not only exposed to the hazards of the sea; he must
+often ford his way by land to remote and scarce accessible places, beyond
+reach of the mail or the post-chaise, beyond even the tracery of the
+bridle-path, and guided by natives across bog and heather.&nbsp; Up
+to 1807 my grand-father seems to have travelled much on horseback; but
+he then gave up the idea - &lsquo;such,&rsquo; he writes with characteristic
+emphasis and capital letters, &lsquo;is the Plague of Baiting.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+He was a good pedestrian; at the age of fifty-eight I find him covering
+seventeen miles over the moors of the Mackay country in less than seven
+hours, and that is not bad travelling for a scramble.&nbsp; The piece
+of country traversed was already a familiar track, being that between
+Loch Eriboll and Cape Wrath; and I think I can scarce do better than
+reproduce from the diary some traits of his first visit.&nbsp; The tender
+lay in Loch Eriboll; by five in the morning they sat down to breakfast
+on board; by six they were ashore - my grandfather, Mr. Slight an assistant,
+and Soutar of the jolly nose, and had been taken in charge by two young
+gentlemen of the neighbourhood and a pair of gillies.&nbsp; About noon
+they reached the Kyle of Durness and passed the ferry.&nbsp; By half-past
+three they were at Cape Wrath - not yet known by the emphatic abbreviation
+of &lsquo;The Cape&rsquo; - and beheld upon all sides of them unfrequented
+shores, an expanse of desert moor, and the high-piled Western Ocean.&nbsp;
+The site of the tower was chosen.&nbsp; Perhaps it is by inheritance
+of blood, but I know few things more inspiriting than this location
+of a lighthouse in a designated space of heather and air, through which
+the sea-birds are still flying.&nbsp; By 9 p.m. the return journey had
+brought them again to the shores of the Kyle.&nbsp; The night was dirty,
+and as the sea was high and the ferry-boat small, Soutar and Mr. Stevenson
+were left on the far side, while the rest of the party embarked and
+were received into the darkness.&nbsp; They made, in fact, a safe though
+an alarming passage; but the ferryman refused to repeat the adventure;
+and my grand-father and the captain long paced the beach, impatient
+for their turn to pass, and tormented with rising anxiety as to the
+fate of their companions.&nbsp; At length they sought the shelter of
+a shepherd&rsquo;s house.&nbsp; &lsquo;We had miserable up-putting,&rsquo;
+the diary continues, &lsquo;and on both sides of the ferry much anxiety
+of mind.&nbsp; Our beds were clean straw, and but for the circumstance
+of the boat, I should have slept as soundly as ever I did after a walk
+through moss and mire of sixteen hours.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+To go round the lights, even to-day, is to visit past centuries.&nbsp;
+The tide of tourists that flows yearly in Scotland, vulgarising all
+where it approaches, is still defined by certain barriers.&nbsp; It
+will be long ere there is a hotel at Sumburgh or a hydropathic at Cape
+Wrath; it will be long ere any <i>char-&agrave;-banc</i>, laden with
+tourists, shall drive up to Barra Head or Monach, the Island of the
+Monks.&nbsp; They are farther from London than St. Petersburg, and except
+for the towers, sounding and shining all night with fog-bells and the
+radiance of the light-room, glittering by day with the trivial brightness
+of white paint, these island and moorland stations seem inaccessible
+to the civilisation of to-day, and even to the end of my grandfather&rsquo;s
+career the isolation was far greater.&nbsp; There ran no post at all
+in the Long Island; from the light-house on Barra Head a boat must be
+sent for letters as far as Tobermory, between sixty and seventy miles
+of open sea; and the posts of Shetland, which had surprised Sir Walter
+Scott in 1814, were still unimproved in 1833, when my grandfather reported
+on the subject.&nbsp; The group contained at the time a population of
+30,000 souls, and enjoyed a trade which had increased in twenty years
+seven-fold, to between three and four thousand tons.&nbsp; Yet the mails
+were despatched and received by chance coasting vessels at the rate
+of a penny a letter; six and eight weeks often elapsed between opportunities,
+and when a mail was to be made up, sometimes at a moment&rsquo;s notice,
+the bellman was sent hastily through the streets of Lerwick.&nbsp; Between
+Shetland and Orkney, only seventy miles apart, there was &lsquo;no trade
+communication whatever.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Such was the state of affairs, only sixty years ago, with the three
+largest clusters of the Scottish Archipelago; and forty-seven years
+earlier, when Thomas Smith began his rounds, or forty-two, when Robert
+Stevenson became conjoined with him in these excursions, the barbarism
+was deep, the people sunk in superstition, the circumstances of their
+life perhaps unique in history.&nbsp; Lerwick and Kirkwall, like Guam
+or the Bay of Islands, were but barbarous ports where whalers called
+to take up and to return experienced seamen.&nbsp; On the outlying islands
+the clergy lived isolated, thinking other thoughts, dwelling in a different
+country from their parishioners, like missionaries in the South Seas.&nbsp;
+My grandfather&rsquo;s unrivalled treasury of anecdote was never written
+down; it embellished his talk while he yet was, and died with him when
+he died; and such as have been preserved relate principally to the islands
+of Ronaldsay and Sanday, two of the Orkney group.&nbsp; These bordered
+on one of the water-highways of civilisation; a great fleet passed annually
+in their view, and of the shipwrecks of the world they were the scene
+and cause of a proportion wholly incommensurable to their size.&nbsp;
+In one year, 1798, my grandfather found the remains of no fewer than
+five vessels on the isle of Sanday, which is scarcely twelve miles long.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Hardly a year passed,&rsquo; he writes, &lsquo;without instances
+of this kind; for, owing to the projecting points of this strangely
+formed island, the lowness and whiteness of its eastern shores, and
+the wonderful manner in which the scanty patches of land are intersected
+with lakes and pools of water, it becomes, even in daylight, a deception,
+and has often been fatally mistaken for an open sea.&nbsp; It had even
+become proverbial with some of the inhabitants to observe that &ldquo;if
+wrecks were to happen, they might as well be sent to the poor isle of
+Sanday as anywhere else.&rdquo;&nbsp; On this and the neighbouring islands
+the inhabitants had certainly had their share of wrecked goods, for
+the eye is presented with these melancholy remains in almost every form.&nbsp;
+For example, although quarries are to be met with generally in these
+islands, and the stones are very suitable for building dykes (<i>Anglic&eacute;</i>,
+walls), yet instances occur of the land being enclosed, even to a considerable
+extent, with ship-timbers.&nbsp; The author has actually seen a park
+(<i>Anglic&eacute;</i>, meadow) paled round chiefly with cedar-wood
+and mahogany from the wreck of a Honduras-built ship; and in one island,
+after the wreck of a ship laden with wine, the inhabitants have been
+known to take claret to their barley-meal porridge.&nbsp; On complaining
+to one of the pilots of the badness of his boat&rsquo;s sails, he replied
+to the author with some degree of pleasantry, &ldquo;Had it been His
+will that you came na&rsquo; here wi&rsquo; your lights, we might &lsquo;a&rsquo;
+had better sails to our boats, and more o&rsquo; other things.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+It may further be mentioned that when some of Lord Dundas&rsquo;s farms
+are to be let in these islands a competition takes place for the lease,
+and it is <i>bona fide</i> understood that a much higher rent is paid
+than the lands would otherwise give were it not for the chance of making
+considerably by the agency and advantages attending shipwrecks on the
+shores of the respective farms.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+The people of North Ronaldsay still spoke Norse, or, rather, mixed it
+with their English.&nbsp; The walls of their huts were built to a great
+thickness of rounded stones from the sea-beach; the roof flagged, loaded
+with earth, and perforated by a single hole for the escape of smoke.&nbsp;
+The grass grew beautifully green on the flat house-top, where the family
+would assemble with their dogs and cats, as on a pastoral lawn; there
+were no windows, and in my grandfather&rsquo;s expression, &lsquo;there
+was really no demonstration of a house unless it were the diminutive
+door.&rsquo;&nbsp; He once landed on Ronaldsay with two friends.&nbsp;
+The inhabitants crowded and pressed so much upon the strangers that
+the bailiff, or resident factor of the island, blew with his ox-horn,
+calling out to the natives to stand off and let the gentlemen come forward
+to the laird; upon which one of the islanders, as spokesman, called
+out, &ldquo;God ha&rsquo;e us, man! thou needsna mak&rsquo; sic a noise.&nbsp;
+It&rsquo;s no&rsquo; every day we ha&rsquo;e <i>three hatted men</i>
+on our isle.&rdquo;&rsquo;&nbsp; When the Surveyor of Taxes came (for
+the first time, perhaps) to Sanday, and began in the King&rsquo;s name
+to complain of the unconscionable swarms of dogs, and to menace the
+inhabitants with taxation, it chanced that my grandfather and his friend,
+Dr. Patrick Neill, were received by an old lady in a Ronaldsay hut.&nbsp;
+Her hut, which was similar to the model described, stood on a Ness,
+or point of land jutting into the sea.&nbsp; They were made welcome
+in the firelit cellar, placed &lsquo;in <i>casey</i> or straw-worked
+chairs, after the Norwegian fashion, with arms, and a canopy overhead,&rsquo;
+and given milk in a wooden dish.&nbsp; These hospitalities attended
+to, the old lady turned at once to Dr. Neill, whom she took for the
+Surveyor of Taxes.&nbsp; &lsquo;Sir,&rsquo; said she, &lsquo;gin ye&rsquo;ll
+tell the King that I canna keep the Ness free o&rsquo; the Bangers (sheep)
+without twa hun&rsquo;s, and twa guid hun&rsquo;s too, he&rsquo;ll pass
+me threa the tax on dugs.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+This familiar confidence, these traits of engaging simplicity, are characters
+of a secluded people.&nbsp; Mankind - and, above all, islanders - come
+very swiftly to a bearing, and find very readily, upon one convention
+or another, a tolerable corporate life.&nbsp; The danger is to those
+from without, who have not grown up from childhood in the islands, but
+appear suddenly in that narrow horizon, life-sized apparitions.&nbsp;
+For these no bond of humanity exists, no feeling of kinship is awakened
+by their peril; they will assist at a shipwreck, like the fisher-folk
+of Lunga, as spectators, and when the fatal scene is over, and the beach
+strewn with dead bodies, they will fence their fields with mahogany,
+and, after a decent grace, sup claret to their porridge.&nbsp; It is
+not wickedness: it is scarce evil; it is only, in its highest power,
+the sense of isolation and the wise disinterestedness of feeble and
+poor races.&nbsp; Think how many viking ships had sailed by these islands
+in the past, how many vikings had landed, and raised turmoil, and broken
+up the barrows of the dead, and carried off the wines of the living;
+and blame them, if you are able, for that belief (which may be called
+one of the parables of the devil&rsquo;s gospel) that a man rescued
+from the sea will prove the bane of his deliverer.&nbsp; It might be
+thought that my grandfather, coming there unknown, and upon an employment
+so hateful to the inhabitants, must have run the hazard of his life.&nbsp;
+But this were to misunderstand.&nbsp; He came franked by the laird and
+the clergyman; he was the King&rsquo;s officer; the work was &lsquo;opened
+with prayer by the Rev. Walter Trail, minister of the parish&rsquo;;
+God and the King had decided it, and the people of these pious islands
+bowed their heads.&nbsp; There landed, indeed, in North Ronaldsay, during
+the last decade of the eighteenth century, a traveller whose life seems
+really to have been imperilled.&nbsp; A very little man of a swarthy
+complexion, he came ashore, exhausted and unshaved, from a long boat
+passage, and lay down to sleep in the home of the parish schoolmaster.&nbsp;
+But he had been seen landing.&nbsp; The inhabitants had identified him
+for a Pict, as, by some singular confusion of name, they called the
+dark and dwarfish aboriginal people of the land.&nbsp; Immediately the
+obscure ferment of a race-hatred, grown into a superstition, began to
+work in their bosoms, and they crowded about the house and the room-door
+with fearful whisperings.&nbsp; For some time the schoolmaster held
+them at bay, and at last despatched a messenger to call my grand-father.&nbsp;
+He came: he found the islanders beside themselves at this unwelcome
+resurrection of the dead and the detested; he was shown, as adminicular
+of testimony, the traveller&rsquo;s uncouth and thick-soled boots; he
+argued, and finding argument unavailing, consented to enter the room
+and examine with his own eyes the sleeping Pict.&nbsp; One glance was
+sufficient: the man was now a missionary, but he had been before that
+an Edinburgh shopkeeper with whom my grandfather had dealt.&nbsp; He
+came forth again with this report, and the folk of the island, wholly
+relieved, dispersed to their own houses.&nbsp; They were timid as sheep
+and ignorant as limpets; that was all.&nbsp; But the Lord deliver us
+from the tender mercies of a frightened flock!<br>
+<br>
+I will give two more instances of their superstition.&nbsp; When Sir
+Walter Scott visited the Stones of Stennis, my grandfather put in his
+pocket a hundred-foot line, which he unfortunately lost.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Some years afterwards,&rsquo; he writes, &lsquo;one of my assistants
+on a visit to the Stones of Stennis took shelter from a storm in a cottage
+close by the lake; and seeing a box-measuring-line in the bole or sole
+of the cottage window, he asked the woman where she got this well-known
+professional appendage.&nbsp; She said: &ldquo;O sir, ane of the bairns
+fand it lang syne at the Stanes; and when drawing it out we took fright,
+and thinking it had belanged to the fairies, we threw it into the bole,
+and it has layen there ever since.&rdquo;&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+This is for the one; the last shall be a sketch by the master hand of
+Scott himself:<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;At the village of Stromness, on the Orkney main island, called
+Pomona, lived, in 1814, an aged dame called Bessie Millie, who helped
+out her subsistence by selling favourable winds to mariners.&nbsp; He
+was a venturous master of a vessel who left the roadstead of Stromness
+without paying his offering to propitiate Bessie Millie!&nbsp; Her fee
+was extremely moderate, being exactly sixpence, for which she boiled
+her kettle and gave the bark the advantage of her prayers, for she disclaimed
+all unlawful acts.&nbsp; The wind thus petitioned for was sure, she
+said, to arrive, though occasionally the mariners had to wait some time
+for it.&nbsp; The woman&rsquo;s dwelling and appearance were not unbecoming
+her pretensions.&nbsp; Her house, which was on the brow of the steep
+hill on which Stromness is founded, was only accessible by a series
+of dirty and precipitous lanes, and for exposure might have been the
+abode of Eolus himself, in whose commodities the inhabitant dealt.&nbsp;
+She herself was, as she told us, nearly one hundred years old, withered
+and dried up like a mummy.&nbsp; A clay-coloured kerchief, folded round
+her neck, corresponded in colour to her corpse-like complexion.&nbsp;
+Two light blue eyes that gleamed with a lustre like that of insanity,
+an utterance of astonishing rapidity, a nose and chin that almost met
+together, and a ghastly expression of cunning, gave her the effect of
+Hecate.&nbsp; Such was Bessie Millie, to whom the mariners paid a sort
+of tribute with a feeling between jest and earnest.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+II<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+From about the beginning of the century up to 1807 Robert Stevenson
+was in partnership with Thomas Smith.&nbsp; In the last-named year the
+partnership was dissolved; Thomas Smith returning to his business, and
+my grandfather becoming sole engineer to the Board of Northern Lights.<br>
+<br>
+I must try, by excerpts from his diary and correspondence, to convey
+to the reader some idea of the ardency and thoroughness with which he
+threw himself into the largest and least of his multifarious engagements
+in this service.&nbsp; But first I must say a word or two upon the life
+of lightkeepers, and the temptations to which they are more particularly
+exposed.&nbsp; The lightkeeper occupies a position apart among men.&nbsp;
+In sea-towers the complement has always been three since the deplorable
+business in the Eddystone, when one keeper died, and the survivor, signalling
+in vain for relief, was compelled to live for days with the dead body.&nbsp;
+These usually pass their time by the pleasant human expedient of quarrelling;
+and sometimes, I am assured, not one of the three is on speaking terms
+with any other.&nbsp; On shore stations, which on the Scottish coast
+are sometimes hardly less isolated, the usual number is two, a principal
+and an assistant.&nbsp; The principal is dissatisfied with the assistant,
+or perhaps the assistant keeps pigeons, and the principal wants the
+water from the roof.&nbsp; Their wives and families are with them, living
+cheek by jowl.&nbsp; The children quarrel; Jockie hits Jimsie in the
+eye, and the mothers make haste to mingle in the dissension.&nbsp; Perhaps
+there is trouble about a broken dish; perhaps Mrs. Assistant is more
+highly born than Mrs. Principal and gives herself airs; and the men
+are drawn in and the servants presently follow.&nbsp; &lsquo;Church
+privileges have been denied the keeper&rsquo;s and the assistant&rsquo;s
+servants,&rsquo; I read in one case, and the eminently Scots periphrasis
+means neither more nor less than excommunication, &lsquo;on account
+of the discordant and quarrelsome state of the families.&nbsp; The cause,
+when inquired into, proves to be <i>tittle</i>-<i>tattle</i> on both
+sides.&rsquo;&nbsp; The tender comes round; the foremen and artificers
+go from station to station; the gossip flies through the whole system
+of the service, and the stories, disfigured and exaggerated, return
+to their own birthplace with the returning tender.&nbsp; The English
+Board was apparently shocked by the picture of these dissensions.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;When the Trinity House can,&rsquo; I find my grandfather writing
+at Beachy Head, in 1834, &lsquo;they do not appoint two keepers, they
+disagree so ill.&nbsp; A man who has a family is assisted by his family;
+and in this way, to my experience and present observation, the business
+is very much neglected.&nbsp; One keeper is, in my view, a bad system.&nbsp;
+This day&rsquo;s visit to an English lighthouse convinces me of this,
+as the lightkeeper was walking on a staff with the gout, and the business
+performed by one of his daughters, a girl of thirteen or fourteen years
+of age.&rsquo;&nbsp; This man received a hundred a year!&nbsp; It shows
+a different reading of human nature, perhaps typical of Scotland and
+England, that I find in my grandfather&rsquo;s diary the following pregnant
+entry: &lsquo;<i>The lightkeepers, agreeing ill</i>, <i>keep one another
+to their duty</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp; But the Scottish system was not alone
+founded on this cynical opinion.&nbsp; The dignity and the comfort of
+the northern lightkeeper were both attended to.&nbsp; He had a uniform
+to &lsquo;raise him in his own estimation, and in that of his neighbour,
+which is of consequence to a person of trust.&nbsp; The keepers,&rsquo;
+my grandfather goes on, in another place, &lsquo;are attended to in
+all the detail of accommodation in the best style as shipmasters; and
+this is believed to have a sensible effect upon their conduct, and to
+regulate their general habits as members of society.&rsquo;&nbsp; He
+notes, with the same dip of ink, that &lsquo;the brasses were not clean,
+and the persons of the keepers not <i>trig&rsquo;</i>; and thus we find
+him writing to a culprit: &lsquo;I have to complain that you are not
+cleanly in your person, and that your manner of speech is ungentle,
+and rather inclines to rudeness.&nbsp; You must therefore take a different
+view of your duties as a lightkeeper.&rsquo;&nbsp; A high ideal for
+the service appears in these expressions, and will be more amply illustrated
+further on.&nbsp; But even the Scottish lightkeeper was frail.&nbsp;
+During the unbroken solitude of the winter months, when inspection is
+scarce possible, it must seem a vain toil to polish the brass hand-rail
+of the stair, or to keep an unrewarded vigil in the light-room; and
+the keepers are habitually tempted to the beginnings of sloth, and must
+unremittingly resist.&nbsp; He who temporises with his conscience is
+already lost.&nbsp; I must tell here an anecdote that illustrates the
+difficulties of inspection.&nbsp; In the days of my uncle David and
+my father there was a station which they regarded with jealousy.&nbsp;
+The two engineers compared notes and were agreed.&nbsp; The tower was
+always clean, but seemed always to bear traces of a hasty cleansing,
+as though the keepers had been suddenly forewarned.&nbsp; On inquiry,
+it proved that such was the case, and that a wandering fiddler was the
+unfailing harbinger of the engineer.&nbsp; At last my father was storm-stayed
+one Sunday in a port at the other side of the island.&nbsp; The visit
+was quite overdue, and as he walked across upon the Monday morning he
+promised himself that he should at last take the keepers unprepared.&nbsp;
+They were both waiting for him in uniform at the gate; the fiddler had
+been there on Saturday!<br>
+<br>
+My grandfather, as will appear from the following extracts, was much
+a martinet, and had a habit of expressing himself on paper with an almost
+startling emphasis.&nbsp; Personally, with his powerful voice, sanguine
+countenance, and eccentric and original locutions, he was well qualified
+to inspire a salutary terror in the service.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I find that the keepers have, by some means or another, got into
+the way of cleaning too much with rotten-stone and oil.&nbsp; I take
+the principal keeper to <i>task</i> on this subject, and make him bring
+a clean towel and clean one of the brazen frames, which leaves the towel
+in an odious state.&nbsp; This towel I put up in a sheet of paper, seal,
+and take with me to confront Mr. Murdoch, who has just left the station.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;This letter&rsquo; - a stern enumeration of complaints - &lsquo;to
+lie a week on the light-room book-place, and to be put in the Inspector&rsquo;s
+hands when he comes round.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;It is the most painful
+thing that can occur for me to have a correspondence of this kind with
+any of the keepers; and when I come to the Lighthouse, instead of having
+the satisfaction to meet them with approbation, it is distressing when
+one is obliged to put on a most angry countenance and demeanour; but
+from such culpable negligence as you have shown there is no avoiding
+it.&nbsp; I hold it as a fixed maxim that, when a man or a family put
+on a slovenly appearance in their houses, stairs, and lanterns, I always
+find their reflectors, burners, windows, and light in general, ill attended
+to; and, therefore, I must insist on cleanliness throughout.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I find you very deficient in the duty of the high tower.&nbsp;
+You thus place your appointment as Principal Keeper in jeopardy; and
+I think it necessary, as an old servant of the Board, to put you upon
+your guard once for all at this time.&nbsp; I call upon you to recollect
+what was formerly and is now said to you.&nbsp; The state of the backs
+of the reflectors at the high tower was disgraceful, as I pointed out
+to you on the spot.&nbsp; They were as if spitten upon, and greasy finger-marks
+upon the back straps.&nbsp; I demand an explanation of this state of
+things.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;The cause of the Commissioners dismissing
+you is expressed in the minute; and it must be a matter of regret to
+you that you have been so much engaged in smuggling, and also that the
+Reports relative to the cleanliness of the Lighthouse, upon being referred
+to, rather added to their unfavourable opinion.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;I
+do not go into the dwelling-house, but severely chide the lightkeepers
+for the disagreement that seems to subsist among them.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;The families of the two lightkeepers here agree very ill.&nbsp;
+I have effected a reconciliation for the present.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Things
+are in a very <i>humdrum</i> state here.&nbsp; There is no painting,
+and in and out of doors no taste or tidiness displayed.&nbsp; Robert&rsquo;s
+wife <i>greets</i> and M&rsquo;Gregor&rsquo;s scolds; and Robert is
+so down-hearted that he says he is unfit for duty.&nbsp; I told him
+that if he was to mind wives&rsquo; quarrels, and to take them up, the
+only way was for him and M&rsquo;Gregor to go down to the point like
+Sir G. Grant and Lord Somerset.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;I cannot say that
+I have experienced a more unpleasant meeting than that of the lighthouse
+folks this morning, or ever saw a stronger example of unfeeling barbarity
+than the conduct which the ---s exhibited.&nbsp; These two cold-hearted
+persons, not contented with having driven the daughter of the poor nervous
+woman from her father&rsquo;s house, <i>both</i> kept <i>pouncing</i>
+at her, lest she should forget her great misfortune.&nbsp; Write me
+of their conduct.&nbsp; Do not make any communication of the state of
+these families at Kinnaird Head, as this would be like <i>Tale-bearing.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+</i>There is the great word out.&nbsp; Tales and Tale-bearing, always
+with the emphatic capitals, run continually in his correspondence.&nbsp;
+I will give but two instances:-<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Write to David [one of the lightkeepers] and caution him to be
+more prudent how he expresses himself.&nbsp; Let him attend his duty
+to the Lighthouse and his family concerns, and give less heed to Tale-bearers.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I have not your last letter at hand to quote its date; but, if
+I recollect, it contains some kind of tales, which nonsense I wish you
+would lay aside, and notice only the concerns of your family and the
+important charge committed to you.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Apparently, however, my grandfather was not himself inaccessible to
+the Tale-bearer, as the following indicates:<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;In walking along with Mr. --- , I explain to him that I should
+be under the necessity of looking more closely into the business here
+from his conduct at Buddonness, which had given an instance of weakness
+in the Moral principle which had staggered my opinion of him.&nbsp;
+His answer was, &ldquo;That will be with regard to the lass?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+I told him I was to enter no farther with him upon the subject.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Mr. Miller appears to be master and man.&nbsp; I am sorry about
+this foolish fellow.&nbsp; Had I known his train, I should not, as I
+did, have rather forced him into the service.&nbsp; Upon finding the
+windows in the state they were, I turned upon Mr. Watt, and especially
+upon Mr. Stewart.&nbsp; The latter did not appear for a length of time
+to have visited the light-room.&nbsp; On asking the cause - did Mr.
+Watt and him (<i>sic</i>) disagree; he said no; but he had got very
+bad usage from the assistant, &ldquo;who was a very obstreperous man.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+I could not bring Mr. Watt to put in language his objections to Miller;
+all I could get was that, he being your friend, and saying he was unwell,
+he did not like to complain or to push the man; that the man seemed
+to have no liking to anything like work; that he was unruly; that, being
+an educated man, he despised them.&nbsp; I was, however, determined
+to have out of these <i>unwilling</i> witnesses the language alluded
+to.&nbsp; I fixed upon Mr. Stewart as chief; he hedged.&nbsp; My curiosity
+increased, and I urged.&nbsp; Then he said, &ldquo;What would I think,
+just exactly, of Mr. Watt being called an Old B-?&rdquo;&nbsp; You may
+judge of my surprise.&nbsp; There was not another word uttered.&nbsp;
+This was quite enough, as coming from a person I should have calculated
+upon quite different behaviour from.&nbsp; It spoke a volume of the
+man&rsquo;s mind and want of principle.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Object to
+the keeper keeping a Bull-Terrier dog of ferocious appearance.&nbsp;
+It is dangerous, as we land at all times of the night.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Have only to complain of the storehouse floor being spotted with
+oil.&nbsp; Give orders for this being instantly rectified, so that on
+my return to-morrow I may see things in good order.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;The
+furniture of both houses wants much rubbing.&nbsp; Mrs. -&rsquo;s carpets
+are absurd beyond anything I have seen.&nbsp; I want her to turn the
+fenders up with the bottom to the fireplace: the carpets, when not likely
+to be in use, folded up and laid as a hearthrug partly under the fender.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+My grandfather was king in the service to his finger-tips.&nbsp; All
+should go in his way, from the principal lightkeeper&rsquo;s coat to
+the assistant&rsquo;s fender, from the gravel in the garden-walks to
+the bad smell in the kitchen, or the oil-spots on the store-room floor.&nbsp;
+It might be thought there was nothing more calculated to awake men&rsquo;s
+resentment, and yet his rule was not more thorough than it was beneficent.&nbsp;
+His thought for the keepers was continual, and it did not end with their
+lives.&nbsp; He tried to manage their successions; he thought no pains
+too great to arrange between a widow and a son who had succeeded his
+father; he was often harassed and perplexed by tales of hardship; and
+I find him writing, almost in despair, of their improvident habits and
+the destitution that awaited their families upon a death.&nbsp; &lsquo;The
+house being completely furnished, they come into possession without
+necessaries, and they go out NAKED.&nbsp; The insurance seems to have
+failed, and what next is to be tried?&rsquo;&nbsp; While they lived
+he wrote behind their backs to arrange for the education of their children,
+or to get them other situations if they seemed unsuitable for the Northern
+Lights.&nbsp; When he was at a lighthouse on a Sunday he held prayers
+and heard the children read.&nbsp; When a keeper was sick, he lent him
+his horse and sent him mutton and brandy from the ship.&nbsp; &lsquo;The
+assistant&rsquo;s wife having been this morning confined, there was
+sent ashore a bottle of sherry and a few rusks - a practice which I
+have always observed in this service,&rsquo; he writes.&nbsp; They dwelt,
+many of them, in uninhabited isles or desert forelands, totally cut
+off from shops.&nbsp; Many of them were, besides, fallen into a rustic
+dishabitude of life, so that even when they visited a city they could
+scarce be trusted with their own affairs, as (for example) he who carried
+home to his children, thinking they were oranges, a bag of lemons.&nbsp;
+And my grandfather seems to have acted, at least in his early years,
+as a kind of gratuitous agent for the service.&nbsp; Thus I find him
+writing to a keeper in 1806, when his mind was already preoccupied with
+arrangements for the Bell Rock: &lsquo;I am much afraid I stand very
+unfavourably with you as a man of promise, as I was to send several
+things of which I believe I have more than once got the memorandum.&nbsp;
+All I can say is that in this respect you are not singular.&nbsp; This
+makes me no better; but really I have been driven about beyond all example
+in my past experience, and have been essentially obliged to neglect
+my own urgent affairs.&rsquo;&nbsp; No servant of the Northern Lights
+came to Edinburgh but he was entertained at Baxter&rsquo;s Place to
+breakfast.&nbsp; There, at his own table, my grandfather sat down delightedly
+with his broad-spoken, homespun officers.&nbsp; His whole relation to
+the service was, in fact, patriarchal; and I believe I may say that
+throughout its ranks he was adored.&nbsp; I have spoken with many who
+knew him; I was his grandson, and their words may have very well been
+words of flattery; but there was one thing that could not be affected,
+and that was the look and light that came into their faces at the name
+of Robert Stevenson.<br>
+<br>
+In the early part of the century the foreman builder was a young man
+of the name of George Peebles, a native of Anstruther.&nbsp; My grandfather
+had placed in him a very high degree of confidence, and he was already
+designated to be foreman at the Bell Rock, when, on Christmas-day 1806,
+on his way home from Orkney, he was lost in the schooner <i>Traveller</i>.&nbsp;
+The tale of the loss of the <i>Traveller</i> is almost a replica of
+that of the <i>Elizabeth</i> of Stromness; like the <i>Elizabeth</i>
+she came as far as Kinnaird Head, was then surprised by a storm, driven
+back to Orkney, and bilged and sank on the island of Flotta.&nbsp; It
+seems it was about the dusk of the day when the ship struck, and many
+of the crew and passengers were drowned.&nbsp; About the same hour,
+my grandfather was in his office at the writing-table; and the room
+beginning to darken, he laid down his pen and fell asleep.&nbsp; In
+a dream he saw the door open and George Peebles come in, &lsquo;reeling
+to and fro, and staggering like a drunken man,&rsquo; with water streaming
+from his head and body to the floor.&nbsp; There it gathered into a
+wave which, sweeping forward, submerged my grandfather.&nbsp; Well,
+no matter how deep; versions vary; and at last he awoke, and behold
+it was a dream!&nbsp; But it may be conceived how profoundly the impression
+was written even on the mind of a man averse from such ideas, when the
+news came of the wreck on Flotta and the death of George.<br>
+<br>
+George&rsquo;s vouchers and accounts had perished with himself; and
+it appeared he was in debt to the Commissioners.&nbsp; But my grandfather
+wrote to Orkney twice, collected evidence of his disbursements, and
+proved him to be seventy pounds ahead.&nbsp; With this sum, he applied
+to George&rsquo;s brothers, and had it apportioned between their mother
+and themselves.&nbsp; He approached the Board and got an annuity of
+&pound;5 bestowed on the widow Peebles; and we find him writing her
+a long letter of explanation and advice, and pressing on her the duty
+of making a will.&nbsp; That he should thus act executor was no singular
+instance.&nbsp; But besides this we are able to assist at some of the
+stages of a rather touching experiment; no less than an attempt to secure
+Charles Peebles heir to George&rsquo;s favour.&nbsp; He is despatched,
+under the character of &lsquo;a fine young man&rsquo;; recommended to
+gentlemen for &lsquo;advice, as he&rsquo;s a stranger in your place,
+and indeed to this kind of charge, this being his first outset as Foreman&rsquo;;
+and for a long while after, the letter-book, in the midst of that thrilling
+first year of the Bell Rock, is encumbered with pages of instruction
+and encouragement.&nbsp; The nature of a bill, and the precautions that
+are to be observed about discounting it, are expounded at length and
+with clearness.&nbsp; &lsquo;You are not, I hope, neglecting, Charles,
+to work the harbour at spring-tides; and see that you pay the greatest
+attention to get the well so as to supply the keeper with water, for
+he is a very helpless fellow, and so unfond of hard work that I fear
+he could do ill to keep himself in water by going to the other side
+for it.&rsquo; - &lsquo;With regard to spirits, Charles, I see very
+little occasion for it.&rsquo;&nbsp; These abrupt apostrophes sound
+to me like the voice of an awakened conscience; but they would seem
+to have reverberated in vain in the ears of Charles.&nbsp; There was
+trouble in Pladda, his scene of operations; his men ran away from him,
+there was at least a talk of calling in the Sheriff.&nbsp; &lsquo;I
+fear,&rsquo; writes my grandfather, &lsquo;you have been too indulgent,
+and I am sorry to add that men do not answer to be too well treated,
+a circumstance which I have experienced, and which you will learn as
+you go on in business.&rsquo;&nbsp; I wonder, was not Charles Peebles
+himself a case in point?&nbsp; Either death, at least, or disappointment
+and discharge, must have ended his service in the Northern Lights; and
+in later correspondence I look in vain for any mention of his name -
+Charles, I mean, not Peebles: for as late as 1839 my grandfather is
+patiently writing to another of the family: &lsquo;I am sorry you took
+the trouble of applying to me about your son, as it lies quite out of
+my way to forward his views in the line of his profession as a Draper.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+III<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+A professional life of Robert Stevenson has been already given to the
+world by his son David, and to that I would refer those interested in
+such matters.&nbsp; But my own design, which is to represent the man,
+would be very ill carried out if I suffered myself or my reader to forget
+that he was, first of all and last of all, an engineer.&nbsp; His chief
+claim to the style of a mechanical inventor is on account of the Jib
+or Balance Crane of the Bell Rock, which are beautiful contrivances.&nbsp;
+But the great merit of this engineer was not in the field of engines.&nbsp;
+He was above all things a projector of works in the face of nature,
+and a modifier of nature itself.&nbsp; A road to be made, a tower to
+be built, a harbour to be constructed, a river to be trained and guided
+in its channel - these were the problems with which his mind was continually
+occupied; and for these and similar ends he travelled the world for
+more than half a century, like an artist, note-book in hand.<br>
+<br>
+He once stood and looked on at the emptying of a certain oil-tube; he
+did so watch in hand, and accurately timed the operation; and in so
+doing offered the perfect type of his profession.&nbsp; The fact acquired
+might never be of use: it was acquired: another link in the world&rsquo;s
+huge chain of processes was brought down to figures and placed at the
+service of the engineer.&nbsp; &lsquo;The very term mensuration sounds
+<i>engineer-like</i>,&rsquo; I find him writing; and in truth what the
+engineer most properly deals with is that which can be measured, weighed,
+and numbered.&nbsp; The time of any operation in hours and minutes,
+its cost in pounds, shillings, and pence, the strain upon a given point
+in foot-pounds - these are his conquests, with which he must continually
+furnish his mind, and which, after he has acquired them, he must continually
+apply and exercise.&nbsp; They must be not only entries in note-books,
+to be hurriedly consulted; in the actor&rsquo;s phrase, he must be <i>stale</i>
+in them; in a word of my grandfather&rsquo;s, they must be &lsquo;fixed
+in the mind like the ten fingers and ten toes.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+These are the certainties of the engineer; so far he finds a solid footing
+and clear views.&nbsp; But the province of formulas and constants is
+restricted.&nbsp; Even the mechanical engineer comes at last to an end
+of his figures, and must stand up, a practical man, face to face with
+the discrepancies of nature and the hiatuses of theory.&nbsp; After
+the machine is finished, and the steam turned on, the next is to drive
+it; and experience and an exquisite sympathy must teach him where a
+weight should be applied or a nut loosened.&nbsp; With the civil engineer,
+more properly so called (if anything can be proper with this awkward
+coinage), the obligation starts with the beginning.&nbsp; He is always
+the practical man.&nbsp; The rains, the winds and the waves, the complexity
+and the fitfulness of nature, are always before him.&nbsp; He has to
+deal with the unpredictable, with those forces (in Smeaton&rsquo;s phrase)
+that &lsquo;are subject to no calculation&rsquo;; and still he must
+predict, still calculate them, at his peril.&nbsp; His work is not yet
+in being, and he must foresee its influence: how it shall deflect the
+tide, exaggerate the waves, dam back the rain-water, or attract the
+thunderbolt.&nbsp; He visits a piece of sea-board; and from the inclination
+and soil of the beach, from the weeds and shell-fish, from the configuration
+of the coast and the depth of soundings outside, he must deduce what
+magnitude of waves is to be looked for.&nbsp; He visits a river, its
+summer water babbling on shallows; and he must not only read, in a thousand
+indications, the measure of winter freshets, but be able to predict
+the violence of occasional great floods.&nbsp; Nay, and more; he must
+not only consider that which is, but that which may be.&nbsp; Thus I
+find my grandfather writing, in a report on the North Esk Bridge: &lsquo;A
+less waterway might have sufficed, but the <i>valleys may come to be
+meliorated by drainage</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp; One field drained after another
+through all that confluence of vales, and we come to a time when they
+shall precipitate by so much a more copious and transient flood, as
+the gush of the flowing drain-pipe is superior to the leakage of a peat.<br>
+<br>
+It is plain there is here but a restricted use for formulas.&nbsp; In
+this sort of practice, the engineer has need of some transcendental
+sense.&nbsp; Smeaton, the pioneer, bade him obey his &lsquo;feelings&rsquo;;
+my father, that &lsquo;power of estimating obscure forces which supplies
+a coefficient of its own to every rule.&rsquo;&nbsp; The rules must
+be everywhere indeed; but they must everywhere be modified by this transcendental
+coefficient, everywhere bent to the impression of the trained eye and
+the <i>feelings</i> of the engineer.&nbsp; A sentiment of physical laws
+and of the scale of nature, which shall have been strong in the beginning
+and progressively fortified by observation, must be his guide in the
+last recourse.&nbsp; I had the most opportunity to observe my father.&nbsp;
+He would pass hours on the beach, brooding over the waves, counting
+them, noting their least deflection, noting when they broke.&nbsp; On
+Tweedside, or by Lyne or Manor, we have spent together whole afternoons;
+to me, at the time, extremely wearisome; to him, as I am now sorry to
+think, bitterly mortifying.&nbsp; The river was to me a pretty and various
+spectacle; I could not see - I could not be made to see - it otherwise.&nbsp;
+To my father it was a chequer-board of lively forces, which he traced
+from pool to shallow with minute appreciation and enduring interest.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;That bank was being under-cut,&rsquo; he might say.&nbsp; &lsquo;Why?&nbsp;
+Suppose you were to put a groin out here, would not the <i>filum fluminis</i>
+be cast abruptly off across the channel? and where would it impinge
+upon the other shore? and what would be the result?&nbsp; Or suppose
+you were to blast that boulder, what would happen?&nbsp; Follow it -
+use the eyes God has given you - can you not see that a great deal of
+land would be reclaimed upon this side?&rsquo;&nbsp; It was to me like
+school in holidays; but to him, until I had worn him out with my invincible
+triviality, a delight.&nbsp; Thus he pored over the engineer&rsquo;s
+voluminous handy-book of nature; thus must, too, have pored my grand-father
+and uncles.<br>
+<br>
+But it is of the essence of this knowledge, or this knack of mind, to
+be largely incommunicable.&nbsp; &lsquo;It cannot be imparted to another,&rsquo;
+says my father.&nbsp; The verbal casting-net is thrown in vain over
+these evanescent, inferential relations. Hence the insignificance of
+much engineering literature.&nbsp; So far as the science can be reduced
+to formulas or diagrams, the book is to the point; so far as the art
+depends on intimate study of the ways of nature, the author&rsquo;s
+words will too often be found vapid.&nbsp; This fact - that engineering
+looks one way, and literature another - was what my grand-father overlooked.&nbsp;
+All his life long, his pen was in his hand, piling up a treasury of
+knowledge, preparing himself against all possible contingencies.&nbsp;
+Scarce anything fell under his notice but he perceived in it some relation
+to his work, and chronicled it in the pages of his journal in his always
+lucid, but sometimes inexact and wordy, style.&nbsp; The Travelling
+Diary (so he called it) was kept in fascicles of ruled paper, which
+were at last bound up, rudely indexed, and put by for future reference.&nbsp;
+Such volumes as have reached me contain a surprising medley: the whole
+details of his employment in the Northern Lights and his general practice;
+the whole biography of an enthusiastic engineer.&nbsp; Much of it is
+useful and curious; much merely otiose; and much can only be described
+as an attempt to impart that which cannot be imparted in words.&nbsp;
+Of such are his repeated and heroic descriptions of reefs; monuments
+of misdirected literary energy, which leave upon the mind of the reader
+no effect but that of a multiplicity of words and the suggested vignette
+of a lusty old gentleman scrambling among tangle.&nbsp; It is to be
+remembered that he came to engineering while yet it was in the egg and
+without a library, and that he saw the bounds of that profession widen
+daily.&nbsp; He saw iron ships, steamers, and the locomotive engine,
+introduced.&nbsp; He lived to travel from Glasgow to Edinburgh in the
+inside of a forenoon, and to remember that he himself had &lsquo;often
+been twelve hours upon the journey, and his grand-father (Lillie) two
+days&rsquo;!&nbsp; The profession was still but in its second generation,
+and had already broken down the barriers of time and space.&nbsp; Who
+should set a limit to its future encroachments?&nbsp; And hence, with
+a kind of sanguine pedantry, he pursued his design of &lsquo;keeping
+up with the day&rsquo; and posting himself and his family on every mortal
+subject.&nbsp; Of this unpractical idealism we shall meet with many
+instances; there was not a trade, and scarce an accomplishment, but
+he thought it should form part of the outfit of an engineer; and not
+content with keeping an encyclopaedic diary himself, he would fain have
+set all his sons to work continuing and extending it.&nbsp; They were
+more happily inspired.&nbsp; My father&rsquo;s engineering pocket-book
+was not a bulky volume; with its store of pregnant notes and vital formulas,
+it served him through life, and was not yet filled when he came to die.&nbsp;
+As for Robert Stevenson and the Travelling Diary, I should be ungrateful
+to complain, for it has supplied me with many lively traits for this
+and subsequent chapters; but I must still remember much of the period
+of my study there as a sojourn in the Valley of the Shadow.<br>
+<br>
+The duty of the engineer is twofold - to design the work, and to see
+the work done.&nbsp; We have seen already something of the vociferous
+thoroughness of the man, upon the cleaning of lamps and the polishing
+of reflectors.&nbsp; In building, in road-making, in the construction
+of bridges, in every detail and byway of his employments, he pursued
+the same ideal.&nbsp; Perfection (with a capital P and violently under-scored)
+was his design.&nbsp; A crack for a penknife, the waste of &lsquo;six-and-thirty
+shillings,&rsquo; &lsquo;the loss of a day or a tide,&rsquo; in each
+of these he saw and was revolted by the finger of the sloven; and to
+spirits intense as his, and immersed in vital undertakings, the slovenly
+is the dishonest, and wasted time is instantly translated into lives
+endangered.&nbsp; On this consistent idealism there is but one thing
+that now and then trenches with a touch of incongruity, and that is
+his love of the picturesque.&nbsp; As when he laid out a road on Hogarth&rsquo;s
+line of beauty; bade a foreman be careful, in quarrying, not &lsquo;to
+disfigure the island&rsquo;; or regretted in a report that &lsquo;the
+great stone, called the <i>Devil in the Hole</i>, was blasted or broken
+down to make road-metal, and for other purposes of the work.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER III: THE BUILDING OF THE BELL ROCK<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Off the mouths of the Tay and the Forth, thirteen miles from Fifeness,
+eleven from Arbroath, and fourteen from the Red Head of Angus, lies
+the Inchcape or Bell Rock.&nbsp; It extends to a length of about fourteen
+hundred feet, but the part of it discovered at low water to not more
+than four hundred and twenty-seven.&nbsp; At a little more than half-flood
+in fine weather the seamless ocean joins over the reef, and at high-water
+springs it is buried sixteen feet.&nbsp; As the tide goes down, the
+higher reaches of the rock are seen to be clothed by <i>Conferva rupestris</i>
+as by a sward of grass; upon the more exposed edges, where the currents
+are most swift and the breach of the sea heaviest, Baderlock or Henware
+flourishes; and the great Tangle grows at the depth of several fathoms
+with luxuriance.&nbsp; Before man arrived, and introduced into the silence
+of the sea the smoke and clangour of a blacksmith&rsquo;s shop, it was
+a favourite resting-place of seals.&nbsp; The crab and lobster haunt
+in the crevices; and limpets, mussels, and the white buckie abound.<br>
+<br>
+According to a tradition, a bell had been once hung upon this rock by
+an abbot of Arbroath, <a name="citation91a"></a><a href="#footnote91a">{91a}</a>
+&lsquo;and being taken down by a sea-pirate, a year thereafter he perished
+upon the same rock, with ship and goods, in the righteous judgment of
+God.&rsquo;&nbsp; From the days of the abbot and the sea-pirate no man
+had set foot upon the Inchcape, save fishers from the neighbouring coast,
+or perhaps - for a moment, before the surges swallowed them - the unfortunate
+victims of shipwreck.&nbsp; The fishers approached the rock with an
+extreme timidity; but their harvest appears to have been great, and
+the adventure no more perilous than lucrative.&nbsp; In 1800, on the
+occasion of my grandfather&rsquo;s first landing, and during the two
+or three hours which the ebb-tide and the smooth water allowed them
+to pass upon its shelves, his crew collected upwards of two hundredweight
+of old metal: pieces of a kedge anchor and a cabin stove, crowbars,
+a hinge and lock of a door, a ship&rsquo;s marking-iron, a piece of
+a ship&rsquo;s caboose, a soldier&rsquo;s bayonet, a cannon ball, several
+pieces of money, a shoe-buckle, and the like.&nbsp; Such were the spoils
+of the Bell Rock.<br>
+<br>
+From 1794 onward, the mind of my grandfather had been exercised with
+the idea of a light upon this formidable danger.&nbsp; To build a tower
+on a sea rock, eleven miles from shore, and barely uncovered at low
+water of neaps, appeared a fascinating enterprise.&nbsp; It was something
+yet unattempted, unessayed; and even now, after it has been lighted
+for more than eighty years, it is still an exploit that has never been
+repeated. <a name="citation92a"></a><a href="#footnote92a">{92a}</a>&nbsp;
+My grandfather was, besides, but a young man, of an experience comparatively
+restricted, and a reputation confined to Scotland; and when he prepared
+his first models, and exhibited them in Merchants&rsquo; Hall, he can
+hardly be acquitted of audacity.&nbsp; John Clerk of Eldin stood his
+friend from the beginning, kept the key of the model room, to which
+he carried &lsquo;eminent strangers,&rsquo; and found words of counsel
+and encouragement beyond price.&nbsp; &lsquo;Mr. Clerk had been personally
+known to Smeaton, and used occasionally to speak of him to me,&rsquo;
+says my grandfather; and again: &lsquo;I felt regret that I had not
+the opportunity of a greater range of practice to fit me for such an
+undertaking; but I was fortified by an expression of my friend Mr. Clerk
+in one of our conversations. &ldquo;This work,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;is
+unique, and can be little forwarded by experience of ordinary masonic
+operations.&nbsp; In this case Smeaton&rsquo;s &lsquo;Narrative&rsquo;
+must be the text-book, and energy and perseverance the pratique.&rdquo;&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+A Bill for the work was introduced into Parliament and lost in the Lords
+in 1802-3.&nbsp; John Rennie was afterwards, at my grandfather&rsquo;s
+suggestion, called in council, with the style of chief engineer.&nbsp;
+The precise meaning attached to these words by any of the parties appears
+irrecoverable.&nbsp; Chief engineer should have full authority, full
+responsibility, and a proper share of the emoluments; and there were
+none of these for Rennie.&nbsp; I find in an appendix a paper which
+resumes the controversy on this subject; and it will be enough to say
+here that Rennie did not design the Bell Rock, that he did not execute
+it, and that he was not paid for it. <a name="citation94a"></a><a href="#footnote94a">{94a}</a>&nbsp;
+From so much of the correspondence as has come down to me, the acquaintance
+of this man, eleven years his senior, and already famous, appears to
+have been both useful and agreeable to Robert Stevenson.&nbsp; It is
+amusing to find my grandfather seeking high and low for a brace of pistols
+which his colleague had lost by the way between Aberdeen and Edinburgh;
+and writing to Messrs. Dollond, &lsquo;I have not thought it necessary
+to trouble Mr. Rennie with this order, but <i>I beg you will see to
+get two minutes of him as he passes your door</i>&rsquo; - a proposal
+calculated rather from the latitude of Edinburgh than from London, even
+in 1807.&nbsp; It is pretty, too, to observe with what affectionate
+regard Smeaton was held in mind by his immediate successors.&nbsp; &lsquo;Poor
+old fellow,&rsquo; writes Rennie to Stevenson, &lsquo;I hope he will
+now and then take a peep at us, and inspire you with fortitude and courage
+to brave all difficulties and dangers to accomplish a work which will,
+if successful, immortalise you in the annals of fame.&rsquo;&nbsp; The
+style might be bettered, but the sentiment is charming.<br>
+<br>
+Smeaton was, indeed, the patron saint of the Bell Rock.&nbsp; Undeterred
+by the sinister fate of Winstanley, he had tackled and solved the problem
+of the Eddystone; but his solution had not been in all respects perfect.&nbsp;
+It remained for my grand-father to outdo him in daring, by applying
+to a tidal rock those principles which had been already justified by
+the success of the Eddystone, and to perfect the model by more than
+one exemplary departure.&nbsp; Smeaton had adopted in his floors the
+principle of the arch; each therefore exercised an outward thrust upon
+the walls, which must be met and combated by embedded chains.&nbsp;
+My grandfather&rsquo;s flooring-stones, on the other hand, were flat,
+made part of the outer wall, and were keyed and dovetailed into a central
+stone, so as to bind the work together and be positive elements of strength.&nbsp;
+In 1703 Winstanley still thought it possible to erect his strange pagoda,
+with its open gallery, its florid scrolls and candlesticks: like a rich
+man&rsquo;s folly for an ornamental water in a park.&nbsp; Smeaton followed;
+then Stevenson in his turn corrected such flaws as were left in Smeaton&rsquo;s
+design; and with his improvements, it is not too much to say the model
+was made perfect.&nbsp; Smeaton and Stevenson had between them evolved
+and finished the sea-tower.&nbsp; No subsequent builder has departed
+in anything essential from the principles of their design.&nbsp; It
+remains, and it seems to us as though it must remain for ever, an ideal
+attained.&nbsp; Every stone in the building, it may interest the reader
+to know, my grandfather had himself cut out in the model; and the manner
+in which the courses were fitted, joggled, trenailed, wedged, and the
+bond broken, is intricate as a puzzle and beautiful by ingenuity.<br>
+<br>
+In 1806 a second Bill passed both Houses, and the preliminary works
+were at once begun.&nbsp; The same year the Navy had taken a great harvest
+of prizes in the North Sea, one of which, a Prussian fishing dogger,
+flat-bottomed and rounded at the stem and stern, was purchased to be
+a floating lightship, and re-named the <i>Pharos</i>.&nbsp; By July
+1807 she was overhauled, rigged for her new purpose, and turned into
+the lee of the Isle of May.&nbsp; &lsquo;It was proposed that the whole
+party should meet in her and pass the night; but she rolled from side
+to side in so extraordinary a manner, that even the most seahardy fled.&nbsp;
+It was humorously observed of this vessel that she was in danger of
+making a round turn and appearing with her keel uppermost; and that
+she would even turn a half-penny if laid upon deck.&rsquo;&nbsp; By
+two o&rsquo;clock on the morning of the 15th July this purgatorial vessel
+was moored by the Bell Rock.<br>
+<br>
+A sloop of forty tons had been in the meantime built at Leith, and named
+the <i>Smeaton</i>; by the 7th of August my grandfather set sail in
+her -<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;carrying with him Mr. Peter Logan, foreman builder, and five
+artificers selected from their having been somewhat accustomed to the
+sea, the writer being aware of the distressing trial which the floating
+light would necessarily inflict upon landsmen from her rolling motion.&nbsp;
+Here he remained till the 10th, and, as the weather was favourable,
+a landing was effected daily, when the workmen were employed in cutting
+the large seaweed from the sites of the lighthouse and beacon, which
+were respectively traced with pickaxes upon the rock.&nbsp; In the meantime
+the crew of the <i>Smeaton</i> was employed in laying down the several
+sets of moorings within about half a mile of the rock for the convenience
+of vessels.&nbsp; The artificers, having, fortunately, experienced moderate
+weather, returned to the workyard of Arbroath with a good report of
+their treatment afloat; when their comrades ashore began to feel some
+anxiety to see a place of which they had heard so much, and to change
+the constant operations with the iron and mallet in the process of hewing
+for an occasional tide&rsquo;s work on the rock, which they figured
+to themselves as a state of comparative ease and comfort.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+I am now for many pages to let my grandfather speak for himself, and
+tell in his own words the story of his capital achievement.&nbsp; The
+tall quarto of 533 pages from which the following narrative has been
+dug out is practically unknown to the general reader, yet good judges
+have perceived its merit, and it has been named (with flattering wit)
+&lsquo;The Romance of Stone and Lime&rsquo; and &lsquo;The Robinson
+Crusoe of Civil Engineering.&rsquo;&nbsp; The tower was but four years
+in the building; it took Robert Stevenson, in the midst of his many
+avocations, no less than fourteen to prepare the <i>Account</i>.&nbsp;
+The title-page is a solid piece of literature of upwards of a hundred
+words; the table of contents runs to thirteen pages; and the dedication
+(to that revered monarch, George IV) must have cost him no little study
+and correspondence.&nbsp; Walter Scott was called in council, and offered
+one miscorrection which still blots the page.&nbsp; In spite of all
+this pondering and filing, there remain pages not easy to construe,
+and inconsistencies not easy to explain away.&nbsp; I have sought to
+make these disappear, and to lighten a little the baggage with which
+my grandfather marches; here and there I have rejointed and rearranged
+a sentence, always with his own words, and all with a reverent and faithful
+hand; and I offer here to the reader the true Monument of Robert Stevenson
+with a little of the moss removed from the inscription, and the Portrait
+of the artist with some superfluous canvas cut away.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+I - OPERATIONS OF 1807<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 16th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+Everything being arranged for sailing to the rock on Saturday the 15th,
+the vessel might have proceeded on the Sunday; but understanding that
+this would not be so agreeable to the artificers it was deferred until
+Monday.&nbsp; Here we cannot help observing that the men allotted for
+the operations at the rock seemed to enter upon the undertaking with
+a degree of consideration which fully marked their opinion as to the
+hazardous nature of the undertaking on which they were about to enter.&nbsp;
+They went in a body to church on Sunday, and whether it was in the ordinary
+course, or designed for the occasion, the writer is not certain, but
+the service was, in many respects, suitable to their circumstances.<br>
+<br>
+[Monday, 17th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+The tide happening to fall late in the evening of Monday the 17th, the
+party, counting twenty-four in number, embarked on board of the <i>Smeaton</i>
+about ten o&rsquo;clock p.m., and sailed from Arbroath with a gentle
+breeze at west.&nbsp; Our ship&rsquo;s colours having been flying all
+day in compliment to the commencement of the work, the other vessels
+in the harbour also saluted, which made a very gay appearance.&nbsp;
+A number of the friends and acquaintances of those on board having been
+thus collected, the piers, though at a late hour, were perfectly crowded,
+and just as the <i>Smeaton</i> cleared the harbour, all on board united
+in giving three hearty cheers, which were returned by those on shore
+in such good earnest, that, in the still of the evening, the sound must
+have been heard in all parts of the town, re-echoing from the walls
+and lofty turrets of the venerable Abbey of Aberbrothwick.&nbsp; The
+writer felt much satisfaction at the manner of this parting scene, though
+he must own that the present rejoicing was, on his part, mingled with
+occasional reflections upon the responsibility of his situation, which
+extended to the safety of all who should be engaged in this perilous
+work.&nbsp; With such sensations he retired to his cabin; but as the
+artificers were rather inclined to move about the deck than to remain
+in their confined berths below, his repose was transient, and the vessel
+being small every motion was necessarily heard.&nbsp; Some who were
+musically inclined occasionally sung; but he listened with peculiar
+pleasure to the sailor at the helm, who hummed over Dibdin&rsquo;s characteristic
+air:-<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;They say there&rsquo;s a Providence sits up aloft,<br>
+To keep watch for the life of poor Jack.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 18th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+The weather had been very gentle all night, and, about four in the morning
+of the 18th, the <i>Smeaton</i> anchored.&nbsp; Agreeably to an arranged
+plan of operations, all hands were called at five o&rsquo;clock a.m.,
+just as the highest part of the Bell Rock began to show its sable head
+among the light breakers, which occasionally whitened with the foaming
+sea.&nbsp; The two boats belonging to the floating light attended the
+<i>Smeaton</i>, to carry the artificers to the rock, as her boat could
+only accommodate about six or eight sitters.&nbsp; Every one was more
+eager than his neighbour to leap into the boats and it required a good
+deal of management on the part of the coxswains to get men unaccustomed
+to a boat to take their places for rowing and at the same time trimming
+her properly.&nbsp; The landing-master and foreman went into one boat,
+while the writer took charge of another, and steered it to and from
+the rock.&nbsp; This became the more necessary in the early stages of
+the work, as places could not be spared for more than two, or at most
+three seamen to each boat, who were always stationed, one at the bow,
+to use the boat-hook in fending or pushing off, and the other at the
+aftermost oar, to give the proper time in rowing, while the middle oars
+were double-banked, and rowed by the artificers.<br>
+<br>
+As the weather was extremely fine, with light airs of wind from the
+east, we landed without difficulty upon the central part of the rock
+at half-past five, but the water had not yet sufficiently left it for
+commencing the work.&nbsp; This interval, however, did not pass unoccupied.&nbsp;
+The first and last of all the principal operations at the Bell Rock
+were accompanied by three hearty cheers from all hands, and, on occasions
+like the present, the steward of the ship attended, when each man was
+regaled with a glass of rum.&nbsp; As the water left the rock about
+six, some began to bore the holes for the great bats or holdfasts, for
+fixing the beams of the Beacon-house, while the smith was fully attended
+in laying out the site of his forge, upon a somewhat sheltered spot
+of the rock, which also recommended itself from the vicinity of a pool
+of water for tempering his irons.&nbsp; These preliminary steps occupied
+about an hour, and as nothing further could be done during this tide
+towards fixing the forge, the workmen gratified their curiosity by roaming
+about the rock, which they investigated with great eagerness till the
+tide overflowed it.&nbsp; Those who had been sick picked dulse <i>(Fucus
+palmatus</i>), which they ate with much seeming appetite; others were
+more intent upon collecting limpets for bait, to enjoy the amusement
+of fishing when they returned on board of the vessel.&nbsp; Indeed,
+none came away empty-handed, as everything found upon the Bell Rock
+was considered valuable, being connected with some interesting association.&nbsp;
+Several coins, and numerous bits of shipwrecked iron, were picked up,
+of almost every description; and, in particular, a marking-iron lettered
+JAMES - a circumstance of which it was thought proper to give notice
+to the public, as it might lead to the knowledge of some unfortunate
+shipwreck, perhaps unheard of till this simple occurrence led to the
+discovery.&nbsp; When the rock began to be overflowed, the landing-master
+arranged the crews of the respective boats, appointing twelve persons
+to each.&nbsp; According to a rule which the writer had laid down to
+himself, he was always the last person who left the rock.<br>
+<br>
+In a short time the Bell Rock was laid completely under water, and the
+weather being extremely fine, the sea was so smooth that its place could
+not be pointed out from the appearance of the surface - a circumstance
+which sufficiently demonstrates the dangerous nature of this rock, even
+during the day, and in the smoothest and calmest state of the sea.&nbsp;
+During the interval between the morning and the evening tides, the artificers
+were variously employed in fishing and reading; others were busy in
+drying and adjusting their wet clothes, and one or two amused their
+companions with the violin and German flute.<br>
+<br>
+About seven in the evening the signal bell for landing on the rock was
+again rung, when every man was at his quarters.&nbsp; In this service
+it was thought more appropriate to use the bell than to <i>pipe</i>
+to quarters, as the use of this instrument is less known to the mechanic
+than the sound of the bell.&nbsp; The landing, as in the morning, was
+at the eastern harbour.&nbsp; During this tide the seaweed was pretty
+well cleared from the site of the operations, and also from the tracks
+leading to the different landing-places; for walking upon the rugged
+surface of the Bell Rock, when covered with seaweed, was found to be
+extremely difficult and even dangerous.&nbsp; Every hand that could
+possibly be occupied now employed in assisting the smith to fit up the
+apparatus for his forge.&nbsp; At 9 p.m. the boats returned to the tender,
+after other two hours&rsquo; work, in the same order as formerly - perhaps
+as much gratified with the success that attended the work of this day
+as with any other in the whole course of the operations.&nbsp; Although
+it could not he said that the fatigues of this day had been great, yet
+all on board retired early to rest.&nbsp; The sea being calm, and no
+movement on deck, it was pretty generally remarked in the morning that
+the bell awakened the greater number on board from their first sleep;
+and though this observation was not altogether applicable to the writer
+himself, yet he was not a little pleased to find that thirty people
+could all at once become so reconciled to a night&rsquo;s quarters within
+a few hundred paces of the Bell Rock.<br>
+<br>
+[Wednesday, 19th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+Being extremely anxious at this time to get forward with fixing the
+smith&rsquo;s forge, on which the progress of the work at present depended,
+the writer requested that he might be called at daybreak to learn the
+landing-master&rsquo;s opinion of the weather from the appearance of
+the rising sun, a criterion by which experienced seamen can generally
+judge pretty accurately of the state of the weather for the following
+day.&nbsp; About five o&rsquo;clock, on coming upon deck, the sun&rsquo;s
+upper limb or disc had just begun to appear as if rising from the ocean,
+and in less than a minute he was seen in the fullest splendour; but
+after a short interval he was enveloped in a soft cloudy sky, which
+was considered emblematical of fine weather.&nbsp; His rays had not
+yet sufficiently dispelled the clouds which hid the land from view,
+and the Bell Rock being still overflowed, the whole was one expanse
+of water.&nbsp; This scene in itself was highly gratifying; and, when
+the morning bell was tolled, we were gratified with the happy forebodings
+of good weather and the expectation of having both a morning and an
+evening tide&rsquo;s work on the rock.<br>
+<br>
+The boat which the writer steered happened to be the last which approached
+the rock at this tide; and, in standing up in the stern, while at some
+distance, to see how the leading boat entered the creek, he was astonished
+to observe something in the form of a human figure, in a reclining posture,
+upon one of the ledges of the rock.&nbsp; He immediately steered the
+boat through a narrow entrance to the eastern harbour, with a thousand
+unpleasant sensations in his mind.&nbsp; He thought a vessel or boat
+must have been wrecked upon the rock during the night; and it seemed
+probable that the rock might be strewed with dead bodies, a spectacle
+which could not fail to deter the artificers from returning so freely
+to their work.&nbsp; In the midst of these reveries the boat took the
+ground at an improper landing-place; but, without waiting to push her
+off, he leapt upon the rock, and making his way hastily to the spot
+which had privately given him alarm, he had the satisfaction to ascertain
+that he had only been deceived by the peculiar situation and aspect
+of the smith&rsquo;s anvil and block, which very completely represented
+the appearance of a lifeless body upon the rock.&nbsp; The writer carefully
+suppressed his feelings, the simple mention of which might have had
+a bad effect upon the artificers, and his haste passed for an anxiety
+to examine the apparatus of the smith&rsquo;s forge, left in an unfinished
+state at evening tide.<br>
+<br>
+In the course of this morning&rsquo;s work two or three apparently distant
+peals of thunder were heard, and the atmosphere suddenly became thick
+and foggy.&nbsp; But as the <i>Smeaton</i>, our present tender, was
+moored at no great distance from the rock, the crew on board continued
+blowing with a horn, and occasionally fired a musket, so that the boats
+got to the ship without difficulty.<br>
+<br>
+[Thursday, 20th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+The wind this morning inclined from the north-east, and the sky had
+a heavy and cloudy appearance, but the sea was smooth, though there
+was an undulating motion on, the surface, which indicated easterly winds,
+and occasioned a slight surf upon the rock.&nbsp; But the boats found
+no difficulty in landing at the western creek at half-past seven, and,
+after a good tide&rsquo;s work, left it again about a quarter from eleven.&nbsp;
+In the evening the artificers landed at half-past seven, and continued
+till half-past eight, having completed the fixing of the smith&rsquo;s
+forge, his vice, and a wooden board or bench, which were also batted
+to a ledge of the rock, to the great joy of all, under a salute of three
+hearty cheers.&nbsp; From an oversight on the part of the smith, who
+had neglected to bring his tinder-box and matches from the vessel, the
+work was prevented from being continued for at least an hour longer.<br>
+<br>
+The smith&rsquo;s shop was, of course, in <i>open space</i>: the large
+bellows were carried to and from the rock every tide, for the serviceable
+condition of which, together with the tinder-box, fuel, and embers of
+the former fire, the smith was held responsible.&nbsp; Those who have
+been placed in situations to feel the inconveniency and want of this
+useful artisan, will be able to appreciate his value in a case like
+the present.&nbsp; It often happened, to our annoyance and disappointment,
+in the early state of the work, when the smith was in the middle of
+a <i>favourite</i> <i>heat</i> in making some useful article, or in
+sharpening the tools, after the flood-tide had obliged the pickmen to
+strike work, a sea would come rolling over the rocks, dash out the fire,
+and endanger his indispensable implement, the bellows.&nbsp; If the
+sea was smooth, while the smith often stood at work knee-deep in water,
+the tide rose by imperceptible degrees, first cooling the exterior of
+the fireplace, or hearth, and then quietly blackening and extinguishing
+the fire from below.&nbsp; The writer has frequently been amused at
+the perplexing anxiety of the blacksmith when coaxing his fire and endeavouring
+to avert the effects of the rising tide.<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 21st Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+Everything connected with the forge being now completed, the artificers
+found no want of sharp tools, and the work went forward with great alacrity
+and spirit.&nbsp; It was also alleged that the rock had a more habitable
+appearance from the volumes of smoke which ascended from the smith&rsquo;s
+shop and the busy noise of his anvil, the operations of the masons,
+the movements of the boats, and shipping at a distance - all contributed
+to give life and activity to the scene.&nbsp; This noise and traffic
+had, however, the effect of almost completely banishing the herd of
+seals which had hitherto frequented the rock as a resting-place during
+the period of low water.&nbsp; The rock seemed to be peculiarly adapted
+to their habits, for, excepting two or three days at neap-tides, a part
+of it always dries at low water - at least, during the summer season
+- and as there was good fishing-ground in the neighbourhood, without
+a human being to disturb or molest them, it had become a very favourite
+residence of these amphibious animals, the writer having occasionally
+counted from fifty to sixty playing about the rock at a time.&nbsp;
+But when they came to be disturbed every tide, and their seclusion was
+broken in upon by the kindling of great fires, together with the beating
+of hammers and picks during low water, after hovering about for a time,
+they changed their place, and seldom more than one or two were to be
+seen about the rock upon the more detached outlayers which dry partially,
+whence they seemed to look with that sort of curiosity which is observable
+in these animals when following a boat.<br>
+<br>
+[Saturday, 22nd Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+Hitherto the artificers had remained on board the <i>Smeaton</i>, which
+was made fast to one of the mooring buoys at a distance only of about
+a quarter of a mile from the rock, and, of course, a very great conveniency
+to the work.&nbsp; Being so near, the seamen could never be mistaken
+as to the progress of the tide, or state of the sea upon the rock, nor
+could the boats be much at a loss to pull on board of the vessel during
+fog, or even in very rough weather; as she could be cast loose from
+her moorings at pleasure, and brought to the lee side of the rock.&nbsp;
+But the <i>Smeaton</i> being only about forty register tons, her accommodations
+were extremely limited.&nbsp; It may, therefore, be easily imagined
+that an addition of twenty-four persons to her own crew must have rendered
+the situation of those on board rather uncomfortable.&nbsp; The only
+place for the men&rsquo;s hammocks on board being in the hold, they
+were unavoidably much crowded: and if the weather had required the hatches
+to be fastened down, so great a number of men could not possibly have
+been accommodated.&nbsp; To add to this evil, the <i>co-boose</i> or
+cooking-place being upon deck, it would not have been possible to have
+cooked for so large a company in the event of bad weather.<br>
+<br>
+The stock of water was now getting short, and some necessaries being
+also wanted for the floating light, the <i>Smeaton</i> was despatched
+for Arbroath; and the writer, with the artificers at the same time shifted
+their quarters from her to the floating light.<br>
+<br>
+Although the rock barely made its appearance at this period of the tides
+till eight o&rsquo;clock, yet, having now a full mile to row from the
+floating light to the rock, instead of about a quarter of a mile from
+the moorings of the <i>Smeaton</i>, it was necessary to be earlier astir,
+and to form different arrangements; breakfast was accordingly served
+up at seven o&rsquo;clock this morning.&nbsp; From the excessive motion
+of the floating light, the writer had looked forward rather with anxiety
+to the removal of the workmen to this ship.&nbsp; Some among them, who
+had been congratulating themselves upon having become sea-hardy while
+on board the <i>Smeaton</i>, had a complete relapse upon returning to
+the floating light.&nbsp; This was the case with the writer.&nbsp; From
+the spacious and convenient berthage of the floating light, the exchange
+to the artificers was, in this respect, much for the better.&nbsp; The
+boats were also commodious, measuring sixteen feet in length on the
+keel, so that, in fine weather, their complement of sitters was sixteen
+persons for each, with which, however, they were rather crowded, but
+she could not stow two boats of larger dimensions.&nbsp; When there
+was what is called a breeze of wind, and a swell in the sea, the proper
+number for each boat could not, with propriety, be rated at more than
+twelve persons.<br>
+<br>
+When the tide-bell rung the boats were hoisted out, and two active seamen
+were employed to keep them from receiving damage alongside.&nbsp; The
+floating light being very buoyant, was so quick in her motions that
+when those who were about to step from her gunwale into a boat, placed
+themselves upon a cleat or step on the ship&rsquo;s side, with the man
+or rail ropes in their hands, they had often to wait for some time till
+a favourable opportunity occurred for stepping into the boat.&nbsp;
+While in this situation, with the vessel rolling from side to side,
+watching the proper time for letting go the man-ropes, it required the
+greatest dexterity and presence of mind to leap into the boats.&nbsp;
+One who was rather awkward would often wait a considerable period in
+this position: at one time his side of the ship would be so depressed
+that he would touch the boat to which he belonged, while the next sea
+would elevate him so much that he would see his comrades in the boat
+on the opposite side of the ship, his friends in the one boat calling
+to him to &lsquo;Jump,&rsquo; while those in the boat on the other side,
+as he came again and again into their view, would jocosely say, &lsquo;Are
+you there yet?&nbsp; You seem to enjoy a swing.&rsquo;&nbsp; In this
+situation it was common to see a person upon each side of the ship for
+a length of time, waiting to quit his hold.<br>
+<br>
+On leaving the rock to-day a trial of seamanship was proposed amongst
+the rowers, for by this time the artificers had become tolerably expert
+in this exercise.&nbsp; By inadvertency some of the oars provided had
+been made of fir instead of ash, and although a considerable stock had
+been laid in, the workmen, being at first awkward in the art, were constantly
+breaking their oars; indeed it was no uncommon thing to see the broken
+blades of a pair of oars floating astern, in the course of a passage
+from the rock to the vessel.&nbsp; The men, upon the whole, had but
+little work to perform in the course of a day; for though they exerted
+themselves extremely hard while on the rock, yet, in the early state
+of the operations, this could not be continued for more than three or
+four hours at a time, and as their rations were large - consisting of
+one pound and a half of beef, one pound of ship biscuit, eight ounces
+oatmeal, two ounces barley, two ounces butter, three quarts of small
+beer, with vegetables and salt - they got into excellent spirits when
+free of sea-sickness.&nbsp; The rowing of the boats against each other
+became a favourite amusement, which was rather a fortunate circumstance,
+as it must have been attended with much inconvenience had it been found
+necessary to employ a sufficient number of sailors for this purpose.&nbsp;
+The writer, therefore, encouraged the spirit of emulation, and the speed
+of their respective boats became a favourite topic.&nbsp; Premiums for
+boat-races were instituted, which were contended for with great eagerness,
+and the respective crews kept their stations in the boats with as much
+precision as they kept their beds on board of the ship.&nbsp; With these
+and other pastimes, when the weather was favourable, the time passed
+away among the inmates of the forecastle and waist of the ship.&nbsp;
+The writer looks back with interest upon the hours of solitude which
+he spent in this lonely ship with his small library.<br>
+<br>
+This being the first Saturday that the artificers were afloat, all hands
+were served with a glass of rum and water at night, to drink the sailors&rsquo;
+favourite toast of &lsquo;Wives and Sweethearts.&rsquo;&nbsp; It was
+customary, upon these occasions, for the seamen and artificers to collect
+in the galley, when the musical instruments were put in requisition:
+for, according to invariable practice, every man must play a tune, sing
+a song, or tell a story.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 23rd Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+Having, on the previous evening, arranged matters with the landing-master
+as to the business of the day, the signal was rung for all hands at
+half-past seven this morning.&nbsp; In the early state of the spring-tides
+the artificers went to the rock before breakfast, but as the tides fell
+later in the day, it became necessary to take this meal before leaving
+the ship.&nbsp; At eight o&rsquo;clock all hands were assembled on the
+quarter-deck for prayers, a solemnity which was gone through in as orderly
+a manner as circumstances would admit.&nbsp; When the weather permitted,
+the flags of the ship were hung up as an awning or screen, forming the
+quarter-deck into a distinct compartment; the pendant was also hoisted
+at the mainmast, and a large ensign flag was displayed over the stern;
+and lastly, the ship&rsquo;s companion, or top of the staircase, was
+covered with the <i>flag proper</i> of the Lighthouse Service, on which
+the Bible was laid.&nbsp; A particular toll of the bell called all hands
+to the quarter-deck, when the writer read a chapter of the Bible, and,
+the whole ship&rsquo;s company being uncovered, he also read the impressive
+prayer composed by the Reverend Dr. Brunton, one of the ministers of
+Edinburgh.<br>
+<br>
+Upon concluding this service, which was attended with becoming reverence
+and attention, all on board retired to their respective berths to breakfast,
+and, at half-past nine, the bell again rung for the artificers to take
+their stations in their respective boats.&nbsp; Some demur having been
+evinced on board about the propriety of working on Sunday, which had
+hitherto been touched upon as delicately as possible, all hands being
+called aft, the writer, from the quarter-deck, stated generally the
+nature of the service, expressing his hopes that every man would feel
+himself called upon to consider the erection of a lighthouse on the
+Bell Rock, in every point of view, as a work of necessity and mercy.&nbsp;
+He knew that scruples had existed with some, and these had, indeed,
+been fairly and candidly urged before leaving the shore; but it was
+expected that, after having seen the critical nature of the rock, and
+the necessity of the measure, every man would now be satisfied of the
+propriety of embracing all opportunities of landing on the rock when
+the state of the weather would permit.&nbsp; The writer further took
+them to witness that it did not proceed from want of respect for the
+appointments and established forms of religion that he had himself adopted
+the resolution of attending the Bell Rock works on the Sunday; but,
+as he hoped, from a conviction that it was his bounden duty, on the
+strictest principles of morality.&nbsp; At the same time it was intimated
+that, if any were of a different opinion, they should be perfectly at
+liberty to hold their sentiments without the imputation of contumacy
+or disobedience; the only difference would be in regard to the pay.<br>
+<br>
+Upon stating this much, he stepped into his boat, requesting all who
+were so disposed to follow him.&nbsp; The sailors, from their habits,
+found no scruple on this subject, and all of the artificers, though
+a little tardy, also embarked, excepting four of the masons, who, from
+the beginning, mentioned that they would decline working on Sundays.&nbsp;
+It may here be noticed that throughout the whole of the operations it
+was observable that the men wrought, if possible, with more keenness
+upon the Sundays than at other times from an impression that they were
+engaged in a work of imperious necessity, which required every possible
+exertion.&nbsp; On returning to the floating light, after finishing
+the tide&rsquo;s work, the boats were received by the part of the ship&rsquo;s
+crew left on board with the usual attention of handing ropes to the
+boats and helping the artificers on board; but the four masons who had
+absented themselves from the work did not appear upon deck.<br>
+<br>
+[Monday, 24th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+The boats left the floating light at a quarter-past nine o&rsquo;clock
+this morning, and the work began at three-quarters past nine; but as
+the neap-tides were approaching the working time at the rock became
+gradually shorter, and it was now with difficulty that two and a half
+hours&rsquo; work could be got.&nbsp; But so keenly had the workmen
+entered into the spirit of the beacon-house operations, that they continued
+to bore the holes in the rock till some of them were knee-deep in water.<br>
+<br>
+The operations at this time were entirely directed to the erection of
+the beacon, in which every man felt an equal interest, as at this critical
+period the slightest casualty to any of the boats at the rock might
+have been fatal to himself individually, while it was perhaps peculiar
+to the writer more immediately to feel for the safety of the whole.&nbsp;
+Each log or upright beam of the beacon was to be fixed to the rock by
+two strong and massive bats or stanchions of iron.&nbsp; These bats,
+for the fixture of the principal and diagonal beams and bracing chains,
+required fifty-four holes, each measuring two inches in diameter and
+eighteen inches in depth.&nbsp; There had already been so considerable
+a progress made in boring and excavating the holes that the writer&rsquo;s
+hopes of getting the beacon erected this year began to be more and more
+confirmed, although it was now advancing towards what was considered
+the latter end of the proper working season at the Bell Rock.&nbsp;
+The foreman joiner, Mr. Francis Watt, was accordingly appointed to attend
+at the rock to-day, when the necessary levels were taken for the step
+or seat of each particular beam of the beacon, that they might be cut
+to their respective lengths, to suit the inequalities of the rock; several
+of the stanchions were also tried into their places, and other necessary
+observations made, to prevent mistakes on the application of the apparatus,
+and to facilitate the operations when the beams came to be set up, which
+would require to be done in the course of a single tide.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 25th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+We had now experienced an almost unvaried tract of light airs of easterly
+wind, with clear weather in the fore-part of the day and fog in the
+evenings.&nbsp; To-day, however, it sensibly changed; when the wind
+came to the south-west, and blew a fresh breeze.&nbsp; At nine a.m.
+the bell rung, and the boats were hoisted out, and though the artificers
+were now pretty well accustomed to tripping up and down the sides of
+the floating light, yet it required more seamanship this morning than
+usual.&nbsp; It therefore afforded some merriment to those who had got
+fairly seated in their respective boats to see the difficulties which
+attended their companions, and the hesitating manner in which they quitted
+hold of the man-ropes in leaving the ship.&nbsp; The passage to the
+rock was tedious, and the boats did not reach it till half-past ten.<br>
+<br>
+It being now the period of neap-tides, the water only partially left
+the rock, and some of the men who were boring on the lower ledges of
+the site of the beacon stood knee-deep in water.&nbsp; The situation
+of the smith to-day was particularly disagreeable, but his services
+were at all times indispensable.&nbsp; As the tide did not leave the
+site of the forge, he stood in the water, and as there was some roughness
+on the surface it was with considerable difficulty that, with the assistance
+of the sailors, he was enabled to preserve alive his fire; and, while
+his feet were immersed in water, his face was not only scorched but
+continually exposed to volumes of smoke, accompanied with sparks from
+the fire, which were occasionally set up owing to the strength and direction
+of the wind.<br>
+<br>
+[Wednesday, 26th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+The wind had shifted this morning to N.N.W., with rain, and was blowing
+what sailors call a fresh breeze.&nbsp; To speak, perhaps, somewhat
+more intelligibly to the general reader, the wind was such that a fishing-boat
+could just carry full sail.&nbsp; But as it was of importance, specially
+in the outset of the business, to keep up the spirit of enterprise for
+landing on all practicable occasions, the writer, after consulting with
+the landing-master, ordered the bell to be rung for embarking, and at
+half-past eleven the boats reached the rock, and left it again at a
+quarter-past twelve, without, however, being able to do much work, as
+the smith could not be set to work from the smallness of the ebb and
+the strong breach of sea, which lashed with great force among the bars
+of the forge.<br>
+<br>
+Just as we were about to leave the rock the wind shifted to the S.W.,
+and, from a fresh gale, it became what seamen term a hard gale, or such
+as would have required the fisherman to take in two or three reefs in
+his sail.&nbsp; It is a curious fact that the respective tides of ebb
+and flood are apparent upon the shore about an hour and a half sooner
+than at the distance of three or four miles in the offing.&nbsp; But
+what seems chiefly interesting here is that the tides around this small
+sunken rock should follow exactly the same laws as on the extensive
+shores of the mainland.&nbsp; When the boats left the Bell Rock to-day
+it was overflowed by the flood-tide, but the floating light did not
+swing round to the flood-tide for more than an hour afterwards.&nbsp;
+Under this disadvantage the boats had to struggle with the ebb-tide
+and a hard gale of wind, so that it was with the greatest difficulty
+that they reached the floating light.&nbsp; Had this gale happened in
+spring-tides when the current was strong we must have been driven to
+sea in a very helpless condition.<br>
+<br>
+The boat which the writer steered was considerably behind the other,
+one of the masons having unluckily broken his oar.&nbsp; Our prospect
+of getting on board, of course, became doubtful, and our situation was
+rather perilous, as the boat shipped so much sea that it occupied two
+of the artificers to bale and clear her of water.&nbsp; When the oar
+gave way we were about half a mile from the ship, but, being fortunately
+to windward, we got into the wake of the floating light, at about 250
+fathoms astern, just as the landing-master&rsquo;s boat reached the
+vessel.&nbsp; He immediately streamed or floated a life-buoy astern,
+with a line which was always in readiness, and by means of this useful
+implement the boat was towed alongside of the floating light, where,
+from her rolling motion, it required no small management to get safely
+on board, as the men were much worn out with their exertions in pulling
+from the rock.&nbsp; On the present occasion the crews of both boats
+were completely drenched with spray, and those who sat upon the bottom
+of the boats to bale them were sometimes pretty deep in the water before
+it could be cleared out.&nbsp; After getting on board, all hands were
+allowed an extra dram, and, having shifted and got a warm and comfortable
+dinner, the affair, it is believed, was little more thought of.<br>
+<br>
+[Thursday, 27th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+The tides were now in that state which sailors term the dead of the
+neap, and it was not expected that any part of the rock would be seen
+above water to-day; at any rate, it was obvious, from the experience
+of yesterday, that no work could be done upon it, and therefore the
+artificers were not required to land.&nbsp; The wind was at west, with
+light breezes, and fine clear weather; and as it was an object with
+the writer to know the actual state of the Bell Rock at neap-tides,
+he got one of the boats manned, and, being accompanied by the landing-master,
+went to it at a quarter-past twelve.&nbsp; The parts of the rock that
+appeared above water being very trifling, were covered by every wave,
+so that no landing was made.&nbsp; Upon trying the depth of water with
+a boathook, particularly on the sites of the lighthouse and beacon,
+on the former, at low water, the depth was found to be three feet, and
+on the central parts of the latter it was ascertained to be two feet
+eight inches.&nbsp; Having made these remarks, the boat returned to
+the ship at two p.m., and the weather being good, the artificers were
+found amusing themselves with fishing.&nbsp; The <i>Smeaton</i> came
+from Arbroath this afternoon, and made fast to her moorings, having
+brought letters and newspapers, with parcels of clean linen, etc., for
+the workmen, who were also made happy by the arrival of three of their
+comrades from the workyard ashore.&nbsp; From these men they not only
+received all the news of the workyard, but seemed themselves to enjoy
+great pleasure in communicating whatever they considered to be interesting
+with regard to the rock.&nbsp; Some also got letters from their friends
+at a distance, the postage of which for the men afloat was always free,
+so that they corresponded the more readily.<br>
+<br>
+The site of the building having already been carefully traced out with
+the pick-axe, the artificers this day commenced the excavation of the
+rock for the foundation or first course of the lighthouse.&nbsp; Four
+men only were employed at this work, while twelve continued at the site
+of the beacon-house, at which every possible opportunity was embraced,
+till this essential art of the operations should be completed.<br>
+<br>
+[Wednesday, 2nd Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+The floating light&rsquo;s bell rung this morning at half-past four
+o&rsquo;clock, as a signal for the boats to be got ready, and the landing
+took place at half-past five.&nbsp; In passing the <i>Smeaton</i> at
+her moorings near the rock, her boat followed with eight additional
+artificers who had come from Arbroath with her at last trip, but there
+being no room for them in the floating light&rsquo;s boats, they had
+continued on board.&nbsp; The weather did not look very promising in
+the morning, the wind blowing pretty fresh from W.S.W.: and had it not
+been that the writer calculated upon having a vessel so much at command,
+in all probability he would not have ventured to land.&nbsp; The <i>Smeaton</i>
+rode at what sailors call a <i>salvagee</i>, with a cross-head made
+fast to the floating buoy.&nbsp; This kind of attachment was found to
+be more convenient than the mode of passing the hawser through the ring
+of the buoy when the vessel was to be made fast.&nbsp; She had then
+only to be steered very close to the buoy, when the salvagee was laid
+hold of with a boat-hook, and the <i>bite</i> of the hawser thrown over
+the cross-head.&nbsp; But the salvagee, by this method, was always left
+at the buoy, and was, of course, more liable to chafe and wear than
+a hawser passed through the ring, which could be wattled with canvas,
+and shifted at pleasure.&nbsp; The salvagee and cross method is, however,
+much practised; but the experience of this morning showed it to be very
+unsuitable for vessels riding in an exposed situation for any length
+of time.<br>
+<br>
+Soon after the artificers landed they commenced work; but the wind coming
+to blow hard, the <i>Smeaton&rsquo;s</i> boat and crew, who had brought
+their complement of eight men to the rock, went off to examine her riding
+ropes, and see that they were in proper order.&nbsp; The boat had no
+sooner reached the vessel than she went adrift, carrying the boat along
+with her.&nbsp; By the time that she was got round to make a tack towards
+the rock, she had drifted at least three miles to leeward, with the
+praam-boat astern; and, having both the wind and a tide against her,
+the writer perceived, with no little anxiety, that she could not possibly
+return to the rock till long after its being overflowed; for, owing
+to the anomaly of the tides formerly noticed, the Bell Rock is completely
+under water when the ebb abates to the offing.<br>
+<br>
+In this perilous predicament, indeed, he found himself placed between
+hope and despair - but certainly the latter was by much the most predominant
+feeling of his mind - situate upon a sunken rock in the middle of the
+ocean, which, in the progress of the flood-tide, was to be laid under
+water to the depth of at least twelve feet in a stormy sea.&nbsp; There
+were this morning thirty-two persons in all upon the rock, with only
+two boats, whose complement, even in good weather, did not exceed twenty-four
+sitters; but to row to the floating light with so much wind, and in
+so heavy a sea, a complement of eight men for each boat was as much
+as could, with propriety, be attempted, so that, in this way, about
+one-half of our number was unprovided for.&nbsp; Under these circumstances,
+had the writer ventured to despatch one of the boats in expectation
+of either working the <i>Smeaton</i> sooner up towards the rock, or
+in hopes of getting her boat brought to our assistance, this must have
+given an immediate alarm to the artificers, each of whom would have
+insisted upon taking to his own boat, and leaving the eight artificers
+belonging to the <i>Smeaton</i> to their chance.&nbsp; Of course a scuffle
+might have ensued, and it is hard to say, in the ardour of men contending
+for life, where it might have ended.&nbsp; It has even been hinted to
+the writer that a party of the <i>pickmen</i> were determined to keep
+exclusively to their own boat against all hazards.<br>
+<br>
+The unfortunate circumstance of the <i>Smeaton</i> and her boat having
+drifted was, for a considerable time, only known to the writer and to
+the landing-master, who removed to the farther point of the rock, where
+he kept his eye steadily upon the progress of the vessel.&nbsp; While
+the artificers were at work, chiefly in sitting or kneeling postures,
+excavating the rock, or boring with the jumpers, and while their numerous
+hammers, with the sound of the smith&rsquo;s anvil, continued, the situation
+of things did not appear so awful.&nbsp; In this state of suspense,
+with almost certain destruction at hand, the water began to rise upon
+those who were at work on the lower parts of the sites of the beacon
+and lighthouse.&nbsp; From the run of sea upon the rock, the forge fire
+was also sooner extinguished this morning than usual, and the volumes
+of smoke having ceased, objects in every direction became visible from
+all parts of the rock.&nbsp; After having had about three &lsquo;hours&rsquo;
+work, the men began, pretty generally, to make towards their respective
+boats for their jackets and stockings, when, to their astonishment,
+instead of three, they found only two boats, the third being adrift
+with the <i>Smeaton</i>.&nbsp; Not a word was uttered by any one, but
+all appeared to be silently calculating their numbers, and looking to
+each other with evident marks of perplexity depicted in their countenances.&nbsp;
+The landing-master, conceiving that blame might be attached to him for
+allowing the boat to leave the rock, still kept at a distance.&nbsp;
+At this critical moment the author was standing upon an elevated part
+of Smith&rsquo;s Ledge, where he endeavoured to mark the progress of
+the <i>Smeaton</i>, not a little surprised that her crew did not cut
+the praam adrift, which greatly retarded her way, and amazed that some
+effort was not making to bring at least the boat, and attempt our relief.&nbsp;
+The workmen looked steadfastly upon the writer, and turned occasionally
+towards the vessel, still far to leeward. <a name="citation122a"></a><a href="#footnote122a">{122a}</a>&nbsp;
+All this passed in the most perfect silence, and the melancholy solemnity
+of the group made an impression never to be effaced from his mind.<br>
+<br>
+The writer had all along been considering of various schemes - providing
+the men could be kept under command - which might be put in practice
+for the general safety, in hopes that the <i>Smeaton</i> might be able
+to pick up the boats to leeward, when they were obliged to leave the
+rock.&nbsp; He was, accordingly, about to address the artificers on
+the perilous nature of their circumstances, and to propose that all
+hands should unstrip their upper clothing when the higher parts of the
+rock were laid under water; that the seamen should remove every unnecessary
+weight and encumbrance from the boats; that a specified number of men
+should go into each boat, and that the remainder should hang by the
+gunwales, while the boats were to be rowed gently towards the <i>Smeaton</i>,
+as the course to the <i>Pharos</i>, or floating light, lay rather to
+windward of the rock.&nbsp; But when he attempted to speak his mouth
+was so parched that his tongue refused utterance, and he now learned
+by experience that the saliva is as necessary as the tongue itself for
+speech.&nbsp; He turned to one of the pools on the rock and lapped a
+little water, which produced immediate relief.&nbsp; But what was his
+happiness, when on rising from this unpleasant beverage, some one called
+out, &lsquo;A boat! a boat!&rsquo; and, on looking around, at no great
+distance, a large boat was seen through the haze making towards the
+rock.&nbsp; This at once enlivened and rejoiced every heart.&nbsp; The
+timeous visitor proved to be James Spink, the Bell Rock pilot, who had
+come express from Arbroath with letters.&nbsp; Spink had for some time
+seen the <i>Smeaton</i>, and had even supposed, from the state of the
+weather, that all hands were on board of her till he approached more
+nearly and observed people upon the rock; but not supposing that the
+assistance of his boat was necessary to carry the artificers off the
+rock, he anchored on the lee-side and began to fish, waiting, as usual,
+till the letters were sent for, as the pilot-boat was too large and
+unwieldy for approaching the rock when there was any roughness or run
+of the sea at the entrance of the landing creeks.<br>
+<br>
+Upon this fortunate change of circumstances, sixteen of the artificers
+were sent, at two trips, in one of the boats, with instructions for
+Spink to proceed with them to the floating light.&nbsp; This being accomplished,
+the remaining sixteen followed in the two boats belonging to the service
+of the rock.&nbsp; Every one felt the most perfect happiness at leaving
+the Bell Rock this morning, though a very hard and even dangerous passage
+to the floating light still awaited us, as the wind by this time had
+increased to a pretty hard gale, accompanied with a considerable swell
+of sea.&nbsp; Every one was as completely drenched in water as if he
+had been dragged astern of the boats.&nbsp; The writer, in particular,
+being at the helm, found, on getting on board, that his face and ears
+were completely coated with a thin film of salt from the sea spray,
+which broke constantly over the bows of the boat.&nbsp; After much baling
+of water and severe work at the oars, the three boats reached the floating
+light, where some new difficulties occurred in getting on board in safety,
+owing partly to the exhausted state of the men, and partly to the violent
+rolling of the vessel.<br>
+<br>
+As the tide flowed, it was expected that the <i>Smeaton</i> would have
+got to windward; but, seeing that all was safe, after tacking for several
+hours and making little progress, she bore away for Arbroath, with the
+praam-boat.&nbsp; As there was now too much wind for the pilot-boat
+to return to Arbroath, she was made fast astern of the floating light,
+and the crew remained on board till next day, when the weather moderated.&nbsp;
+There can be very little doubt that the appearance of James Spink with
+his boat on this critical occasion was the means of preventing the loss
+of lives at the rock this morning.&nbsp; When these circumstances, some
+years afterwards, came to the knowledge of the Board, a small pension
+was ordered to our faithful pilot, then in his seventieth year; and
+he still continues to wear the uniform clothes and badge of the Lighthouse
+service.&nbsp; Spink is a remarkably strong man, whose <i>tout ensemble</i>
+is highly characteristic of a North-country fisherman.&nbsp; He usually
+dresses in a <i>p&eacute;-jacket</i>, cut after a particular fashion,
+and wears a large, flat, blue bonnet.&nbsp; A striking likeness of Spink
+in his pilot-dress, with the badge or insignia on his left arm which
+is characteristic of the boatmen in the service of the Northern Lights,
+has been taken by Howe, and is in the writer&rsquo;s possession.<br>
+<br>
+[Thursday, 3rd Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+The bell rung this morning at five o&rsquo;clock, but the writer must
+acknowledge, from the circumstances of yesterday, that its sound was
+extremely unwelcome.&nbsp; This appears also to have been the feelings
+of the artificers, for when they came to be mustered, out of twenty-six,
+only eight, besides the foreman and seamen, appeared upon deck to accompany
+the writer to the rock.&nbsp; Such are the baneful effects of anything
+like misfortune or accident connected with a work of this description.&nbsp;
+The use of argument to persuade the men to embark in cases of this kind
+would have been out of place, as it is not only discomfort, or even
+the risk of the loss of a limb, but life itself that becomes the question.&nbsp;
+The boats, notwithstanding the thinness of our ranks, left the vessel
+at half-past five.&nbsp; The rough weather of yesterday having proved
+but a summer&rsquo;s gale, the wind came to-day in gentle breezes; yet,
+the atmosphere being cloudy, it a not a very favourable appearance.&nbsp;
+The boats reached the rock at six a.m., and the eight artificers who
+landed were employed in clearing out the bat-holes for the beacon-house,
+and had a very prosperous tide of four hours&rsquo; work, being the
+longest yet experienced by half an hour.<br>
+<br>
+The boats left the rock again at ten o&rsquo;clock, and the weather
+having cleared up as we drew near the vessel, the eighteen artificers
+who had remained on board were observed upon deck, but as the boats
+approached they sought their way below, being quite ashamed of their
+conduct.&nbsp; This was the only instance of refusal to go to the rock
+which occurred during the whole progress of the work, excepting that
+of the four men who declined working upon Sunday, a case which the writer
+did not conceive to be at all analogous to the present.&nbsp; It may
+here be mentioned, much to the credit of these four men, that they stood
+foremost in embarking for the rock this morning.<br>
+<br>
+[Saturday, 5th Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+It was fortunate that a landing was not attempted this evening, for
+at eight o&rsquo;clock the wind shifted to E.S.E., and at ten it had
+become a hard gale, when fifty fathoms of the floating light&rsquo;s
+hempen cable were veered out.&nbsp; The gale still increasing, the ship
+rolled and laboured excessively, and at midnight eighty fathoms of cable
+were veered out; while the sea continued to strike the vessel with a
+degree of force which had not before been experienced.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 6th Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+During the last night there was little rest on board of the <i>Pharos</i>,
+and daylight, though anxiously wished for, brought no relief, as the
+gale continued with unabated violence.&nbsp; The sea struck so hard
+upon the vessel&rsquo;s bows that it rose in great quantities, or in
+&lsquo;green seas,&rsquo; as the sailors termed it, which were carried
+by the wind as far aft as the quarter-deck, and not infrequently over
+the stern of the ship altogether.&nbsp; It fell occasionally so heavily
+on the skylight of the writer&rsquo;s cabin, though so far aft as to
+be within five feet of the helm, that the glass was broken to pieces
+before the dead-light could be got into its place, so that the water
+poured down in great quantities.&nbsp; In shutting out the water, the
+admission of light was prevented, and in the morning all continued in
+the most comfortless state of darkness.&nbsp; About ten o&rsquo;clock
+a.m. the wind shifted to N.E., and blew, if possible, harder than before,
+and it was accompanied by a much heavier swell of sea.&nbsp; In the
+course of the gale, the part of the cable in the hause-hole had been
+so often shifted that nearly the whole length of one of her hempen cables,
+of 120 fathoms, had been veered out, besides the chain-moorings.&nbsp;
+The cable, for its preservation, was also carefully served or wattled
+with pieces of canvas round the windlass, and with leather well greased
+in the hause-hole.&nbsp; In this state things remained during the whole
+day, every sea which struck the vessel - and the seas followed each
+other in close succession - causing her to shake, and all on board occasionally
+to tremble.&nbsp; At each of these strokes of the sea the rolling and
+pitching of the vessel ceased for a time, and her motion was felt as
+if she had either broke adrift before the wind or were in the act of
+sinking; but, when another sea came, she ranged up against it with great
+force, and this became the regular intimation of our being still riding
+at anchor.<br>
+<br>
+About eleven o&rsquo;clock, the writer with some difficulty got out
+of bed, but, in attempting to dress, he was thrown twice upon the floor
+at the opposite end of the cabin.&nbsp; In an undressed state he made
+shift to get about half-way up the companion-stairs, with an intention
+to observe the state of the sea and of the ship upon deck; but he no
+sooner looked over the companion than a heavy sea struck the vessel,
+which fell on the quarter-deck, and rushed downstairs in the officers&rsquo;
+cabin in so considerable a quantity that it was found necessary to lift
+one of the scuttles in the floor, to let the water into the limbers
+of the ship, as it dashed from side to side in such a manner as to run
+into the lower tier of beds.&nbsp; Having been foiled in this attempt,
+and being completely wetted, he again got below and went to bed.&nbsp;
+In this state of the weather the seamen had to move about the necessary
+or indispensable duties of the ship with the most cautious use both
+of hands and feet, while it required all the art of the landsman to
+keep within the precincts of his bed.&nbsp; The writer even found himself
+so much tossed about that it became necessary, in some measure, to shut
+himself in bed, in order to avoid being thrown upon the floor.&nbsp;
+Indeed, such was the motion of the ship that it seemed wholly impracticable
+to remain in any other than a lying posture.&nbsp; On deck the most
+stormy aspect presented itself, while below all was wet and comfortless.<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;About two o&rsquo;clock p.m. a great alarm was given throughout
+the ship from the effects of a very heavy sea which struck her, and
+almost filled the waist, pouring down into the berths below, through
+every chink and crevice of the hatches and skylights.&nbsp; From the
+motion of the vessel being thus suddenly deadened or checked, and from
+the flowing in of the water above, it is believed there was not an individual
+on board who did not think, at the moment, that the vessel had foundered,
+and was in the act of sinking.&nbsp; The writer could withstand this
+no longer, and as soon as she again began to range to the sea he determined
+to make another effort to get upon deck.&nbsp; In the first instance,
+however, he groped his way in darkness from his own cabin through the
+berths of the officers, where all was quietness.&nbsp; He next entered
+the galley and other compartments occupied by the artificers.&nbsp;
+Here also all was shut up in darkness, the fire having been drowned
+out in the early part of the gale.&nbsp; Several of the artificers were
+employed in prayer, repeating psalms and other devotional exercises
+in a full tone of voice; others protesting that, if they should fortunately
+get once more on shore, no one should ever see them afloat again.&nbsp;
+With the assistance of the landing-master, the writer made his way,
+holding on step by step, among the numerous impediments which lay in
+the way.&nbsp; Such was the creaking noise of the bulk-heads or partitions,
+the dashing of the water, and the whistling noise of the winds, that
+it was hardly possible to break in upon such a confusion of sounds.&nbsp;
+In one or two instances, anxious and repeated inquiries were made by
+the artificers as to the state of things upon deck, to which the captain
+made the usual answer, that it could not blow long in this way, and
+that we must soon have better weather.&nbsp; The next berth in succession,
+moving forward in the ship, was that allotted for the seamen.&nbsp;
+Here the scene was considerably different.&nbsp; Having reached the
+middle of this darksome berth without its inmates being aware of any
+intrusion, the writer had the consolation of remarking that, although
+they talked of bad weather and the cross accidents of the sea, yet the
+conversation was carried on in that sort of tone and manner which bespoke
+an ease and composure of mind highly creditable to them and pleasing
+to him.&nbsp; The writer immediately accosted the seamen about the state
+of the ship.&nbsp; To these inquiries they replied that the vessel being
+light, and having but little hold of the water, no top-rigging, with
+excellent ground-tackle, and everything being fresh and new, they felt
+perfect confidence in their situation.<br>
+<br>
+It being impossible to open any of the hatches in the fore part of the
+ship in communicating with the deck, the watch was changed by passing
+through the several berths to the companion-stair leading to the quarter-deck.&nbsp;
+The writer, therefore, made the best of his way aft, and, on a second
+attempt to look out, he succeeded, and saw indeed an astonishing sight.&nbsp;
+The sea or waves appeared to be ten or fifteen feet in height of unbroken
+water, and every approaching billow seemed as if it would overwhelm
+our vessel, but she continued to rise upon the waves and to fall between
+the seas in a very wonderful manner.&nbsp; It seemed to be only those
+seas which caught her in the act of rising which struck her with so
+much violence and threw such quantities of water aft.&nbsp; On deck
+there was only one solitary individual looking out, to give the alarm
+in the event of the ship breaking from her moorings.&nbsp; The seaman
+on watch continued only two hours; he who kept watch at this time was
+a tall, slender man of a black complexion; he had no greatcoat nor over-all
+of any kind, but was simply dressed in his ordinary jacket and trousers;
+his hat was tied under his chin with a napkin, and he stood aft the
+foremast, to which he had lashed himself with a gasket or small rope
+round his waist, to prevent his falling upon deck or being washed overboard.&nbsp;
+When the writer looked up, he appeared to smile, which afforded a further
+symptom of the confidence of the crew in their ship.&nbsp; This person
+on watch was as completely wetted as if he had been drawn through the
+sea, which was given as a reason for his not putting on a greatcoat,
+that he might wet as few of his clothes as possible, and have a dry
+shift when he went below.&nbsp; Upon deck everything that was movable
+was out of sight, having either been stowed below, previous to the gale,
+or been washed overboard.&nbsp; Some trifling parts of the quarter boards
+were damaged by the breach of the sea; and one of the boats upon deck
+was about one-third full of water, the oyle-hole or drain having been
+accidently stopped up, and part of her gunwale had received considerable
+injury.&nbsp; These observations were hastily made, and not without
+occasionally shutting the companion, to avoid being wetted by the successive
+seas which broke over the bows and fell upon different parts of the
+deck according to the impetus with which the waves struck the vessel.&nbsp;
+By this time it was about three o&rsquo;clock in the afternoon, and
+the gale, which had now continued with unabated force for twenty-seven
+hours, had not the least appearance of going off.<br>
+<br>
+In the dismal prospect of undergoing another night like the last, and
+being in imminent hazard of parting from our cable, the writer thought
+it necessary to advise with the master and officers of the ship as to
+the probable event of the vessel&rsquo;s drifting from her moorings.&nbsp;
+They severally gave it as their opinion that we had now every chance
+of riding out the gale, which, in all probability, could not continue
+with the same fury many hours longer; and that even if she should part
+from her anchor, the storm-sails had been laid to hand, and could be
+bent in a very short time.&nbsp; They further stated that from the direction
+of the wind being N.E., she would sail up the Firth of Forth to Leith
+Roads.&nbsp; But if this should appear doubtful, after passing the Island
+and Light of May, it might be advisable at once to steer for Tyningham
+Sands, on the western side of Dunbar, and there run the vessel ashore.&nbsp;
+If this should happen at the time of high-water, or during the ebbing
+of the tide, they were of opinion, from the flatness and strength of
+the floating light, that no danger would attend her taking the ground,
+even with a very heavy sea.&nbsp; The writer, seeing the confidence
+which these gentlemen possessed with regard to the situation of things,
+found himself as much relieved with this conversation as he had previously
+been with the seeming indifference of the forecastle men, and the smile
+of the watch upon deck, though literally lashed to the foremast.&nbsp;
+From this time he felt himself almost perfectly at ease; at any rate,
+he was entirely resigned to the ultimate result.<br>
+<br>
+About six o&rsquo;clock in the evening the ship&rsquo;s company was
+heard moving upon deck, which on the present occasion was rather the
+cause of alarm.&nbsp; The writer accordingly rang his bell to know what
+was the matter, when he was informed by the steward that the weather
+looked considerably better, and that the men upon deck were endeavouring
+to ship the smoke-funnel of the galley that the people might get some
+meat.&nbsp; This was a more favourable account than had been anticipated.&nbsp;
+During the last twenty-one hours he himself had not only had nothing
+to eat, but he had almost never passed a thought on the subject.&nbsp;
+Upon the mention of a change of weather, he sent the steward to learn
+how the artificers felt, and on his return he stated that they now seemed
+to be all very happy, since the cook had begun to light the galley-fire
+and make preparations for the suet-pudding of Sunday, which was the
+only dish to be attempted for the mess, from the ease with which it
+could both be cooked and served up.<br>
+<br>
+The principal change felt upon the ship as the wind abated was her increased
+rolling motion, but the pitching was much diminished, and now hardly
+any sea came farther aft than the foremast: but she rolled so extremely
+hard as frequently to dip and take in water over the gunwales and rails
+in the waist.&nbsp; By nine o&rsquo;clock all hands had been refreshed
+by the exertions of the cook and steward, and were happy in the prospect
+of the worst of the gale being over.&nbsp; The usual complement of men
+was also now set on watch, and more quietness was experienced throughout
+the ship.&nbsp; Although the previous night had been a very restless
+one, it had not the effect of inducing repose in the writer&rsquo;s
+berth on the succeeding night; for having been so much tossed about
+in bed during the last thirty hours, he found no easy spot to turn to,
+and his body was all sore to the touch, which ill accorded with the
+unyielding materials with which his bed-place was surrounded.<br>
+<br>
+[Monday, 7th Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+This morning, about eight o&rsquo;clock, the writer was agreeably surprised
+to see the scuttle of his cabin sky-light removed, and the bright rays
+of the sun admitted.&nbsp; Although the ship continued to roll excessively,
+and the sea was still running very high, yet the ordinary business on
+board seemed to be going forward on deck.&nbsp; It was impossible to
+steady a telescope, so as to look minutely at the progress of the waves
+and trace their breach upon the Bell Rock; but the height to which the
+cross-running waves rose in sprays when they met each other was truly
+grand, and the continued roar and noise of the sea was very perceptible
+to the ear.&nbsp; To estimate the height of the sprays at forty or fifty
+feet would surely be within the mark.&nbsp; Those of the workmen who
+were not much afflicted with sea-sickness, came upon deck, and the wetness
+below being dried up, the cabins were again brought into a habitable
+state.&nbsp; Every one seemed to meet as if after a long absence, congratulating
+his neighbour upon the return of good weather.&nbsp; Little could be
+said as to the comfort of the vessel, but after riding out such a gale,
+no one felt the least doubt or hesitation as to the safety and good
+condition of her moorings.&nbsp; The master and mate were extremely
+anxious, however, to heave in the hempen cable, and see the state of
+the clinch or iron ring of the chain-cable.&nbsp; But the vessel rolled
+at such a rate that the seamen could not possibly keep their feet at
+the windlass nor work the hand-spikes, though it had been several times
+attempted since the gale took off.<br>
+<br>
+About twelve noon, however, the vessel&rsquo;s motion was observed to
+be considerably less, and the sailors were enabled to walk upon deck
+with some degree of freedom.&nbsp; But, to the astonishment of every
+one, it was soon discovered that the floating light was adrift!&nbsp;
+The windlass was instantly manned, and the men soon gave out that there
+was no strain upon the cable.&nbsp; The mizzen sail, which was bent
+for the occasional purpose of making the vessel ride more easily to
+the tide, was immediately set, and the other sails were also hoisted
+in a short time, when, in no small consternation, we bore away about
+one mile to the south-westward of the former station, and there let
+go the best bower anchor and cable in twenty fathoms water, to ride
+until the swell of the sea should fall, when it might be practicable
+to grapple for the moorings, and find a better anchorage for the ship.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 15th Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+This morning, at five a.m., the bell rung as a signal for landing upon
+the rock, a sound which, after a lapse of ten days, it is believed was
+welcomed by every one on board.&nbsp; There being a heavy breach of
+sea at the eastern creek, we landed, though not without difficulty,
+on the western side, every one seeming more eager than another to get
+upon the rock; and never did hungry men sit down to a hearty meal with
+more appetite than the artificers began to pick the dulse from the rocks.&nbsp;
+This marine plant had the effect of reviving the sickly, and seemed
+to be no less relished by those who were more hardy.<br>
+<br>
+While the water was ebbing, and the men were roaming in quest of their
+favourite morsel, the writer was examining the effects of the storm
+upon the forge and loose apparatus left upon the rock.&nbsp; Six large
+blocks of granite which had been landed, by way of experiment, on the
+1st instant, were now removed from their places and, by the force of
+the sea, thrown over a rising ledge into a hole at the distance of twelve
+or fifteen paces from the place on which they had been landed.&nbsp;
+This was a pretty good evidence both of the violence of the storm and
+the agitation of the sea upon the rock.&nbsp; The safety of the smith&rsquo;s
+forge was always an object of essential regard.&nbsp; The ash-pan of
+the hearth or fireplace, with its weighty cast-iron back, had been washed
+from their places of supposed security; the chains of attachment had
+been broken, and these ponderous articles were found at a very considerable
+distance in a hole on the western side of the rock; while the tools
+and picks of the Aberdeen masons were scattered about in every direction.&nbsp;
+It is, however, remarkable that not a single article was ultimately
+lost.<br>
+<br>
+This being the night on which the floating light was advertised to be
+lighted, it was accordingly exhibited, to the great joy of every one.<br>
+<br>
+[Wednesday, 16th Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+The writer was made happy to-day by the return of the Lighthouse yacht
+from a voyage to the Northern Lighthouses.&nbsp; Having immediately
+removed on board of this fine vessel of eighty-one tons register, the
+artificers gladly followed; for, though they found themselves more pinched
+for accommodation on board of the yacht, and still more so in the <i>Smeaton</i>,
+yet they greatly preferred either of these to the <i>Pharos</i>, or
+floating light, on account of her rolling motion, though in all respects
+fitted up for their conveniency.<br>
+<br>
+The writer called them to the quarter-deck and informed them that, having
+been one mouth afloat, in terms of their agreement they were now at
+liberty to return to the workyard at Arbroath if they preferred this
+to continuing at the Bell Rock.&nbsp; But they replied that, in the
+prospect of soon getting the beacon erected upon the rock, and having
+made a change from the floating light, they were now perfectly reconciled
+to their situation, and would remain afloat till the end of the working
+season.<br>
+<br>
+[Thursday, 17th Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+The wind was at N.E. this morning, and though they were only light airs,
+yet there was a pretty heavy swell coming ashore upon the rock.&nbsp;
+The boats landed at half-past seven o&rsquo;clock a.m., at the creek
+on the southern side of the rock, marked Port Hamilton.&nbsp; But as
+one of the boats was in the act of entering this creek, the seaman at
+the bow-oar, who had just entered the service, having inadvertently
+expressed some fear from a heavy sea which came rolling towards the
+boat, and one of the artificers having at the same time looked round
+and missed a stroke with his oar, such a preponderance was thus given
+to the rowers upon the opposite side that when the wave struck the boat
+it threw her upon a ledge of shelving rocks, where the water left her,
+and she having <i>kanted</i> to seaward, the next wave completely filled
+her with water.&nbsp; After making considerable efforts the boat was
+again got afloat in the proper track of the creek, so that we landed
+without any other accident than a complete ducking.&nbsp; There being
+no possibility of getting a shift of clothes, the artificers began with
+all speed to work, so as to bring themselves into heat, while the writer
+and his assistants kept as much as possible in motion.&nbsp; Having
+remained more than an hour upon the rock, the boats left it at half-past
+nine; and, after getting on board, the writer recommended to the artificers,
+as the best mode of getting into a state of comfort, to strip off their
+wet clothes and go to bed for an hour or two.&nbsp; No further inconveniency
+was felt, and no one seemed to complain of the affection called &lsquo;catching
+cold.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 18th Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+An important occurrence connected with the operations of this season
+was the arrival of the <i>Smeaton</i> at four p.m., having in tow the
+six principal beams of the beacon-house, together with all the stanchions
+and other work on board for fixing it on the rock.&nbsp; The mooring
+of the floating light was a great point gained, but in the erection
+of the beacon at this late period of the season new difficulties presented
+themselves.&nbsp; The success of such an undertaking at any season was
+precarious, because a single day of bad weather occurring before the
+necessary fixtures could be made might sweep the whole apparatus from
+the rock.&nbsp; Notwithstanding these difficulties, the writer had determined
+to make the trial, although he could almost have wished, upon looking
+at the state of the clouds and the direction of the wind, that the apparatus
+for the beacon had been still in the workyard.<br>
+<br>
+[Saturday, 19th Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+The main beams of the beacon were made up in two separate rafts, fixed
+with bars and bolts of iron.&nbsp; One of these rafts, not being immediately
+wanted, was left astern of the floating light, and the other was kept
+in tow by the <i>Smeaton</i>, at the buoy nearest to the rock.&nbsp;
+The Lighthouse yacht rode at another buoy with all hands on board that
+could possibly be spared out of the floating light.&nbsp; The party
+of artificers and seamen which landed on the rock counted altogether
+forty in number.&nbsp; At half-past eight o&rsquo;clock a derrick, or
+mast of thirty feet in height, was erected and properly supported with
+guy-ropes, for suspending the block for raising the first principal
+beam of the beacon; and a winch machine was also bolted down to the
+rock for working the purchase-tackle.<br>
+<br>
+Upon raising the derrick, all hands on the rock spontaneously gave three
+hearty cheers, as a favourable omen of our future exertions in pointing
+out more permanently the position of the rock.&nbsp; Even to this single
+spar of timber, could it be preserved, a drowning man might lay hold.&nbsp;
+When the <i>Smeaton</i> drifted on the 2nd of this month such a spar
+would have been sufficient to save us till she could have come to our
+relief.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 20th Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+The wind this morning was variable, but the weather continued extremely
+favourable for the operations throughout the whole day.&nbsp; At six
+a.m. the boats were in motion, and the raft, consisting of four of the
+six principal beams of the beacon-house, each measuring about sixteen
+inches square, and fifty feet in length, was towed to the rock, where
+it was anchored, that it might ground upon it as the water ebbed.&nbsp;
+The sailors and artificers, including all hands, to-day counted no fewer
+than fifty-two, being perhaps the greatest number of persons ever collected
+upon the Bell Rock.&nbsp; It was early in the tide when the boats reached
+the rock, and the men worked a considerable time up to their middle
+in water, every one being more eager than his neighbour to be useful.&nbsp;
+Even the four artificers who had hitherto declined working on Sunday
+were to-day most zealous in their exertions.&nbsp; They had indeed become
+so convinced of the precarious nature and necessity of the work that
+they never afterwards absented themselves from the rock on Sunday when
+a landing was practicable.<br>
+<br>
+Having made fast a piece of very good new line, at about two-thirds
+from the lower end of one of the beams, the purchase-tackle of the derrick
+was hooked into the turns of the line, and it was speedily raised by
+the number of men on the rock and the power of the winch tackle.&nbsp;
+When this log was lifted to a sufficient height, its foot, or lower
+end, was <i>stepped</i> into the spot which had been previously prepared
+for it.&nbsp; Two of the great iron stanchions were then set in their
+respective holes on each side of the beam, when a rope was passed round
+them and the beam, to prevent it from slipping till it could be more
+permanently fixed.&nbsp; The derrick, or upright spar used for carrying
+the tackle to raise the first beam, was placed in such a position as
+to become useful for supporting the upper end of it, which now became,
+in its turn, the prop of the tackle for raising the second beam.&nbsp;
+The whole difficulty of this operation was in the raising and propping
+of the first beam, which became a convenient derrick for raising the
+second, these again a pair of shears for lifting the third, and the
+shears a triangle for raising the fourth.&nbsp; Having thus got four
+of the six principal beams set on end, it required a considerable degree
+of trouble to get their upper ends to fit.&nbsp; Here they formed the
+apex of a cone, and were all together mortised into a large piece of
+beechwood, and secured, for the present, with ropes, in a temporary
+manner.&nbsp; During the short period of one tide all that could further
+be done for their security was to put a single screw-bolt through the
+great kneed bats or stanchions on each side of the beams, and screw
+the nut home.<br>
+<br>
+In this manner these four principal beams were erected, and left in
+a pretty secure state.&nbsp; The men had commenced while there was about
+two or three feet of water upon the side of the beacon, and as the sea
+was smooth they continued the work equally long during flood-tide.&nbsp;
+Two of the boats being left at the rock to take off the joiners, who
+were busily employed on the upper parts till two o&rsquo;clock p.m.,
+this tide&rsquo;s work may be said to have continued for about seven
+hours, which was the longest that had hitherto been got upon the rock
+by at least three hours.<br>
+<br>
+When the first boats left the rock with the artificers employed on the
+lower part of the work during the flood-tide, the beacon had quite a
+novel appearance.&nbsp; The beams erected formed a common base of about
+thirty-three feet, meeting at the top, which was about forty-five feet
+above the rock, and here half a dozen of the artificers were still at
+work.&nbsp; After clearing the rock the boats made a stop, when three
+hearty cheers were given, which were returned with equal goodwill by
+those upon the beacon, from the personal interest which every one felt
+in the prosperity of this work, so intimately connected with his safety.<br>
+<br>
+All hands having returned to their respective ships, they got a shift
+of dry clothes and some refreshment.&nbsp; Being Sunday, they were afterwards
+convened by signal on board of the Lighthouse yacht, when prayers were
+read; for every heart upon this occasion felt gladness, and every mind
+was disposed to be thankful for the happy and successful termination
+of the operations of this day.<br>
+<br>
+[Monday, 21st Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+The remaining two principal beams were erected in the course of this
+tide, which, with the assistance of those set up yesterday, was found
+to be a very simple operation.<br>
+<br>
+The six principal beams of the beacon were thus secured, at least in
+a temporary manner, in the course of two tides, or in the short space
+of about eleven hours and a half.&nbsp; Such is the progress that may
+be made when active hands and willing minds set properly to work in
+operations of this kind.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday 22nd, Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+Having now got the weighty part of this work over, and being thereby
+relieved of the difficulty both of landing and victualling such a number
+of men, the <i>Smeaton</i> could now be spared, and she was accordingly
+despatched to Arbroath for a supply of water and provisions, and carried
+with her six of the artificers who could best be spared.<br>
+<br>
+[Wednesday, 23rd Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+In going out of the eastern harbour, the boat which the writer steered
+shipped a sea, that filled her about one-third with water.&nbsp; She
+had also been hid for a short time, by the waves breaking upon the rock,
+from the sight of the crew of the preceding boat, who were much alarmed
+for our safety, imagining for a time that she had gone down.<br>
+<br>
+The <i>Smeaton</i> returned from Arbroath this afternoon, but there
+was so much sea that she could not be made fast to her moorings, and
+the vessel was obliged to return to Arbroath without being able either
+to deliver the provisions or take the artificers on board.&nbsp; The
+Lighthouse yacht was also soon obliged to follow her example, as the
+sea was breaking heavily over her bows.&nbsp; After getting two reefs
+in the mainsail, and the third or storm-jib set, the wind being S.W.,
+she bent to windward, though blowing a hard gale, and got into St. Andrews
+Bay, where we passed the night under the lee of Fifeness.<br>
+<br>
+[Thursday, 24th Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+At two o&rsquo;clock this morning we were in St. Andrews Bay, standing
+off and on shore, with strong gales of wind at S.W.; at seven we were
+off the entrance of the Tay; at eight stood towards the rock, and at
+ten passed to leeward of it, but could not attempt a landing.&nbsp;
+The beacon, however, appeared to remain in good order, and by six p.m.
+the vessel had again beaten up to St. Andrews Bay, and got into somewhat
+smoother water for the night.<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 25th Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+At seven o&rsquo;clock bore away for the Bell Rock, but finding a heavy
+sea running on it were unable to land.&nbsp; The writer, however, had
+the satisfaction to observe, with his telescope, that everything about
+the beacon appeared entire: and although the sea had a most frightful
+appearance, yet it was the opinion of every one that, since the erection
+of the beacon, the Bell Rock was divested of many of its terrors, and
+had it been possible to have got the boats hoisted out and manned, it
+might have even been found practicable to land.&nbsp; At six it blew
+so hard that it was found necessary to strike the topmast and take in
+a third reef of the mainsail, and under this low canvas we soon reached
+St. Andrews Bay, and got again under the lee of the land for the night.&nbsp;
+The artificers, being sea-hardy, were quite reconciled to their quarters
+on board of the Lighthouse yacht; but it is believed that hardly any
+consideration would have induced them again to take up their abode in
+the floating light.<br>
+<br>
+[Saturday, 26th Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+At daylight the yacht steered towards the Bell Rock, and at eight a.m.
+made fast to her moorings; at ten, all hands, to the amount of thirty,
+landed, when the writer had the happiness to find that the beacon had
+withstood the violence of the gale and the heavy breach of sea, everything
+being found in the same state in which it had been left on the 21st.&nbsp;
+The artificers were now enabled to work upon the rock throughout the
+whole day, both at low and high water, but it required the strictest
+attention to the state of the weather, in case of their being overtaken
+with a gale, which might prevent the possibility of getting them off
+the rock.<br>
+<br>
+Two somewhat memorable circumstances in the annals of the Bell Rock
+attended the operations of this day: one was the removal of Mr. James
+Dove, the foreman smith, with his apparatus, from the rock to the upper
+part of the beacon, where the forge was now erected on a temporary platform,
+laid on the cross beams or upper framing.&nbsp; The other was the artificers
+having dined for the first time upon the rock, their dinner being cooked
+on board of the yacht, and sent to them by one of the boats.&nbsp; But
+what afforded the greatest happiness and relief was the removal of the
+large bellows, which had all along been a source of much trouble and
+perplexity, by their hampering and incommoding the boat which carried
+the smiths and their apparatus.<br>
+<br>
+[Saturday, 3rd Oct.]<br>
+<br>
+The wind being west to-day, the weather was very favourable for operations
+at the rock, and during the morning and evening tides, with the aid
+of torchlight, the masons had seven hours&rsquo; work upon the site
+of the building.&nbsp; The smiths and joiners, who landed at half-past
+six a.m., did not leave the rock till a quarter-past eleven p.m., having
+been at work, with little intermission, for sixteen hours and three-quarters.&nbsp;
+When the water left the rock, they were employed at the lower parts
+of the beacon, and as the tide rose or fell, they shifted the place
+of their operations.&nbsp; From these exertions, the fixing and securing
+of the beacon made rapid advancement, as the men were now landed in
+the morning and remained throughout the day.&nbsp; But, as a sudden
+change of weather might have prevented their being taken off at the
+proper time of tide, a quantity of bread and water was always kept on
+the beacon.<br>
+<br>
+During this period of working at the beacon all the day, and often a
+great part of the night, the writer was much on board of the tender;
+but, while the masons could work on the rock, and frequently also while
+it was covered by the tide, he remained on the beacon; especially during
+the night, as he made a point of being on the rock to the latest hour,
+and was generally the last person who stepped into the boat.&nbsp; He
+had laid this down as part of his plan of procedure; and in this way
+had acquired, in the course of the first season, a pretty complete knowledge
+and experience of what could actually be done at the Bell Rock, under
+all circumstances of the weather.&nbsp; By this means also his assistants,
+and the artificers and mariners, got into a systematic habit of proceeding
+at the commencement of the work, which, it is believed, continued throughout
+the whole of the operations.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 4th Oct.]<br>
+<br>
+The external part of the beacon was now finished, with its supports
+and bracing-chains, and whatever else was considered necessary for its
+stability in so far as the season would permit; and although much was
+still wanting to complete this fabric, yet it was in such a state that
+it could be left without much fear of the consequences of a storm.&nbsp;
+The painting of the upper part was nearly finished this afternoon; and
+the <i>Smeaton</i> had brought off a quantity of brushwood and other
+articles, for the purpose of heating or charring the lower part of the
+principal beams, before being laid over with successive coats of boiling
+pitch, to the height of from eight to twelve feet, or as high as the
+rise of spring-tides.&nbsp; A small flagstaff having also been erected
+to-day, a flag was displayed for the first time from the beacon, by
+which its perspective effect was greatly improved.&nbsp; On this, as
+on all like occasions at the Bell Rock, three hearty cheers were given;
+and the steward served out a dram of rum to all hands, while the Lighthouse
+yacht, <i>Smeaton</i>, and floating light, hoisted their colours in
+compliment to the erection.<br>
+<br>
+[Monday, 5th Oct.]<br>
+<br>
+In the afternoon, and just as the tide&rsquo;s work was over, Mr. John
+Rennie, engineer, accompanied by his son Mr. George, on their way to
+the harbour works of Fraserburgh, in Aberdeenshire, paid a visit to
+the Bell Rock, in a boat from Arbroath.&nbsp; It being then too late
+in the tide for landing, they remained on board of the Lighthouse yacht
+all night, when the writer, who had now been secluded from society for
+several weeks, enjoyed much of Mr. Rennie&rsquo;s interesting conversation,
+both on general topics, and professionally upon the progress of the
+Bell Rock works, on which he was consulted as chief engineer.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 6th Oct.]<br>
+<br>
+The artificers landed this morning at nine, after which one of the boats
+returned to the ship for the writer and Messrs. Rennie, who, upon landing,
+were saluted with a display of the colours from the beacon and by three
+cheers from the workmen.&nbsp; Everything was now in a prepared state
+for leaving the rock, and giving up the works afloat for this season,
+excepting some small articles, which would still occupy the smiths and
+joiners for a few days longer.&nbsp; They accordingly shifted on board
+of the <i>Smeaton</i>, while the yacht left the rock for Arbroath, with
+Messrs. Rennie, the writer, and the remainder of the artificers.&nbsp;
+But, before taking leave, the steward served out a farewell glass, when
+three hearty cheers were given, and an earnest wish expressed that everything,
+in the spring of 1808, might be found in the same state of good order
+as it was now about to be left.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+II - OPERATIONS OF 1808<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+[Monday, 29th Feb.]<br>
+<br>
+The writer sailed from Arbroath at one a.m. in the Lighthouse yacht.&nbsp;
+At seven the floating light was hailed, and all on board found to be
+well.&nbsp; The crew were observed to have a very healthy-like appearance,
+and looked better than at the close of the works upon the rock.&nbsp;
+They seemed only to regret one thing, which was the secession of their
+cook, Thomas Elliot - not on account of his professional skill, but
+for his facetious and curious manner.&nbsp; Elliot had something peculiar
+in his history, and was reported by his comrades to have seen better
+days.&nbsp; He was, however, happy with his situation on board of the
+floating light, and, having a taste for music, dancing, and acting plays,
+he contributed much to the amusement of the ship&rsquo;s company in
+their dreary abode during the winter months.&nbsp; He had also recommended
+himself to their notice as a good shipkeeper, for as it did not answer
+Elliot to go often ashore, he had always given up his turn of leave
+to his neighbours.&nbsp; At his own desire he was at length paid off,
+when he had a considerable balance of wages to receive, which he said
+would be sufficient to carry him to the West Indies, and he accordingly
+took leave of the Lighthouse service.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 1st March]<br>
+<br>
+At daybreak the Lighthouse yacht, attended by a boat from the floating
+light, again stood towards the Bell Rock.&nbsp; The weather felt extremely
+cold this morning, the thermometer being at 34 degrees, with the wind
+at east, accompanied by occasional showers of snow, and the marine barometer
+indicated 29.80.&nbsp; At half-past seven the sea ran with such force
+upon the rock that it seemed doubtful if a landing could be effected.&nbsp;
+At half-past eight, when it was fairly above water, the writer took
+his place in the floating light&rsquo;s boat with the artificers, while
+the yacht&rsquo;s boat followed, according to the general rule of having
+two boats afloat in landing expeditions of this kind, that, in case
+of accident to one boat, the other might assist.&nbsp; In several unsuccessful
+attempts the boats were beat back by the breach of the sea upon the
+rock.&nbsp; On the eastern side it separated into two distinct waves,
+which came with a sweep round to the western side, where they met; and
+at the instance of their confluence the water rose in spray to a considerable
+height.&nbsp; Watching what the sailors term a <i>smooth</i>, we caught
+a favourable opportunity, and in a very dexterous manner the boats were
+rowed between the two seas, and made a favourable landing at the western
+creek.<br>
+<br>
+At the latter end of last season, as was formerly noticed, the beacon
+was painted white, and from the bleaching of the weather and the sprays
+of the sea the upper parts were kept clean; but within the range of
+the tide the principal beams were observed to be thickly coated with
+a green stuff, the <i>conferva</i> of botanists.&nbsp; Notwithstanding
+the intrusion of these works, which had formerly banished the numerous
+seals that played about the rock, they were now seen in great numbers,
+having been in an almost undisturbed state for six months.&nbsp; It
+had now also, for the first time, got some inhabitants of the feathered
+tribe: in particular the scarth or cormorant, and the large herring-gull,
+had made the beacon a resting-place, from its vicinity to their fishing-grounds.&nbsp;
+About a dozen of these birds had rested upon the cross-beams, which,
+in some places, were coated with their dung; and their flight, as the
+boats approached, was a very unlooked-for indication of life and habitation
+on the Bell Rock, conveying the momentary idea of the conversion of
+this fatal rock, from being a terror to the mariner, into a residence
+of man and a safeguard to shipping.<br>
+<br>
+Upon narrowly examining the great iron stanchions with which the beams
+were fixed to the rock, the writer had the satisfaction of finding that
+there was not the least appearance of working or shifting at any of
+the joints or places of connection; and, excepting the loosening of
+the bracing-chains, everything was found in the same entire state in
+which it had been left in the month of October.&nbsp; This, in the estimation
+of the writer, was a matter of no small importance to the future success
+of the work.&nbsp; He from that moment saw the practicability and propriety
+of fitting up the beacon, not only as a place of refuge in case of accident
+to the boats in landing, but as a residence for the artificers during
+the working months.<br>
+<br>
+While upon the top of the beacon the writer was reminded by the landing-master
+that the sea was running high, and that it would be necessary to set
+off while the rock afforded anything like shelter to the boats, which
+by this time had been made fast by a long line to the beacon, and rode
+with much agitation, each requiring two men with boat-hooks to keep
+them from striking each other, or from ranging up against the beacon.&nbsp;
+But even under these circumstances the greatest confidence was felt
+by every one, from the security afforded by this temporary erection.&nbsp;
+For, supposing the wind had suddenly increased to a gale, and that it
+had been found unadvisable to go into the boats; or, supposing they
+had drifted or sprung a leak from striking upon the rocks; in any of
+these possible and not at all improbable cases, those who might thus
+have been left upon the rock had now something to lay hold of, and,
+though occupying this dreary habitation of the sea-gull and the cormorant,
+affording only bread and water, yet <i>life</i>, would be preserved,
+and the mind would still be supported by the hope of being ultimately
+relieved.<br>
+<br>
+[Wednesday, 25th May]<br>
+<br>
+On the 25th of May the writer embarked at Arbroath, on board of the
+<i>Sir Joseph Banks</i>, for the Bell Rock, accompanied by Mr. Logan
+senior, foreman builder, with twelve masons and two smiths, together
+with thirteen seamen, including the master, mate, and steward.<br>
+<br>
+[Thursday, 26th May]<br>
+<br>
+Mr. James Wilson, now commander of the <i>Pharos</i>, floating light,
+and landing-master, in the room of Mr. Sinclair, who had left the service,
+came into the writer&rsquo;s cabin this morning at six o&rsquo;clock,
+and intimated that there was a good appearance of landing on the rock.&nbsp;
+Everything being arranged, both boats proceeded in company, and at eight
+a.m. they reached the rock.&nbsp; The lighthouse colours were immediately
+hoisted upon the flagstaff of the beacon, a compliment which was duly
+returned by the tender and floating light, when three hearty cheers
+were given, and a glass of rum was served out to all hands to drink
+success to the operations of 1808.<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 27th May]<br>
+<br>
+This morning the wind was at east, blowing a fresh gale, the weather
+being hazy, with a considerable breach of sea setting in upon the rock.&nbsp;
+The morning bell was therefore rung, in some doubt as to the practicability
+of making a landing.&nbsp; After allowing the rock to get fully up,
+or to be sufficiently left by the tide, that the boats might have some
+shelter from the range of the sea, they proceeded at 8 a.m., and upon
+the whole made a pretty good landing; and after two hours and three-quarters&rsquo;
+work returned to the ship in safety.<br>
+<br>
+In the afternoon the wind considerably increased, and, as a pretty heavy
+sea was still running, the tender rode very hard, when Mr. Taylor, the
+commander, found it necessary to take in the bowsprit, and strike the
+fore and main topmasts, that she might ride more easily.&nbsp; After
+consulting about the state of the weather, it was resolved to leave
+the artificers on board this evening, and carry only the smiths to the
+rock, as the sharpening of the irons was rather behind, from their being
+so much broken and blunted by the hard and tough nature of the rock,
+which became much more compact and hard as the depth of excavation was
+increased.&nbsp; Besides avoiding the risk of encumbering the boats
+with a number of men who had not yet got the full command of the oar
+in a breach of sea, the writer had another motive for leaving them behind.&nbsp;
+He wanted to examine the site of the building without interruption,
+and to take the comparative levels of the different inequalities of
+its area; and as it would have been painful to have seen men standing
+idle upon the Bell Rock, where all moved with activity, it was judged
+better to leave them on board.&nbsp; The boats landed at half-past seven
+p.m., and the landing-master, with the seamen, was employed during this
+tide in cutting the seaweeds from the several paths leading to the landing-places,
+to render walking more safe, for, from the slippery state of the surface
+of the rock, many severe tumbles had taken place.&nbsp; In the meantime
+the writer took the necessary levels, and having carefully examined
+the site of the building and considered all its parts, it still appeared
+to be necessary to excavate to the average depth of fourteen inches
+over the whole area of the foundation.<br>
+<br>
+[Saturday, 28th May]<br>
+<br>
+The wind still continued from the eastward with a heavy swell; and to-day
+it was accompanied with foggy weather and occasional showers of rain.&nbsp;
+Notwithstanding this, such was the confidence which the erection of
+the beacon had inspired that the boats landed the artificers on the
+rock under very unpromising circumstances, at half-past eight, and they
+continued at work till half-past eleven, being a period of three hours,
+which was considered a great tide&rsquo;s work in the present low state
+of the foundation.&nbsp; Three of the masons on board were so afflicted
+with sea-sickness that they had not been able to take any food for almost
+three days, and they were literally assisted into the boats this morning
+by their companions.&nbsp; It was, however, not a little surprising
+to see how speedily these men revived upon landing on the rock and eating
+a little dulse.&nbsp; Two of them afterwards assisted the sailors in
+collecting the chips of stone and carrying them out of the way of the
+pickmen; but the third complained of a pain in his head, and was still
+unable to do anything.&nbsp; Instead of returning to the tender with
+the boats, these three men remained on the beacon all day, and had their
+victuals sent to them along with the smiths&rsquo;.&nbsp; From Mr. Dove,
+the foreman smith, they had much sympathy, for he preferred remaining
+on the beacon at all hazards, to be himself relieved from the malady
+of sea-sickness.&nbsp; The wind continuing high, with a heavy sea, and
+the tide falling late, it was not judged proper to land the artificers
+this evening, but in the twilight the boats were sent to fetch the people
+on board who had been left on the rock.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 29th May]<br>
+<br>
+The wind was from the S.W. to-day, and the signal-bell rung, as usual,
+about an hour before the period for landing on the rock.&nbsp; The writer
+was rather surprised, however, to hear the landing-master repeatedly
+call, &lsquo;All hands for the rock!&rsquo; and, coming on deck, he
+was disappointed to find the seamen only in the boats.&nbsp; Upon inquiry,
+it appeared that some misunderstanding had taken place about the wages
+of the artificers for Sundays.&nbsp; They had preferred wages for seven
+days statedly to the former mode of allowing a day for each tide&rsquo;s
+work on Sunday, as they did not like the appearance of working for double
+or even treble wages on Sunday, and would rather have it understood
+that their work on that day arose more from the urgency of the case
+than with a view to emolument.&nbsp; This having been judged creditable
+to their religious feelings, and readily adjusted to their wish, the
+boats proceeded to the rock, and the work commenced at nine a.m.<br>
+<br>
+[Monday, 30th May]<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Francis Watt commenced, with five joiners, to fit up a temporary
+platform upon the beacon, about twenty-five feet above the highest part
+of the rock.&nbsp; This platform was to be used as the site of the smith&rsquo;s
+forge, after the beacon should be fitted up as a barrack; and here also
+the mortar was to be mixed and prepared for the building, and it was
+accordingly termed the Mortar Gallery.<br>
+<br>
+The landing-master&rsquo;s crew completed the discharging from the <i>Smeaton</i>
+of her cargo of the cast-iron rails and timber.&nbsp; It must not here
+be omitted to notice that the <i>Smeaton</i> took in ballast from the
+Bell Rock, consisting of the shivers or chips of stone produced by the
+workmen in preparing the site of the building, which were now accumulating
+in great quantities on the rock.&nbsp; These the boats loaded, after
+discharging the iron.&nbsp; The object in carrying off these chips,
+besides ballasting the vessel, was to get them permanently out of the
+way, as they were apt to shift about from place to place with every
+gale of wind; and it often required a considerable time to clear the
+foundation a second time of this rubbish.&nbsp; The circumstance of
+ballasting a ship at the Bell Rock afforded great entertainment, especially
+to the sailors; and it was perhaps with truth remarked that the <i>Smeaton</i>
+was the first vessel that had ever taken on board ballast at the Bell
+Rock.&nbsp; Mr. Pool, the commander of this vessel, afterwards acquainted
+the writer that, when the ballast was landed upon the quay at Leith,
+many persons carried away specimens of it, as part of a cargo from the
+Bell Rock; when he added, that such was the interest excited, from the
+number of specimens carried away, that some of his friends suggested
+that he should have sent the whole to the Cross of Edinburgh, where
+each piece might have sold for a penny.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 31st May]<br>
+<br>
+In the evening the boats went to the rock, and brought the joiners and
+smiths, and their sickly companions, on board of the tender.&nbsp; These
+also brought with them two baskets full of fish, which they had caught
+at high-water from the beacon, reporting, at the same time, to their
+comrades, that the fish were swimming in such numbers over the rock
+at high-water that it was completely hid from their sight, and nothing
+seen but the movement of thousands of fish.&nbsp; They were almost exclusively
+of the species called the podlie, or young coal-fish.&nbsp; This discovery,
+made for the first time to-day by the workmen, was considered fortunate,
+as an additional circumstance likely to produce an inclination among
+the artificers to take up their residence in the beacon, when it came
+to be fitted up as a barrack.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 7th June]<br>
+<br>
+At three o&rsquo;clock in the morning the ship&rsquo;s bell was rung
+as the signal for landing at the rock.&nbsp; When the landing was to
+be made before breakfast, it was customary to give each of the artificers
+and seamen a dram and a biscuit, and coffee was prepared by the steward
+for the cabins.&nbsp; Exactly at four o&rsquo;clock the whole party
+landed from three boats, including one of those belonging to the floating
+light, with a part of that ship&rsquo;s crew, which always attended
+the works in moderate weather.&nbsp; The landing-master&rsquo;s boat,
+called the <i>Seaman</i>, but more commonly called the <i>Lifeboat</i>,
+took the lead.&nbsp; The next boat, called the <i>Mason</i>, was generally
+steered by the writer; while the floating light&rsquo;s boat, <i>Pharos</i>,
+was under the management of the boatswain of that ship.<br>
+<br>
+Having now so considerable a party of workmen and sailors on the rock,
+it may be proper here to notice how their labours were directed.&nbsp;
+Preparations having been made last month for the erection of a second
+forge upon the beacon, the smiths commenced their operations both upon
+the lower and higher platforms.&nbsp; They were employed in sharpening
+the picks and irons for the masons, and in making bats and other apparatus
+of various descriptions connected with the fitting of the railways.&nbsp;
+The landing-master&rsquo;s crew were occupied in assisting the millwrights
+in laying the railways to hand.&nbsp; Sailors, of all other descriptions
+of men, are the most accommodating in the use of their hands.&nbsp;
+They worked freely with the boring-irons, and assisted in all the operations
+of the railways, acting by turns as boatmen, seamen, and artificers.&nbsp;
+We had no such character on the Bell Rock as the common labourer.&nbsp;
+All the operations of this department were cheerfully undertaken by
+the seamen, who, both on the rock and on shipboard, were the inseparable
+companions of every work connected with the erection of the Bell Rock
+Lighthouse.&nbsp; It will naturally be supposed that about twenty-five
+masons, occupied with their picks in executing and preparing the foundation
+of the lighthouse, in the course of a tide of about three hours, would
+make a considerable impression upon an area even of forty-two feet in
+diameter.&nbsp; But in proportion as the foundation was deepened, the
+rock was found to be much more hard and difficult to work, while the
+baling and pumping of water became much more troublesome.&nbsp; A joiner
+was kept almost constantly employed in fitting the picks to their handles,
+which, as well as the points to the irons, were very frequently broken.<br>
+<br>
+The Bell Rock this morning presented by far the most busy and active
+appearance it had exhibited since the erection of the principal beams
+of the beacon.&nbsp; The surface of the rock was crowded with men, the
+two forges flaming, the one above the other, upon the beacon, while
+the anvils thundered with the rebounding noise of their wooden supports,
+and formed a curious contrast with the occasional clamour of the surges.&nbsp;
+The wind was westerly, and the weather being extremely agreeable, as
+soon after breakfast as the tide had sufficiently overflowed the rock
+to float the boats over it, the smiths, with a number of the artificers,
+returned to the beacon, carrying their fishing-tackle along with them.&nbsp;
+In the course of the forenoon, the beacon exhibited a still more extraordinary
+appearance than the rock had done in the morning.&nbsp; The sea being
+smooth, it seemed to be afloat upon the water, with a number of men
+supporting themselves in all the variety of attitude and position: while,
+from the upper part of this wooden house, the volumes of smoke which
+ascended from the forges gave the whole a very curious and fanciful
+appearance.<br>
+<br>
+In the course of this tide it was observed that a heavy swell was setting
+in from the eastward, and the appearance of the sky indicated a change
+of weather, while the wind was shifting about.&nbsp; The barometer also
+had fallen from 30 in. to 29.6.&nbsp; It was, therefore, judged prudent
+to shift the vessel to the S.W. or more distant buoy.&nbsp; Her bowsprit
+was also soon afterwards taken in, the topmasts struck, and everything
+made <i>snug</i>, as seamen term it, for a gale.&nbsp; During the course
+of the night the wind increased and shifted to the eastward, when the
+vessel rolled very hard, and the sea often broke over her bows with
+great force.<br>
+<br>
+[Wednesday, 8th June]<br>
+<br>
+Although the motion of the tender was much less than that of the floating
+light - at least, in regard to the rolling motion - yet she <i>sended</i>,
+or pitched, much.&nbsp; Being also of a very handsome build, and what
+seamen term very <i>clean</i> <i>aft</i>, the sea often struck the counter
+with such force that the writer, who possessed the aftermost cabin,
+being unaccustomed to this new vessel, could not divest himself of uneasiness;
+for when her stern fell into the sea, it struck with so much violence
+as to be more like the resistance of a rock than the sea.&nbsp; The
+water, at the same time, often rushed with great force up the rudder-case,
+and, forcing up the valve of the water-closet, the floor of his cabin
+was at times laid under water.&nbsp; The gale continued to increase,
+and the vessel rolled and pitched in such a manner that the hawser by
+which the tender was made fast to the buoy snapped, and she went adrift.&nbsp;
+In the act of swinging round to the wind she shipped a very heavy sea,
+which greatly alarmed the artificers, who imagined that we had got upon
+the rock; but this, from the direction of the wind, was impossible.&nbsp;
+The writer, however, sprung upon deck, where he found the sailors busily
+employed in rigging out the bowsprit and in setting sail.&nbsp; From
+the easterly direction of the wind, it was considered most advisable
+to steer for the Firth of Forth, and there wait a change of weather.&nbsp;
+At two p.m. we accordingly passed the Isle of May, at six anchored in
+Leith Roads, and at eight the writer landed, when he came in upon his
+friends, who were not a little surprised at his unexpected appearance,
+which gave an instantaneous alarm for the safety of things at the Bell
+Rock.<br>
+<br>
+[Thursday, 9th June]<br>
+<br>
+The wind still continued to blow very hard at E. by N., and the <i>Sir
+Joseph Banks</i> rode heavily, and even drifted with both anchors ahead,
+in Leith Roads.&nbsp; The artificers did not attempt to leave the ship
+last night; but there being upwards of fifty people on board, and the
+decks greatly lumbered with the two large boats, they were in a very
+crowded and impatient state on board.&nbsp; But to-day they got ashore,
+and amused themselves by walking about the streets of Edinburgh, some
+in very humble apparel, from having only the worst of their jackets
+with them, which, though quite suitable for their work, were hardly
+fit for public inspection, being not only tattered, but greatly stained
+with the red colour of the rock.<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 10th June]<br>
+<br>
+To-day the wind was at S.E., with light breezes and foggy weather.&nbsp;
+At six a.m. the writer again embarked for the Bell Rock, when the vessel
+immediately sailed.&nbsp; At eleven p.m., there being no wind, the kedge-anchor
+was <i>let go</i> off Anstruther, one of the numerous towns on the coast
+of Fife, where we waited the return of the tide.<br>
+<br>
+[Saturday, 11th June]<br>
+<br>
+At six a.m. the <i>Sir Joseph</i> got under weigh, and at eleven was
+again made fast to the southern buoy at the Bell Rock.&nbsp; Though
+it was now late in the tide, the writer, being anxious to ascertain
+the state of things after the gale, landed with the artificers to the
+number of forty-four.&nbsp; Everything was found in an entire state;
+but, as the tide was nearly gone, only half an hour&rsquo;s work had
+been got when the site of the building was overflowed.&nbsp; In the
+evening the boats again landed at nine, and after a good tide&rsquo;s
+work of three hours with torchlight, the work was left off at midnight.&nbsp;
+To the distant shipping the appearance of things under night on the
+Bell Rock, when the work was going forward, must have been very remarkable,
+especially to those who were strangers to the operations.&nbsp; Mr.
+John Reid, principal lightkeeper, who also acted as master of the floating
+light during the working months at the rock, described the appearance
+of numerous lights situated so low in the water, when seen at the distance
+of two or three miles, as putting him in mind of Milton&rsquo;s description
+of the fiends in the lower regions, adding, &lsquo;for it seems greatly
+to surpass Will-o&rsquo;-the-Wisp, or any of those earthly spectres
+of which we have so often heard.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+[Monday, 13th June]<br>
+<br>
+From the difficulties attending the landing on the rock, owing to the
+breach of sea which had for days past been around it, the artificers
+showed some backwardness at getting into the boats this morning; but
+after a little explanation this was got over.&nbsp; It was always observable
+that for some time after anything like danger had occurred at the rock,
+the workmen became much more cautious, and on some occasions their timidity
+was rather troublesome.&nbsp; It fortunately happened, however, that
+along with the writer&rsquo;s assistants and the sailors there were
+also some of the artificers themselves who felt no such scruples, and
+in this way these difficulties were the more easily surmounted.&nbsp;
+In matters where life is in danger it becomes necessary to treat even
+unfounded prejudices with tenderness, as an accident, under certain
+circumstances, would not only have been particularly painful to those
+giving directions, but have proved highly detrimental to the work, especially
+in the early stages of its advancement.<br>
+<br>
+At four o&rsquo;clock fifty-eight persons landed; but the tides being
+extremely languid, the water only left the higher parts of the rock,
+and no work could be done at the site of the building.&nbsp; A third
+forge was, however, put in operation during a short time, for the greater
+conveniency of sharpening the picks and irons, and for purposes connected
+with the preparations for fixing the railways on the rock.&nbsp; The
+weather towards the evening became thick and foggy, and there was hardly
+a breath of wind to ruffle the surface of the water.&nbsp; Had it not,
+therefore, been for the noise from the anvils of the smiths who had
+been left on the beacon throughout the day, which afforded a guide for
+the boats, a landing could not have been attempted this evening, especially
+with such a company of artificers.&nbsp; This circumstance confirmed
+the writer&rsquo;s opinion with regard to the propriety of connecting
+large bells to be rung with machinery in the lighthouse, to be tolled
+day and night during the continuance of foggy weather.<br>
+<br>
+[Thursday, 23rd June]<br>
+<br>
+The boats landed this evening, when the artificers had again two hours&rsquo;
+work.&nbsp; The weather still continuing very thick and foggy, more
+difficulty was experienced in getting on board of the vessels to-night
+than had occurred on any previous occasion, owing to a light breeze
+of wind which carried the sound of the bell, and the other signals made
+on board of the vessels, away from the rock.&nbsp; Having fortunately
+made out the position of the sloop <i>Smeaton</i> at the N.E. buoy -
+to which we were much assisted by the barking of the ship&rsquo;s dog,
+- we parted with the <i>Smeaton&rsquo;s</i> boat, when the boats of
+the tender took a fresh departure for that vessel, which lay about half
+a mile to the south-westward.&nbsp; Yet such is the very deceiving state
+of the tides, that, although there was a small binnacle and compass
+in the landing-master&rsquo;s boat, we had, nevertheless, passed the
+<i>Sir Joseph</i> a good way, when, fortunately, one of the sailors
+catched the sound of a blowing-horn.&nbsp; The only fire-arms on board
+were a pair of swivels of one-inch calibre; but it is quite surprising
+how much the sound is lost in foggy weather, as the report was heard
+but at a very short distance.&nbsp; The sound from the explosion of
+gunpowder is so instantaneous that the effect of the small guns was
+not so good as either the blowing of a horn or the tolling of a bell,
+which afforded a more constant and steady direction for the pilot.<br>
+<br>
+[Wednesday, 6th July]<br>
+<br>
+Landed on the rock with the three boats belonging to the tender at five
+p.m., and began immediately to bale the water out of the foundation-pit
+with a number of buckets, while the pumps were also kept in action with
+relays of artificers and seamen.&nbsp; The work commenced upon the higher
+parts of the foundation as the water left them, but it was now pretty
+generally reduced to a level.&nbsp; About twenty men could be conveniently
+employed at each pump, and it is quite astonishing in how short a time
+so great a body of water could be drawn off.&nbsp; The water in the
+foundation-pit at this time measured about two feet in depth, on an
+area of forty-two feet in diameter, and yet it was drawn off in the
+course of about half an hour.&nbsp; After this the artificers commenced
+with their picks and continued at work for two hours and a half, some
+of the sailors being at the same time busily employed in clearing the
+foundation of chips and in conveying the irons to and from the smiths
+on the beacon, where they were sharped.&nbsp; At eight o&rsquo;clock
+the sea broke in upon us and overflowed the foundation-pit, when the
+boats returned to the tender.<br>
+<br>
+[Thursday, 7th July]<br>
+<br>
+The landing-master&rsquo;s bell rung this morning about four o&rsquo;clock,
+and at half-past five, the foundation being cleared, the work commenced
+on the site of the building.&nbsp; But from the moment of landing, the
+squad of joiners and millwrights was at work upon the higher parts of
+the rock in laying the railways, while the anvils of the smith resounded
+on the beacon, and such columns of smoke ascended from the forges that
+they were often mistaken by strangers at a distance for a ship on fire.&nbsp;
+After continuing three hours at work the foundation of the building
+was again overflowed, and the boats returned to the ship at half-past
+eight o&rsquo;clock. the masons and pickmen had, at this period, a pretty
+long day on board of the tender, but the smiths and joiners were kept
+constantly at work upon the beacon, the stability and great conveniency
+of which had now been so fully shown that no doubt remained as to the
+propriety of fitting it up as a barrack.&nbsp; The workmen were accordingly
+employed, during the period of high-water, in making preparations for
+this purpose.<br>
+<br>
+The foundation-pit now assumed the appearance of a great platform, and
+the late tides had been so favourable that it became apparent that the
+first course, consisting of a few irregular and detached stones for
+making up certain inequalities in the interior parts of the site of
+the building, might be laid in the course of the present spring-tides.&nbsp;
+Having been enabled to-day to get the dimensions of the foundation,
+or first stone, accurately taken, a mould was made of its figure, when
+the writer left the rock, after the tide&rsquo;s work of this morning,
+in a fast rowing-boat for Arbroath; and, upon landing, two men were
+immediately set to work upon one of the blocks from Mylnefield quarry,
+which was prepared in the course of the following day, as the stone-cutters
+relieved each other, and worked both night and day, so that it was sent
+off in one of the stone-lighters without delay.<br>
+<br>
+[Saturday, 9th July]<br>
+<br>
+The site of the foundation-stone was very difficult to work, from its
+depth in the rock; but being now nearly prepared, it formed a very agreeable
+kind of pastime at high-water for all hands to land the stone itself
+upon the rock.&nbsp; The landing-master&rsquo;s crew and artificers
+accordingly entered with great spirit into this operation.&nbsp; The
+stone was placed upon the deck of the <i>Hedderwick</i> praam-boat,
+which had just been brought from Leith, and was decorated with colours
+for the occasion.&nbsp; Flags were also displayed from the shipping
+in the offing, and upon the beacon.&nbsp; Here the writer took his station
+with the greater part of the artificers, who supported themselves in
+every possible position while the boats towed the praam from her moorings
+and brought her immediately over the site of the building, where her
+grappling anchors were let go.&nbsp; The stone was then lifted off the
+deck by a tackle hooked into a Lewis bat inserted into it, when it was
+gently lowered into the water and grounded on the site of the building,
+amidst the cheering acclamations of about sixty persons.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 10th July]<br>
+<br>
+At eleven o&rsquo;clock the foundation-stone was laid to hand.&nbsp;
+It was of a square form, containing about twenty cubic feet, and had
+the figures, or date, of 1808 simply cut upon it with a chisel.&nbsp;
+A derrick, or spar of timber, having been erected at the edge of the
+hole and guyed with ropes, the stone was then hooked to the tackle and
+lowered into its place, when the writer, attended by his assistants
+- Mr. Peter Logan, Mr. Francis Watt, and Mr. James Wilson, - applied
+the square, the level, and the mallet, and pronounced the following
+benediction: &lsquo;May the great Architect of the Universe complete
+and bless this building,&rsquo; on which three hearty cheers were given,
+and success to the future operations was drunk with the greatest enthusiasm.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 26th July]<br>
+<br>
+The wind being at S.E. this evening, we had a pretty heavy swell of
+sea upon the rock, and some difficulty attended our getting off in safety,
+as the boats got aground in the creek and were in danger of being upset.&nbsp;
+Upon extinguishing the torchlights, about twelve in number, the darkness
+of the night seemed quite horrible; the water being also much charged
+with the phosphorescent appearance which is familiar to every one on
+shipboard, the waves, as they dashed upon the rock, were in some degree
+like so much liquid flame.&nbsp; The scene, upon the whole, was truly
+awful!<br>
+<br>
+[Wednesday, 27th July]<br>
+<br>
+In leaving the rock this evening everything, after the torches were
+extinguished, had the same dismal appearance as last night, but so perfectly
+acquainted were the landing-master and his crew with the position of
+things at the rock, that comparatively little inconveniency was experienced
+on these occasions when the weather was moderate; such is the effect
+of habit, even in the most unpleasant situations.&nbsp; If, for example,
+it had been proposed to a person accustomed to a city life, at once
+to take up his quarters off a sunken reef and land upon it in boats
+at all hours of the night, the proposition must have appeared quite
+impracticable and extravagant; but this practice coming progressively
+upon the artificers, it was ultimately undertaken with the greatest
+alacrity.&nbsp; Notwithstanding this, however, it must be acknowledged
+that it was not till after much labour and peril, and many an anxious
+hour, that the writer is enabled to state that the site of the Bell
+Rock Lighthouse is fully prepared for the first entire course of the
+building.<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 12th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+The artificers landed this morning at half-past ten, and after an hour
+and a half&rsquo;s work eight stones were laid, which completed the
+first entire course of the building, consisting of 123 blocks, the last
+of which was laid with three hearty cheers.<br>
+<br>
+[Saturday, 10th Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+Landed at nine a.m., and by a quarter-past twelve noon twenty-three
+stones had been laid.&nbsp; The works being now somewhat elevated by
+the lower courses, we got quit of the very serious inconvenience of
+pumping water to clear the foundation-pit.&nbsp; This gave much facility
+to the operations, and was noticed with expressions of as much happiness
+by the artificers as the seamen had shown when relieved of the continual
+trouble of carrying the smith&rsquo;s bellows off the rock prior to
+the erection of the beacon.<br>
+<br>
+[Wednesday, 21st Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Thomas Macurich, mate of the <i>Smeaton</i>, and James Scott, one
+of the crew, a young man about eighteen years of age, immediately went
+into their boat to make fast a hawser to the ring in the top of the
+floating buoy of the moorings, and were forthwith to proceed to land
+their cargo, so much wanted, at the rock.&nbsp; The tides at this period
+were very strong, and the mooring-chain, when sweeping the ground, had
+caught hold of a rock or piece of wreck by which the chain was so shortened
+that when the tide flowed the buoy got almost under water, and little
+more than the ring appeared at the surface.&nbsp; When Macurich and
+Scott were in the act of making the hawser fast to the ring, the chain
+got suddenly disentangled at the bottom, and this large buoy, measuring
+about seven feet in height and three feet in diameter at the middle,
+tapering to both ends, being what seamen term a <i>Nun</i>-<i>buoy</i>,
+vaulted or sprung up with such force that it upset the boat, which instantly
+filled with water.&nbsp; Mr. Macurich, with much exertion, succeeded
+in getting hold of the boat&rsquo;s gunwale, still above the surface
+of the water, and by this means was saved; but the young man Scott was
+unfortunately drowned.&nbsp; He had in all probability been struck about
+the head by the ring of the buoy, for although surrounded with the oars
+and the thwarts of the boat which floated near him, yet he seemed entirely
+to want the power of availing himself of such assistance, and appeared
+to be quite insensible, while Pool, the master of the <i>Smeaton</i>,
+called loudly to him; and before assistance could be got from the tender,
+he was carried away by the strength of the current and disappeared.<br>
+<br>
+The young man Scott was a great favourite in the service, having had
+something uncommonly mild and complaisant in his manner; and his loss
+was therefore universally regretted.&nbsp; The circumstances of his
+case were also peculiarly distressing to his mother, as her husband,
+who was a seaman, had for three years past been confined to a French
+prison, and the deceased was the chief support of the family.&nbsp;
+In order in some measure to make up the loss to the poor woman for the
+monthly aliment regularly allowed her by her late son, it was suggested
+that a younger boy, a brother of the deceased, might be taken into the
+service.&nbsp; This appeared to be rather a delicate proposition, but
+it was left to the landing-master to arrange according to circumstances;
+such was the resignation, and at the same time the spirit, of the poor
+woman, that she readily accepted the proposal, and in a few days the
+younger Scott was actually afloat in the place of his brother.&nbsp;
+On representing this distressing case to the Board, the Commissioners
+were pleased to grant an annuity of &pound;5 to Scott&rsquo;s mother.<br>
+<br>
+The <i>Smeaton</i>, not having been made fast to the buoy, had, with
+the ebb-tide, drifted to leeward a considerable way eastward of the
+rock, and could not, till the return of the flood-tide, be worked up
+to her moorings, so that the present tide was lost, notwithstanding
+all exertions which had been made both ashore and afloat with this cargo.&nbsp;
+The artificers landed at six a.m.; but, as no materials could be got
+upon the rock this morning, they were employed in boring trenail holes
+and in various other operations, and after four hours&rsquo; work they
+returned on board the tender.&nbsp; When the <i>Smeaton</i> got up to
+her moorings, the landing-master&rsquo;s crew immediately began to unload
+her.&nbsp; There being too much wind for towing the praams in the usual
+way, they were warped to the rock in the most laborious manner by their
+windlasses, with successive grapplings and hawsers laid out for this
+purpose.&nbsp; At six p.m. the artificers landed, and continued at work
+till half-past ten, when the remaining seventeen stones were laid which
+completed the third entire course, or fourth of the lighthouse, with
+which the building operations were closed for the season.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+III - OPERATIONS OF 1809<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+[Wednesday, 24th May]<br>
+<br>
+The last night was the first that the writer, had passed in his old
+quarters on board of the floating light for about twelve months, when
+the weather was so fine and the sea so smooth that even here he felt
+but little or no motion, excepting at the turn of the tide, when the
+vessel gets into what the seamen term the <i>trough</i> <i>of the sea</i>.&nbsp;
+At six a.m. Mr. Watt, who conducted the operations of the railways and
+beacon-house, had landed with nine artificers.&nbsp; At half-past one
+p.m. Mr. Peter Logan had also landed with fifteen masons, and immediately
+proceeded to set up the crane.&nbsp; The sheer-crane or apparatus for
+lifting the stones out of the praam-boats at the eastern creek had been
+already erected, and the railways now formed about two-thirds of an
+entire circle round the building: some progress had likewise been made
+with the reach towards the western landing-place.&nbsp; The floors being
+laid, the beacon now assumed the appearance of a habitation.&nbsp; The
+<i>Smeaton</i> was at her moorings, with the <i>Fernie</i> praam-boat
+astern, for which she was laying down moorings, and the tender being
+also at her station, the Bell Rock had again put on its former busy
+aspect.<br>
+<br>
+[Wednesday, 31st May]<br>
+<br>
+The landing-master&rsquo;s bell, often no very favourite sound, rung
+at six this morning; but on this occasion, it is believed, it was gladly
+received by all on board, as the welcome signal of the return of better
+weather.&nbsp; The masons laid thirteen stones to-day, which the seamen
+had landed, together with other building materials.&nbsp; During these
+twenty-four hours the wind was from the south, blowing fresh breezes,
+accompanied with showers of snow.&nbsp; In the morning the snow showers
+were so thick that it was with difficulty the landing-master, who always
+steered the leading boat, could make his way to the rock through the
+drift.&nbsp; But at the Bell Rock neither snow nor rain, nor fog nor
+wind, retarded the progress of the work, if unaccompanied by a heavy
+swell or breach of the sea.<br>
+<br>
+The weather during the months of April and May had been uncommonly boisterous,
+and so cold that the thermometer seldom exceeded 40&deg;, while the
+barometer was generally about 29.50.&nbsp; We had not only hail and
+sleet, but the snow on the last day of May lay on the decks and rigging
+of the ship to the depth of about three inches; and, although now entering
+upon the month of June, the length of the day was the chief indication
+of summer.&nbsp; Yet such is the effect of habit, and such was the expertness
+of the landing-master&rsquo;s crew, that, even in this description of
+weather, seldom a tide&rsquo;s work was lost.&nbsp; Such was the ardour
+and zeal of the heads of the several departments at the rock, including
+Mr. Peter Logan, foreman builder, Mr. Francis Watt, foreman millwright,
+and Captain Wilson, landing-master, that it was on no occasion necessary
+to address them, excepting in the way of precaution or restraint.&nbsp;
+Under these circumstances, however, the writer not unfrequently felt
+considerable anxiety, of which this day&rsquo;s experience will afford
+an example.<br>
+<br>
+[Thursday, 1st June]<br>
+<br>
+This morning, at a quarter-past eight, the artificers were landed as
+usual, and, after three hours and three-quarters&rsquo; work, five stones
+were laid, the greater part of this tide having been taken up in completing
+the boring and trenailing of the stones formerly laid.&nbsp; At noon
+the writer, with the seamen and artificers, proceeded to the tender,
+leaving on the beacon the joiners, and several of those who were troubled
+with sea-sickness - among whom was Mr. Logan, who remained with Mr.
+Watt - counting altogether eleven persons.&nbsp; During the first and
+middle parts of these twenty-four hours the wind was from the east,
+blowing what the seamen term &lsquo;fresh breezes&rsquo;; but in the
+afternoon it shifted to E.N.E., accompanied with so heavy a swell of
+sea that the <i>Smeaton</i> and tender struck their topmasts, launched
+in their bolt-sprits, and &lsquo;made all snug&rsquo; for a gale.&nbsp;
+At four p.m. the <i>Smeaton</i> was obliged to slip her moorings, and
+passed the tender, drifting before the wind, with only the foresail
+set.&nbsp; In passing, Mr. Pool hailed that he must run for the Firth
+of Forth to prevent the vessel from &lsquo;riding under.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+On board of the tender the writer&rsquo;s chief concern was about the
+eleven men left upon the beacon.&nbsp; Directions were accordingly given
+that everything about the vessel should be put in the best possible
+state, to present as little resistance to the wind as possible, that
+she might have the better chance of riding out the gale.&nbsp; Among
+these preparations the best bower cable was bent, so as to have a second
+anchor in readiness in case the mooring-hawser should give way, that
+every means might be used for keeping the vessel within sight of the
+prisoners on the beacon, and thereby keep them in as good spirits as
+possible.&nbsp; From the same motive the boats were kept afloat that
+they might be less in fear of the vessel leaving her station.&nbsp;
+The landing-master had, however, repeatedly expressed his anxiety for
+the safety of the boats, and wished much to have them hoisted on board.&nbsp;
+At seven p.m. one of the boats, as he feared, was unluckily filled with
+sea from a wave breaking into her, and it was with great difficulty
+that she could be baled out and got on board, with the loss of her oars,
+rudder, and loose thwarts.&nbsp; Such was the motion of the ship that
+in taking this boat on board her gunwale was stove in, and she otherwise
+received considerable damage.&nbsp; Night approached, but it was still
+found quite impossible to go near the rock.&nbsp; Consulting, therefore,
+the safety of the second boat, she also was hoisted on board of the
+tender.<br>
+<br>
+At this time the cabins of the beacon were only partially covered, and
+had neither been provided with bedding nor a proper fireplace, while
+the stock of provisions was but slender.&nbsp; In these uncomfortable
+circumstances the people on the beacon were left for the night, nor
+was the situation of those on board of the tender much better.&nbsp;
+The rolling and pitching motion of the ship was excessive; and, excepting
+to those who had been accustomed to a residence in the floating light,
+it seemed quite intolerable.&nbsp; Nothing was heard but the hissing
+of the winds and the creaking of the bulkheads or partitions of the
+ship; the night was, therefore, spent in the most unpleasant reflections
+upon the condition of the people on the beacon, especially in the prospect
+of the tender being driven from her moorings.&nbsp; But, even in such
+a case, it afforded some consolation that the stability of the fabric
+was never doubted, and that the boats of the floating light were at
+no great distance, and ready to render the people on the rock the earliest
+assistance which the weather would permit.&nbsp; The writer&rsquo;s
+cabin being in the sternmost part of the ship, which had what sailors
+term a good entry, or was sharp built, the sea, as before noticed, struck
+her counter with so much violence that the water, with a rushing noise,
+continually forced its way up the rudder-case, lifted the valve of the
+water-closet, and overran the cabin floor.&nbsp; In these circumstances
+daylight was eagerly looked for, and hailed with delight, as well by
+those afloat as by the artificers upon the rock.<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 2nd June]<br>
+<br>
+In the course of the night the writer held repeated conversations with
+the officer on watch, who reported that the weather continued much in
+the same state, and that the barometer still indicated 29.20 inches.&nbsp;
+At six a.m. the landing-master considered the weather to have somewhat
+moderated; and, from certain appearances of the sky, he was of opinion
+that a change for the better would soon take place.&nbsp; He accordingly
+proposed to attempt a landing at low-water, and either get the people
+off the rock, or at least ascertain what state they were in.&nbsp; At
+nine a.m. he left the vessel with a boat well manned, carrying with
+him a supply of cooked provisions and a tea-kettle full of mulled port
+wine for the people on the beacon, who had not had any regular diet
+for about thirty hours, while they were exposed during that period,
+in a great measure, both to the winds and the sprays of the sea.&nbsp;
+The boat having succeeded in landing, she returned at eleven a.m. with
+the artificers, who had got off with considerable difficulty, and who
+were heartily welcomed by all on board.<br>
+<br>
+Upon inquiry it appeared that three of the stones last laid upon the
+building had been partially lifted from their beds by the force of the
+sea, and were now held only by the trenails, and that the cast-iron
+sheer-crane had again been thrown down and completely broken.&nbsp;
+With regard to the beacon, the sea at high-water had lifted part of
+the mortar gallery or lowest floor, and washed away all the lime-casks
+and other movable articles from it; but the principal parts of this
+fabric had sustained no damage.&nbsp; On pressing Messrs. Logan and
+Watt on the situation of things in the course of the night, Mr. Logan
+emphatically said: &lsquo;That the beacon had an <i>ill-faured</i> <a name="citation171a"></a><a href="#footnote171a">{171a}</a>
+<i>twist</i> when the sea broke upon it at high-water, but that they
+were not very apprehensive of danger.&rsquo;&nbsp; On inquiring as to
+how they spent the night, it appeared that they had made shift to keep
+a small fire burning, and by means of some old sails defended themselves
+pretty well from the sea sprays.<br>
+<br>
+It was particularly mentioned that by the exertions of James Glen, one
+of the joiners, a number of articles were saved from being washed off
+the mortar gallery.&nbsp; Glen was also very useful in keeping up the
+spirits of the forlorn party.&nbsp; In the early part of life he had
+undergone many curious adventures at sea, which he now recounted somewhat
+after the manner of the tales of the <i>Arabian Nights</i>.&nbsp; When
+one observed that the beacon was a most comfortless lodging, Glen would
+presently introduce some of his exploits and hardships, in comparison
+with which the state of things at the beacon bore an aspect of comfort
+and happiness.&nbsp; Looking to their slender stock of provisions, and
+their perilous and uncertain chance of speedy relief, he would launch
+out into an account of one of his expeditions in the North Sea, when
+the vessel, being much disabled in a storm, was driven before the wind
+with the loss of almost all their provisions; and the ship being much
+infested with rats, the crew hunted these vermin with great eagerness
+to help their scanty allowance.&nbsp; By such means Glen had the address
+to make his companions, in some measure, satisfied, or at least passive,
+with regard to their miserable prospects upon this half-tide rock in
+the middle of the ocean.&nbsp; This incident is noticed, more particularly,
+to show the effects of such a happy turn of mind, even under the most
+distressing and ill-fated circumstances.<br>
+<br>
+[Saturday, 17th June]<br>
+<br>
+At eight a.m. the artificers and sailors, forty-five in number, landed
+on the rock, and after four hours&rsquo; work seven stones were laid.&nbsp;
+The remainder of this tide, from the threatening appearance of the weather,
+was occupied in trenailing and making all things as secure as possible.&nbsp;
+At twelve noon the rock and building were again overflowed, when the
+masons and seamen went on board of the tender, but Mr. Watt, with his
+squad of ten men, remained on the beacon throughout the day.&nbsp; As
+it blew fresh from the N.W. in the evening, it was found impracticable
+either to land the building artificers or to take the artificers off
+the beacon, and they were accordingly left there all night, but in circumstances
+very different from those of the 1st of this month.&nbsp; The house,
+being now in a more complete state, was provided with bedding, and they
+spent the night pretty well, though they complained of having been much
+disturbed at the time of high-water by the shaking and tremulous motion
+of their house and by the plashing noise of the sea upon mortar gallery.&nbsp;
+Here James Glen&rsquo;s versatile powers were again at work in cheering
+up those who seemed to be alarmed, and in securing everything as far
+as possible.&nbsp; On this occasion he had only to recall to the recollections
+of some of them the former night which they had spent on the beacon,
+the wind and sea being then much higher, and their habitation in a far
+less comfortable state.<br>
+<br>
+The wind still continuing to blow fresh from the N.W., at five p.m.
+the writer caused a signal to be made from the tender for the <i>Smeaton
+and Patriot</i> to slip their moorings, when they ran for Lunan Bay,
+an anchorage on the east side of the Redhead.&nbsp; Those on board of
+the tender spent but a very rough night, and perhaps slept less soundly
+than their companions on the beacon, especially as the wind was at N.W.,
+which caused the vessel to ride with her stern towards the Bell Rock;
+so that, in the event of anything giving way, she could hardly have
+escaped being stranded upon it.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 18th June]<br>
+<br>
+The weather having moderated to-day, the wind shifted to the westward.&nbsp;
+At a quarter-past nine a.m. the artificers landed from the tender and
+had the pleasure to find their friends who had been left on the rock
+quite hearty, alleging that the beacon was the preferable quarters of
+the two.<br>
+<br>
+[Saturday, 24th June]<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Peter Logan, the foreman builder, and his squad, twenty-one in number,
+landed this morning at three o&rsquo;clock, and continued at work four
+hours and a quarter, and after laying seventeen stones returned to the
+tender.&nbsp; At six a.m. Mr. Francis Watt and his squad of twelve men
+landed, and proceeded with their respective operations at the beacon
+and railways, and were left on the rock during the whole day without
+the necessity of having any communication with the tender, the kitchen
+of the beacon-house being now fitted up.&nbsp; It was to-day, also,
+that Peter Fortune - a most obliging and well-known character in the
+Lighthouse service - was removed from the tender to the beacon as cook
+and steward, with a stock of provisions as ample as his limited store-room
+would admit.<br>
+<br>
+When as many stones were built as comprised this day&rsquo;s work, the
+demand for mortar was proportionally increased, and the task of the
+mortar-makers on these occasions was both laborious and severe.&nbsp;
+This operation was chiefly performed by John Watt - a strong, active
+quarrier by profession, - who was a perfect character in his way, and
+extremely zealous in his department.&nbsp; While the operations of the
+mortar-makers continued, the forge upon the gallery was not generally
+in use; but, as the working hours of the builders extended with the
+height of the building, the forge could not be so long wanted, and then
+a sad confusion often ensued upon the circumscribed floor of the mortar
+gallery, as the operations of Watt and his assistants trenched greatly
+upon those of the smiths.&nbsp; Under these circumstances the boundary
+of the smiths was much circumscribed, and they were personally annoyed,
+especially in blowy weather, with the dust of the lime in its powdered
+state.&nbsp; The mortar-makers, on the other hand, were often not a
+little distressed with the heat of the fire and the sparks elicited
+on the anvil, and not unaptly complained that they were placed between
+the &lsquo;devil and the deep sea.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 25th June]<br>
+<br>
+The work being now about ten feet in height, admitted of a rope-ladder
+being distended <a name="citation174a"></a><a href="#footnote174a">{174a}</a>
+between the beacon and the building.&nbsp; By this &lsquo;Jacob&rsquo;s
+Ladder,&rsquo; as the seamen termed it, a communication was kept up
+with the beacon while the rock was considerably under water.&nbsp; One
+end of it being furnished with tackle-blocks, was fixed to the beams
+of the beacon, at the level of the mortar gallery, while the further
+end was connected with the upper course of the building by means of
+two Lewis bats which were lifted from course to course as the work advanced.&nbsp;
+In the same manner a rope furnished with a travelling pulley was distended
+for the purpose of transporting the mortar-buckets, and other light
+articles between the beacon and the building, which also proved a great
+conveniency to the work.&nbsp; At this period the rope-ladder and tackle
+for the mortar had a descent from the beacon to the building; by and
+by they were on a level, and towards the end of the season, when the
+solid part had attained its full height, the ascent was from the mortar
+gallery to the building.<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 30th June]<br>
+<br>
+The artificers landed on the rock this morning at a quarter-past six,
+and remained at work five hours.&nbsp; The cooking apparatus being now
+in full operation, all hands had breakfast on the beacon at the usual
+hour, and remained there throughout the day.&nbsp; The crane upon the
+building had to be raised to-day from the eighth to the ninth course,
+an operation which now required all the strength that could be mustered
+for working the guy-tackles; for as the top of the crane was at this
+time about thirty-five feet above the rock, it became much more unmanageable.&nbsp;
+While the beam was in the act of swinging round from one guy to another,
+a great strain was suddenly brought upon the opposite tackle, with the
+end of which the artificers had very improperly neglected to take a
+turn round some stationary object, which would have given them the complete
+command of the tackle.&nbsp; Owing to this simple omission, the crane
+got a preponderancy to one side, and fell upon the building with a terrible
+crash.&nbsp; The surrounding artificers immediately flew in every direction
+to get out of its way; but Michael Wishart, the principal builder, having
+unluckily stumbled upon one of the uncut trenails, fell upon his back.&nbsp;
+His body fortunately got between the movable beam and the upright shaft
+of the crane, and was thus saved; but his feet got entangled with the
+wheels of the crane and were severely injured.&nbsp; Wishart, being
+a robust young man, endured his misfortune with wonderful firmness;
+he was laid upon one of the narrow framed beds of the beacon and despatched
+in a boat to the tender, where the writer was when this accident happened,
+not a little alarmed on missing the crane from the top of the building,
+and at the same time seeing a boat rowing towards the vessel with great
+speed.&nbsp; When the boat came alongside with poor Wishart, stretched
+upon a bed covered with blankets, a moment of great anxiety followed,
+which was, however, much relieved when, on stepping into the boat, he
+was accosted by Wishart, though in a feeble voice, and with an aspect
+pale as death from excessive bleeding.&nbsp; Directions having been
+immediately given to the coxswain to apply to Mr. Kennedy at the workyard
+to procure the best surgical aid, the boat was sent off without delay
+to Arbroath.&nbsp; The writer then landed at the rock, when the crane
+was in a very short time got into its place and again put in a working
+state.<br>
+<br>
+[Monday, 3rd July]<br>
+<br>
+The writer having come to Arbroath with the yacht, had an opportunity
+of visiting Michael Wishart, the artificer who had met with so severe
+an accident at the rock on the 30th ult., and had the pleasure to find
+him in a state of recovery.&nbsp; From Dr. Stevenson&rsquo;s account,
+under whose charge he had been placed, hopes were entertained that amputation
+would not be necessary, as his patient still kept free of fever or any
+appearance of mortification; and Wishart expressed a hope that he might,
+at least, be ultimately capable of keeping the light at the Bell Rock,
+as it was not now likely that he would assist further in building the
+house.<br>
+<br>
+[Saturday, 8th July]<br>
+<br>
+It was remarked to-day, with no small demonstration of joy, that the
+tide, being neap, did not, for the first time, overflow the building
+at high-water.&nbsp; Flags were accordingly hoisted on the beacon-house,
+and crane on the top of the building, which were repeated from the floating
+light, Lighthouse yacht, tender, <i>Smeaton, Patriot</i>, and the two
+praams.&nbsp; A salute of three guns was also fired from the yacht at
+high-water, when, all the artificers being collected on the top of the
+building, three cheers were given in testimony of this important circumstance.&nbsp;
+A glass of rum was then served out to all hands on the rock and on board
+of the respective ships.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 16th July]<br>
+<br>
+Besides laying, boring, trenailing, wedging, and grouting thirty-two
+stones, several other operations were proceeded with on the rock at
+low-water, when some of the artificers were employed at the railways,
+and at high-water at the beacon-house.&nbsp; The seamen having prepared
+a quantity of tarpaulin, or cloth laid over with successive coats of
+hot tar, the joiners had just completed the covering of the roof with
+it.&nbsp; This sort of covering was lighter and more easily managed
+than sheet-lead in such a situation.&nbsp; As a further defence against
+the weather the whole exterior of this temporary residence was painted
+with three coats of white-lead paint.&nbsp; Between the timber framing
+of the habitable part of the beacon the interstices were to be stuffed
+with moss, as a light substance that would resist dampness and check
+sifting winds; the whole interior was then to be lined with green baize
+cloth, so that both without and within the cabins were to have a very
+comfortable appearance.<br>
+<br>
+Although the building artificers generally remained on the rock throughout
+the day, and the millwrights, joiners, and smiths, while their number
+was considerable, remained also during the night, yet the tender had
+hitherto been considered as their night quarters.&nbsp; But the wind
+having in the course of the day shifted to the N.W., and as the passage
+to the tender, in the boats, was likely to be attended with difficulty,
+the whole of the artificers, with Mr. Logan, the foreman, preferred
+remaining all night on the beacon, which had of late become the solitary
+abode of George-Forsyth, a jobbing upholsterer, who had been employed
+in lining the beacon-house with cloth and in fitting up the bedding.&nbsp;
+Forsyth was a tall, thin, and rather loose-made man, who had an utter
+aversion at climbing upon the trap-ladders of the beacon, but especially
+at the process of boating, and the motion of the ship, which he said
+&lsquo;was death itself.&rsquo;&nbsp; He therefore pertinaciously insisted
+with the landing-master in being left upon the beacon, with a small
+black dog as his only companion.&nbsp; The writer, however, felt some
+delicacy in leaving a single individual upon the rock, who must have
+been so very helpless in case of accident.&nbsp; This fabric had, from
+the beginning, been rather intended by the writer to guard against accident
+from the loss or damage of a boat, and as a place for making mortar,
+a smith&rsquo;s shop, and a store for tools during the working months,
+than as permanent quarters; nor was it at all meant to be possessed
+until tile joiner-work was completely finished, and his own cabin, and
+that for the foreman, in readiness, when it was still to be left to
+the choice of the artificers to occupy the tender or the beacon.&nbsp;
+He, however, considered Forsyth&rsquo;s partiality and confidence in
+the latter as rather a fortunate occurrence.<br>
+<br>
+[Wednesday, 19th July]<br>
+<br>
+The whole of the artificers, twenty-three in number, now removed of
+their own accord from the tender, to lodge in the beacon, together with
+Peter Fortune, a person singularly adapted for a residence of this kind,
+both from the urbanity of his manners and the versatility of his talents.&nbsp;
+Fortune, in his person, was of small stature, and rather corpulent.&nbsp;
+Besides being a good Scots cook, he had acted both as groom and house-servant;
+he had been a soldier, a sutler, a writer&rsquo;s clerk, and an apothecary,
+from which he possessed the art of writing and suggesting recipes, and
+had hence, also, perhaps, acquired a turn for making collections in
+natural history.&nbsp; But in his practice in surgery on the Bell Rock,
+for which he received an annual fee of three guineas, he is supposed
+to have been rather partial to the use of the lancet.&nbsp; In short,
+Peter was the <i>factotum</i> of the beacon-house, where he ostensibly
+acted in the several capacities of cook, steward, surgeon, and barber,
+and kept a statement of the rations or expenditure of the provisions
+with the strictest integrity.<br>
+<br>
+In the present important state of the building, when it had just attained
+the height of sixteen feet, and the upper courses, and especially the
+imperfect one, were in the wash of the heaviest seas, an express boat
+arrived at the rock with a letter from Mr. Kennedy, of the workyard,
+stating that in consequence of the intended expedition to Walcheren,
+an embargo had been laid on shipping at all the ports of Great Britain:
+that both the <i>Smeaton</i> and <i>Patriot</i> were detained at Arbroath,
+and that but for the proper view which Mr. Ramsey, the port officer,
+had taken of his orders, neither the express boat nor one which had
+been sent with provisions and necessaries for the floating light would
+have been permitted to leave the harbour.&nbsp; The writer set off without
+delay for Arbroath, and on landing used every possible means with the
+official people, but their orders were deemed so peremptory that even
+boats were not permitted to sail from any port upon the coast.&nbsp;
+In the meantime, the collector of the Customs at Montrose applied to
+the Board at Edinburgh, but could, of himself, grant no relief to the
+Bell Rock shipping.<br>
+<br>
+At this critical period Mr. Adam Duff, then Sheriff of Forfarshire,
+now of the county of Edinburgh, and <i>ex officio</i> one of the Commissioners
+of the Northern Lighthouses, happened to be at Arbroath.&nbsp; Mr. Duff
+took an immediate interest in representing the circumstances of the
+case to the Board of Customs at Edinburgh.&nbsp; But such were the doubts
+entertained on the subject that, on having previously received the appeal
+from the collector at Montrose, the case had been submitted to the consideration
+of the Lords of the Treasury, whose decision was now waited for.<br>
+<br>
+In this state of things the writer felt particularly desirous to get
+the thirteenth course finished, that the building might be in a more
+secure state in the event of bad weather.&nbsp; An opportunity was therefore
+embraced on the 25th, in sailing with provisions for the floating light,
+to carry the necessary stones to the rock for this purpose, which were
+landed and built on the 26th and 27th.&nbsp; But so closely was the
+watch kept up that a Custom-house officer was always placed on board
+of the <i>Smeaton</i> and <i>Patriot</i> while they were afloat, till
+the embargo was especially removed from the lighthouse vessels.&nbsp;
+The artificers at the Bell Rock had been reduced to fifteen, who were
+regularly supplied with provisions, along with the crew of the floating
+light, mainly through the port officer&rsquo;s liberal interpretation
+of his orders.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 1st Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+There being a considerable swell and breach of sea upon the rock yesterday,
+the stones could not be got landed till the day following, when the
+wind shifted to the southward and the weather improved.&nbsp; But to-day
+no less than seventy-eight blocks of stone were landed, of which forty
+were built, which completed the fourteenth and part of the fifteenth
+courses.&nbsp; The number of workmen now resident in the beacon-house
+was augmented to twenty-four, including the landing-master&rsquo;s crew
+from the tender and the boat&rsquo;s crew from the floating light, who
+assisted at landing the stones.&nbsp; Those daily at work upon the rock
+at this period amounted to forty-six.&nbsp; A cabin had been laid out
+for the writer on the beacon, but his apartment had been the last which
+was finished, and he had not yet taken possession of it; for though
+he generally spent the greater part of the day, at this time, upon the
+rock, yet he always slept on board of the tender.<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 11th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+The wind was at S. E. on the 11th, and there was so very heavy a swell
+of sea upon the rock that no boat could approach it.<br>
+<br>
+[Saturday, 12th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+The gale still continuing from the S.E., the sea broke with great violence
+both upon the building and the beacon.&nbsp; The former being twenty-three
+feet in height, the upper part of the crane erected on it having been
+lifted from course to course as the building advanced, was now about
+thirty-six feet above the rock.&nbsp; From observations made on the
+rise of the sea by this crane, the artificers were enabled to estimate
+its height to be about fifty feet above the rock, while the sprays fell
+with a most alarming noise upon their cabins.&nbsp; At low-water, in
+the evening, a signal was made from the beacon, at the earnest desire
+of some of the artificers, for the boats to come to the rock; and although
+this could not be effected without considerable hazard, it was, however,
+accomplished, when twelve of their number, being much afraid, applied
+to the foreman to be relieved, and went on board of the tender.&nbsp;
+But the remaining fourteen continued on the rock, with Mr. Peter Logan,
+the foreman builder.&nbsp; Although this rule of allowing an option
+to every man either to remain on the rock or return to the tender was
+strictly adhered to, yet, as it would have been extremely inconvenient
+to have the men parcelled out in this manner, it became necessary to
+embrace the first opportunity of sending those who had left the beacon
+to the workyard, with as little appearance of intention as possible,
+lest it should hurt their feelings, or prevent others from acting according
+to their wishes, either in landing on the rock or remaining on the beacon.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 15th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+The wind had fortunately shifted to the S.W. this morning, and though
+a considerable breach was still upon the rock, yet the landing-master&rsquo;s
+crew were enabled to get one praam-boat, lightly loaded with five stones,
+brought in safety to the western creek; these stones were immediately
+laid by the artificers, who gladly embraced the return of good weather
+to proceed with their operations.&nbsp; The writer had this day taken
+possession of his cabin in the beacon-house.&nbsp; It was small, but
+commodious, and was found particularly convenient in coarse and blowing
+weather, instead of being obliged to make a passage to the tender in
+an open boat at all times, both during the day and the night, which
+was often attended with much difficulty and danger.<br>
+<br>
+[Saturday, 19th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+For some days past the weather had been occasionally so thick and foggy
+that no small difficulty was experienced in going even between the rock
+and the tender, though quite at hand.&nbsp; But the floating light&rsquo;s
+boat lost her way so far in returning on board that the first land she
+made, after rowing all night, was Fifeness, a distance of about fourteen
+miles.&nbsp; The weather having cleared in the morning, the crew stood
+off again for the floating light, and got on board in a half-famished
+and much exhausted state, having been constantly rowing for about sixteen
+hours.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 20th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+The weather being very favourable to-day, fifty-three stones were landed,
+and the builders were not a little gratified in having built the twenty-second
+course, consisting of fifty-one stones, being the first course which
+had been completed in one day.&nbsp; This, as a matter of course, produced
+three hearty cheers.&nbsp; At twelve noon prayers were read for the
+first time on the Bell Rock; those present, counting thirty, were crowded
+into the upper apartment of the beacon, where the writer took a central
+position, while two of the artificers, joining hands, supported the
+Bible.<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 25th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+To-day the artificers laid forty-five stones, which completed the twenty-fourth
+course, reckoning above the first entire one, and the twenty-sixth above
+the rock.&nbsp; This finished the solid part of the building, and terminated
+the height of the outward casing of granite, which is thirty-one feet
+six inches above the rock or site of the foundation-stone, and about
+seventeen feet above high-water of spring-tides.&nbsp; Being a particular
+crisis in the progress of the lighthouse, the landing and laying of
+the last stone for the season was observed with the usual ceremonies.<br>
+<br>
+From observations often made by the writer, in so far as such can be
+ascertained, it appears that no wave in the open seas, in an unbroken
+state, rises more than from seven to nine feet above the general surface
+of the ocean.&nbsp; The Bell Rock Lighthouse may therefore now be considered
+at from eight to ten feet above the height of the waves; and, although
+the sprays and heavy seas have often been observed, in the present state
+of the building, to rise to the height of fifty feet, and fall with
+a tremendous noise on the beacon-house, yet such seas were not likely
+to make any impression on a mass of solid masonry, containing about
+1400 tons,<br>
+<br>
+[Wednesday, 30th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+The whole of the artificers left the rock at mid-day, when the tender
+made sail for Arbroath, which she reached about six p.m.&nbsp; The vessel
+being decorated with colours, and having fired a salute of three guns
+on approaching the harbour, the workyard artificers, with a multitude
+of people, assembled at the harbour, when mutual cheering and congratulations
+took place between those afloat and those on the quays.&nbsp; The tender
+had now, with little exception, been six months on the station at the
+Bell Rock, and during the last four months few of the squad of builders
+had been ashore.&nbsp; In particular, Mr. Peter Logan, the foreman,
+and Mr. Robert Selkirk, principal builder, had never once left the rock.&nbsp;
+The artificers, having made good wages during their stay, like seamen
+upon a return voyage, were extremely happy, and spent the evening with
+much innocent mirth and jollity.<br>
+<br>
+In reflecting upon the state of the matters at the Bell Rock during
+the working months, when the writer was much with the artificers, nothing
+can equal the happy manner in which these excellent workmen spent their
+time.&nbsp; They always went from Arbroath to their arduous task cheering
+and they generally returned in the same hearty state.&nbsp; While at
+the rock, between the tides, they amused themselves in reading, fishing,
+music, playing cards, draughts, etc., or in sporting with one another.&nbsp;
+In the workyard at Arbroath the young men were almost, without exception,
+employed in the evening at school, in writing and arithmetic, and not
+a few were learning architectural drawing, for which they had every
+convenience and facility, and were, in a very obliging manner, assisted
+in their studies by Mr. David Logan, clerk of the works.&nbsp; It therefore
+affords the most pleasing reflections to look back upon the pursuits
+of about sixty individuals who for years conducted themselves, on all
+occasions, in a sober and rational manner.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+IV - OPERATIONS OF 1810<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+[Thursday, 10th May]<br>
+<br>
+The wind had shifted to-day to W.N.W., when the writer, with considerable
+difficulty, was enabled to land upon the rock for the first time this
+season, at ten a.m.&nbsp; Upon examining the state of the building,
+and apparatus in general, he had the satisfaction to find everything
+in good order.&nbsp; The mortar in all the joints was perfectly entire.&nbsp;
+The building, now thirty feet in height, was thickly coated with <i>fuci</i>
+to the height of about fifteen feet, calculating from the rock: on the
+eastern side, indeed, the growth of seaweed was observable to the full
+height of thirty feet, and even on the top or upper bed of the last-laid
+course, especially towards the eastern side, it had germinated, so as
+to render walking upon it somewhat difficult.<br>
+<br>
+The beacon-house was in a perfectly sound state, and apparently just
+as it had been left in the month of November.&nbsp; But the tides being
+neap, the lower parts, particularly where the beams rested on the rock,
+could not now be seen.&nbsp; The floor of the mortar gallery having
+been already laid down by Mr. Watt and his men on a former visit, was
+merely soaked with the sprays; but the joisting-beams which supported
+it had, in the course of the winter, been covered with a fine downy
+conferva produced by the range of the sea.&nbsp; They were also a good
+deal whitened with the mute of the cormorant and other sea-fowls, which
+had roosted upon the beacon in winter.&nbsp; Upon ascending to the apartments,
+it was found that the motion of the sea had thrown open the door of
+the cook-house: this was only shut with a single latch, that in case
+of shipwreck at the Bell Rock the mariner might find ready access to
+the shelter of this forlorn habitation, where a supply of provisions
+was kept; and being within two miles and a half of the floating light,
+a signal could readily be observed, when a boat might be sent to his
+relief as the weather permitted.&nbsp; An arrangement for this purpose
+formed one of the instructions on board of the floating light, but happily
+no instance occurred for putting it in practice.&nbsp; The hearth or
+fireplace of the cook-house was built of brick in as secure a manner
+as possible, to prevent accident from fire; but some of the plaster-work
+had shaken loose, from its damp state and the tremulous motion of the
+beacon in stormy weather.&nbsp; The writer next ascended to the floor
+which was occupied by the cabins of himself and his assistants, which
+were in tolerably good order, having only a damp and musty smell.&nbsp;
+The barrack for the artificers, over all, was next visited; it had now
+a very dreary and deserted appearance when its former thronged state
+was recollected.&nbsp; In some parts the water had come through the
+boarding, and had discoloured the lining of green cloth, but it was,
+nevertheless, in a good habitable condition.&nbsp; While the seamen
+were employed in landing a stock of provisions, a few of the artificers
+set to work with great eagerness to sweep and clean the several apartments.&nbsp;
+The exterior of the beacon was, in the meantime, examined, and found
+in perfect order.&nbsp; The painting, though it had a somewhat blanched
+appearance, adhered firmly both on the sides and roof, and only two
+or three panes of glass were broken in the cupola, which had either
+been blown out by the force of the wind, or perhaps broken by sea-fowl.<br>
+<br>
+Having on this occasion continued upon the building and beacon a considerable
+time after the tide had begun to flow, the artificers were occupied
+in removing the forge from the top of the building, to which the gangway
+or wooden bridge gave great facility; and, although it stretched or
+had a span of forty-two feet, its construction was extremely simple,
+while the road-way was perfectly firm and steady.&nbsp; In returning
+from this visit to the rock every one was pretty well soused in spray
+before reaching the tender at two o&rsquo;clock p.m., where things awaited
+the landing party in as comfortable a way as such a situation would
+admit.<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 11th May]<br>
+<br>
+The wind was still easterly, accompanied with rather a heavy swell of
+sea for the operations in hand.&nbsp; A landing was, however, made this
+morning, when the artificers were immediately employed in scraping the
+seaweed off the upper course of the building, in order to apply the
+moulds of the first course of the staircase, that the joggle-holes might
+be marked off in the upper course of the solid.&nbsp; This was also
+necessary previously to the writer&rsquo;s fixing the position of the
+entrance door, which was regulated chiefly by the appearance of the
+growth of the seaweed on the building, indicating the direction of the
+heaviest seas, on the opposite side of which the door was placed.&nbsp;
+The landing-master&rsquo;s crew succeeded in towing into the creek on
+the western side of the rock the praam-boat with the balance-crane,
+which had now been on board of the praam for five days.&nbsp; The several
+pieces of this machine, having been conveyed along the railways upon
+the waggons to a position immediately under the bridge, were elevated
+to its level, or thirty feet above the rock, in the following manner.&nbsp;
+A chain-tackle was suspended over a pulley from the cross-beam connecting
+the tops of the kingposts of the bridge, which was worked by a winch-machine
+with wheel, pinion, and barrel, round which last the chain was wound.&nbsp;
+This apparatus was placed on the beacon side of the bridge, at the distance
+of about twelve feet from the cross-beam and pulley in the middle of
+the bridge.&nbsp; Immediately under the cross-beam a hatch was formed
+in the roadway of the bridge, measuring seven feet in length and five
+feet in breadth, made to shut with folding boards like a double door,
+through which stones and other articles were raised; the folding doors
+were then let down, and the stone or load was gently lowered upon a
+waggon which was wheeled on railway trucks towards the lighthouse.&nbsp;
+In this manner the several castings of the balance-crane were got up
+to the top of the solid of the building.<br>
+<br>
+The several apartments of the beacon-house having been cleaned out and
+supplied with bedding, a sufficient stock of provisions was put into
+the store, when Peter Fortune, formerly noticed, lighted his fire in
+the beacon for the first time this season.&nbsp; Sixteen artificers
+at the same time mounted to their barrack-room, and all the foremen
+of the works also took possession of their cabin, all heartily rejoiced
+at getting rid of the trouble of boating and the sickly motion of the
+tender.<br>
+<br>
+[Saturday, 12th May]<br>
+<br>
+The wind was at E.N.E., blowing so fresh, and accompanied with so much
+sea, that no stones could be landed to-day.&nbsp; The people on the
+rock, however, were busily employed in screwing together the balance-crane,
+cutting out the joggle-holes in the upper course, and preparing all
+things for commencing the building operations.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 13th May]<br>
+<br>
+The weather still continues boisterous, although the barometer has all
+the while stood at about 30 inches.&nbsp; Towards evening the wind blew
+so fresh at E. by S. that the boats both of the <i>Smeaton</i> and tender
+were obliged to be hoisted in, and it was feared that the <i>Smeaton</i>
+would have to slip her moorings.&nbsp; The people on the rock were seen
+busily employed, and had the balance-crane apparently ready for use,
+but no communication could be had with them to-day.<br>
+<br>
+[Monday, 14th May]<br>
+<br>
+The wind continued to blow so fresh, and the <i>Smeaton</i> rode so
+heavily with her cargo, that at noon a signal was made for her getting
+under weigh, when she stood towards Arbroath; and on board of the tender
+we are still without any communication with the people on the rock,
+where the sea was seen breaking over the top of the building in great
+sprays, and raging with much agitation among the beams of the beacon.<br>
+<br>
+[Thursday, 17th May]<br>
+<br>
+The wind, in the course of the day, had shifted from north to west;
+the sea being also considerably less, a boat landed on the rock at six
+p.m., for the first time since the 11th, with the provisions and water
+brought off by the <i>Patriot</i>.&nbsp; The inhabitants of the beacon
+were all well, but tired above measure for want of employment, as the
+balance-crane and apparatus was all in readiness.&nbsp; Under these
+circumstances they felt no less desirous of the return of good weather
+than those afloat, who were continually tossed with the agitation of
+the sea.&nbsp; The writer, in particular, felt himself almost as much
+fatigued and worn-out as he had been at any period since the commencement
+of the work.&nbsp; The very backward state of the weather at so advanced
+a period of the season unavoidably created some alarm, lest he should
+be overtaken with bad weather at a late period of the season, with the
+building operations in an unfinished state.&nbsp; These apprehensions
+were, no doubt, rather increased by the inconveniences of his situation
+afloat, as the tender rolled and pitched excessively at times.&nbsp;
+This being also his first off-set for the season, every bone of his
+body felt sore with preserving a sitting posture while he endeavoured
+to pass away the time in reading; as for writing, it was wholly impracticable.&nbsp;
+He had several times entertained thoughts of leaving the station for
+a few days and going into Arbroath with the tender till the weather
+should improve; but as the artificers had been landed on the rock he
+was averse to this at the commencement of the season, knowing also that
+he would be equally uneasy in every situation till the first cargo was
+landed: and he therefore resolved to continue at his post until this
+should be effected.<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 18th May]<br>
+<br>
+The wind being now N.W., the sea was considerably run down, and this
+morning at five o&rsquo;clock the landing-master&rsquo;s crew, thirteen
+in number, left the tender; and having now no detention with the landing
+of artificers, they proceeded to unmoor the <i>Hedderwick</i> praam-boat,
+and towed her alongside of the <i>Smeaton</i>: and in the course of
+the day twenty-three blocks of stone, three casks of pozzolano, three
+of sand, three of lime, and one of Roman cement, together with three
+bundles of trenails and three of wedges, were all landed on the rock
+and raised the top of the building by means of the tackle suspended
+from the cross-beam on the middle of the bridge.&nbsp; The stones were
+then moved along the bridge on the waggon to the building within reach
+of the balance-crane, with which they were laid in their respective
+places on the building.&nbsp; The masons immediately thereafter proceeded
+to bore the trenail-holes into the course below, and otherwise to complete
+the one in hand.&nbsp; When the first stone was to be suspended by the
+balance-crane, the bell on the beacon was rung, and all the artificers
+and seamen were collected on the building.&nbsp; Three hearty cheers
+were given while it was lowered into its place, and the steward served
+round a glass of rum, when success was drunk to the further progress
+of the building.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 20th May]<br>
+<br>
+The wind was southerly to-day, but there was much less sea than yesterday,
+and the landing-master&rsquo;s crew were enabled to discharge and land
+twenty-three pieces of stone and other articles for the work.&nbsp;
+The artificers had completed the laying of the twenty-seventh or first
+course of the staircase this morning, and in the evening they finished
+the boring, trenailing, wedging, and grouting it with mortar.&nbsp;
+At twelve o&rsquo;clock noon the beacon-house bell was rung, and all
+hands were collected on the top of the building, where prayers were
+read for the first time on the lighthouse, which forcibly struck every
+one, and had, upon the whole, a very impressive effect.<br>
+<br>
+From the hazardous situation of the beacon-house with regard to fire,
+being composed wholly of timber, there was no small risk from accident:
+and on this account one of the most steady of the artificers was appointed
+to see that the fire of the cooking-house, and the lights in general,
+were carefully extinguished at stated hours.<br>
+<br>
+[Monday, 4th June]<br>
+<br>
+This being the birthday of our much-revered Sovereign King George III,
+now in the fiftieth year of his reign, the shipping of the Lighthouse
+service were this morning decorated with colours according to the taste
+of their respective captains.&nbsp; Flags were also hoisted upon the
+beacon-house and balance-crane on the top of the building.&nbsp; At
+twelve noon a salute was fired from the tender, when the King&rsquo;s
+health was drunk, with all the honours, both on the rock and on board
+of the shipping.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 5th June]<br>
+<br>
+As the lighthouse advanced in height, the cubical contents of the stones
+were less, but they had to be raised to a greater height; and the walls,
+being thinner, were less commodious for the necessary machinery and
+the artificers employed, which considerably retarded the work.&nbsp;
+Inconvenience was also occasionally experienced from the men dropping
+their coats, hats, mallets, and other tools, at high-water, which were
+carried away by the tide; and the danger to the people themselves was
+now greatly increased.&nbsp; Had any of them fallen from the beacon
+or building at high-water, while the landing-master&rsquo;s crew were
+generally engaged with the craft at a distance, it must have rendered
+the accident doubly painful to those on the rock, who at this time had
+no boat, and consequently no means of rendering immediate and prompt
+assistance.&nbsp; In such cases it would have been too late to have
+got a boat by signal from the tender.&nbsp; A small boat, which could
+be lowered at pleasure, was therefore suspended by a pair of davits
+projected from the cook-house, the keel being about thirty feet from
+the rock.&nbsp; This boat, with its tackle was put under the charge
+of James Glen, of whose exertions on the beacon mention has already
+been made, and who, having in early life been a seaman, was also very
+expert in the management of a boat.&nbsp; A life-buoy was likewise suspended
+from the bridge, to which a coil of line two hundred fathoms in length
+was attached, which could be let out to a person falling into the water,
+or to the people in the boat, should they not be able to work her with
+the oars.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 7th June]<br>
+<br>
+To-day twelve stones were landed on the rock, being the remainder of
+the <i>Patriot&rsquo;s</i> cargo; and the artificers built the thirty-ninth
+course, consisting of fourteen stones.&nbsp; The Bell Rock works had
+now a very busy appearance, as the lighthouse was daily getting more
+into form.&nbsp; Besides the artificers and their cook, the writer and
+his servant were also lodged on the beacon, counting in all twenty-nine;
+and at low-water the landing-master&rsquo;s crew, consisting of from
+twelve to fifteen seamen, were employed in transporting the building
+materials, working the landing apparatus on the rock, and dragging the
+stone waggons along the railways.<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 8th June]<br>
+<br>
+In the course of this day the weather varied much.&nbsp; In the morning
+it was calm, in the middle part of the day there were light airs of
+wind from the south, and in the evening fresh breezes from the east.&nbsp;
+The barometer in the writer&rsquo;s cabin in the beacon-house oscillated
+from 30 inches to 30.42, and the weather was extremely pleasant.&nbsp;
+This, in any situation, forms one of the chief comforts of life; but,
+as may easily be conceived, it was doubly so to people stuck, as it
+were, upon a pinnacle in the middle of the ocean.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 10th June]<br>
+<br>
+One of the praam-boats had been brought to the rock with eleven stones,
+notwithstanding the perplexity which attended the getting of those formerly
+landed taken up to the building.&nbsp; Mr. Peter Logan, the foreman
+builder, interposed, and prevented this cargo from being delivered;
+but the landing-master&rsquo;s crew were exceedingly averse to this
+arrangement, from an idea that &ldquo;ill luck&rdquo; would in future
+attend the praam, her cargo, and those who navigated her, from thus
+reversing her voyage.&nbsp; It may be noticed that this was the first
+instance of a praam-boat having been sent from the Bell Rock with any
+part of her cargo on board, and was considered so uncommon an occurrence
+that it became a topic of conversation among the seamen and artificers.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 12th June]<br>
+<br>
+To-day the stones formerly sent from the rock were safely landed, notwithstanding
+the augury of the seamen in consequence of their being sent away two
+days before.<br>
+<br>
+[Thursday, 14th June]<br>
+<br>
+To-day twenty-seven stones and eleven joggle-pieces were landed, part
+of which consisted of the forty-seventh course, forming the storeroom
+floor.&nbsp; The builders were at work this morning by four o&rsquo;clock,
+in the hopes of being able to accomplish the laying of the eighteen
+stones of this course.&nbsp; But at eight o&rsquo;clock in the evening
+they had still two to lay, and as the stones of this course were very
+unwieldy, being six feet in length, they required much precaution and
+care both in lifting and laying them.&nbsp; It was only on the writer&rsquo;s
+suggestion to Mr. Logan that the artificers were induced to leave off,
+as they had intended to complete this floor before going to bed.&nbsp;
+The two remaining stones were, however, laid in their places without
+mortar when the bell on the beacon was rung, and, all hands being collected
+on the top of the building, three hearty cheers were given on covering
+the first apartment.&nbsp; The steward then served out a dram to each,
+when the whole retired to their barrack much fatigued, but with the
+anticipation of the most perfect repose even in the &ldquo;hurricane-house,&rdquo;
+amidst the dashing seas on the Bell Rock.<br>
+<br>
+While the workmen were at breakfast and dinner it was the writer&rsquo;s
+usual practice to spend his time on the walls of the building, which,
+notwithstanding the narrowness of the track, nevertheless formed his
+principal walk when the rock was under water.&nbsp; But this afternoon
+he had his writing-desk set upon the storeroom floor, when he wrote
+to Mrs. Stevenson - certainly the first letter dated from the Bell Rock
+<i>Lighthouse</i> - giving a detail of the fortunate progress of the
+work with an assurance that the lighthouse would soon be completed at
+the rate at which it now proceeded; and, the <i>Patriot</i> having sailed
+for Arbroath in the evening, he felt no small degree of pleasure in
+despatching this communication to his family.<br>
+<br>
+The weather still continuing favourable for the operations at the rock,
+the work proceeded with much energy, through the exertions both of the
+seamen and artificers.&nbsp; For the more speedy and effectual working
+of the several tackles in raising the materials as the building advanced
+in height, and there being a great extent of railway to attend to, which
+required constant repairs, two additional millwrights were added to
+the complement on the rock, which, including the writer, now counted
+thirty-one in all.&nbsp; So crowded was the men&rsquo;s barrack that
+the beds were ranged five tier in height, allowing only about one foot
+eight inches for each bed.&nbsp; The artificers commenced this morning
+at five o&rsquo;clock, and, in the course of the day, they laid the
+forty-eighth and forty-ninth courses, consisting each of sixteen blocks.&nbsp;
+From the favourable state of the weather, and the regular manner in
+which the work now proceeded, the artificers had generally from four
+to seven extra hours&rsquo; work, which, including their stated wages
+of 3s. 4d., yielded them from 5s. 4d. to about 6s. 10d. per day besides
+their board; even the postage of their letters was paid while they were
+at the Bell Rock.&nbsp; In these advantages the foremen also shared,
+having about double the pay and amount of premiums of the artificers.&nbsp;
+The seamen being less out of their element in the Bell Rock operations
+than the landsmen, their premiums consisted in a slump sum payable at
+the end of the season, which extended from three to ten guineas.<br>
+<br>
+As the laying of the floors was somewhat tedious, the landing-master
+and his crew had got considerably beforehand with the building artificers
+in bringing materials faster to the rock than they could be built.&nbsp;
+The seamen having, therefore, some spare time, were occasionally employed
+during fine weather in dredging or grappling for the several mushroom
+anchors and mooring-chains which had been lost in the vicinity of the
+Bell Rock during the progress of the work by the breaking loose and
+drifting of the floating buoys.&nbsp; To encourage their exertions in
+this search, five guineas were offered as a premium for each set they
+should find; and, after much patient application, they succeeded to-day
+in hooking one of these lost anchors with its chain.<br>
+<br>
+It was a general remark at the Bell Rock, as before noticed, that fish
+were never plenty in its neighbourhood excepting in good weather.&nbsp;
+Indeed, the seamen used to speculate about the state of the weather
+from their success in fishing.&nbsp; When the fish disappeared at the
+rock, it was considered a sure indication that a gale was not far off,
+as the fish seemed to seek shelter in deeper water from the roughness
+of the sea during these changes in the weather.&nbsp; At this time the
+rock, at high-water, was completely covered with podlies, or the fry
+of the coal-fish, about six or eight inches in length.&nbsp; The artificers
+sometimes occupied half an hour after breakfast and dinner in catching
+these little fishes, but were more frequently supplied from the boats
+of the tender.<br>
+<br>
+[Saturday, 16th June]<br>
+<br>
+The landing-master having this day discharged the <i>Smeaton</i> and
+loaded the <i>Hedderwick and Dickie</i> praam-boats with nineteen stones,
+they were towed to their respective moorings, when Captain Wilson, in
+consequence of the heavy swell of sea, came in his boat to the beacon-house
+to consult with the writer as to the propriety of venturing the loaded
+praam-boats with their cargoes to the rock while so much sea was running.&nbsp;
+After some dubiety expressed on the subject, in which the ardent mind
+of the landing-master suggested many arguments in favour of his being
+able to convey the praams in perfect safety, it was acceded to.&nbsp;
+In bad weather, and especially on occasions of difficulty like the present,
+Mr. Wilson, who was an extremely active seaman, measuring about five
+feet three inches in height, of a robust habit, generally dressed himself
+in what he called a <i>monkey jacket</i>, made of thick duffle cloth,
+with a pair of Dutchman&rsquo;s petticoat trousers, reaching only to
+his knees, where they were met with a pair of long water-tight boots;
+with this dress, his glazed hat, and his small brass speaking trumpet
+in his hand, he bade defiance to the weather.&nbsp; When he made his
+appearance in this most suitable attire for the service his crew seemed
+to possess additional life, never failing to use their utmost exertions
+when the captain put on his <i>storm rigging</i>.&nbsp; They had this
+morning commenced loading the praam-boats at four o&rsquo;clock, and
+proceeded to tow them into the eastern landing-place, which was accomplished
+with much dexterity, though not without the risk of being thrown, by
+the force of the sea, on certain projecting ledges of the rock.&nbsp;
+In such a case the loss even of a single stone would have greatly retarded
+the work.&nbsp; For the greater safety in entering the creek it was
+necessary to put out several warps and guy-ropes to guide the boats
+into its narrow and intricate entrance; and it frequently happened that
+the sea made a clean breach over the praams, which not only washed their
+decks, but completely drenched the crew in water.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 17th June]<br>
+<br>
+It was fortunate, in the present state of the weather, that the fiftieth
+course was in a sheltered spot, within the reach of the tackle of the
+winch-machine upon the bridge; a few stones were stowed upon the bridge
+itself, and the remainder upon the building, which kept the artificers
+at work.&nbsp; The stowing of the materials upon the rock was the department
+of Alexander Brebner, mason, who spared no pains in attending to the
+safety of the stones, and who, in the present state of the work, when
+the stones were landed faster than could be built, generally worked
+till the water rose to his middle.&nbsp; At one o&rsquo;clock to-day
+the bell rung for prayers, and all hands were collected into the upper
+barrack-room of the beacon-house, when the usual service was performed.<br>
+<br>
+The wind blew very hard in the course of last night from N.E., and to-day
+the sea ran so high that no boat could approach the rock.&nbsp; During
+the dinner-hour, when the writer was going to the top of the building
+as usual, but just as he had entered the door and was about to ascend
+the ladder, a great noise was heard overhead, and in an instant he was
+soused in water from a sea which had most unexpectedly come over the
+walls, though now about fifty-eight feet in height.&nbsp; On making
+his retreat he found himself completely whitened by the lime, which
+had mixed with the water while dashing down through the different floors;
+and, as nearly as he could guess, a quantity equal to about a hogshead
+had come over the walls, and now streamed out at the door.&nbsp; After
+having shifted himself, he again sat down in his cabin, the sea continuing
+to run so high that the builders did not resume their operations on
+the walls this afternoon.&nbsp; The incident just noticed did not create
+more surprise in the mind of the writer than the sublime appearance
+of the waves as they rolled majestically over the rock.&nbsp; This scene
+he greatly enjoyed while sitting at his cabin window; each wave approached
+the beacon like a vast scroll unfolding; and in passing discharged a
+quantity of air, which he not only distinctly felt, but was even sufficient
+to lift the leaves of a book which lay before him.&nbsp; These waves
+might be ten or twelve feet in height, and about 250 feet in length,
+their smaller end being towards the north, where the water was deep,
+and they were opened or cut through by the interposition of the building
+and beacon.&nbsp; The gradual manner in which the sea, upon these occasions,
+is observed to become calm or to subside, is a very remarkable feature
+of this phenomenon.&nbsp; For example, when a gale is succeeded by a
+calm, every third or fourth wave forms one of these great seas, which
+occur in spaces of from three to five minutes, as noted by the writer&rsquo;s
+watch; but in the course of the next tide they become less frequent,
+and take off so as to occur only in ten or fifteen minutes; and, singular
+enough, at the third tide after such gales, the writer has remarked
+that only one or two of these great waves appear in the course of the
+whole tide.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 19th June]<br>
+<br>
+The 19th was a very unpleasant and disagreeable day, both for the seamen
+and artificers, as it rained throughout with little intermission from
+four a.m. till eleven p.m., accompanied with thunder and lightning,
+during which period the work nevertheless continued unremittingly, and
+the builders laid the fifty-first and fifty-second courses.&nbsp; This
+state of weather was no less severe upon the mortar-makers, who required
+to temper or prepare the mortar of a thicker or thinner consistency,
+in some measure, according to the state of the weather.&nbsp; From the
+elevated position of the building, the mortar gallery on the beacon
+was now much lower, and the lime-buckets were made to traverse upon
+a rope distended between it and the building.&nbsp; On occasions like
+the present, however, there was often a difference of opinion between
+the builders and the mortar-makers.&nbsp; John Watt, who had the principal
+charge of the mortar, was a most active worker, but, being somewhat
+of an irascible temper, the builders occasionally amused themselves
+at his expense; for while he was eagerly at work with his large iron-shod
+pestle in the mortar-tub, they often sent down contradictory orders,
+some crying, &lsquo;Make it a little stiffer, or thicker, John,&rsquo;
+while others called out to make it &lsquo;thinner,&rsquo; to which he
+generally returned very speedy and sharp replies, so that these conversations
+at times were rather amusing.<br>
+<br>
+During wet weather the situation of the artificers on the top of the
+building was extremely disagreeable; for although their work did not
+require great exertion, yet, as each man had his particular part to
+perform, either in working the crane or in laying the stones, it required
+the closest application and attention, not only on the part of Mr. Peter
+Logan, the foreman, who was constantly on the walls, but also of the
+chief workmen.&nbsp; Robert Selkirk, the principal builder, for example,
+had every stone to lay in its place.&nbsp; David Cumming, a mason, had
+the charge of working the tackle of the balance-weight, and James Scott,
+also a mason, took charge of the purchase with which the stones were
+laid; while the pointing the joints of the walls with cement was intrusted
+to William Reid and William Kennedy, who stood upon a scaffold suspended
+over the walls in rather a frightful manner.&nbsp; The least act of
+carelessness or inattention on the part of any of these men might have
+been fatal, not only to themselves, but also to the surrounding workmen,
+especially if any accident had happened to the crane itself, while the
+material damage or loss of a single stone would have put an entire stop
+to the operations until another could have been brought from Arbroath.&nbsp;
+The artificers, having wrought seven and a half hours of extra time
+to-day, had 3s. 9d. of extra pay, while the foremen had 7s. 6d. over
+and above their stated pay and board.&nbsp; Although, therefore, the
+work was both hazardous and fatiguing, yet, the encouragement being
+considerable, they were always very cheerful, and perfectly reconciled
+to the confinement and other disadvantages of the place.<br>
+<br>
+During fine weather, and while the nights were short, the duty on board
+of the floating light was literally nothing but a waiting on, and therefore
+one of her boats, with a crew of five men, daily attended the rock,
+but always returned to the vessel at night.&nbsp; The carpenter, however,
+was one of those who was left on board of the ship, as he also acted
+in the capacity of assistant lightkeeper, being, besides, a person who
+was apt to feel discontent and to be averse to changing his quarters,
+especially to work with the millwrights and joiners at the rock, who
+often, for hours together, wrought knee-deep, and not unfrequently up
+to the middle, in water.&nbsp; Mr. Watt having about this time made
+a requisition for another hand, the carpenter was ordered to attend
+the rock in the floating light&rsquo;s boat.&nbsp; This he did with
+great reluctance, and found so much fault that he soon got into discredit
+with his messmates.&nbsp; On this occasion he left the Lighthouse service,
+and went as a sailor in a vessel bound for America - a step which, it
+is believed, he soon regretted, as, in the course of things, he would,
+in all probability, have accompanied Mr. John Reid, the principal lightkeeper
+of the floating light, to the Bell Rock Lighthouse as his principal
+assistant.&nbsp; The writer had a wish to be of service to this man,
+as he was one of those who came off to the floating light in the month
+of September 1807, while she was riding at single anchor after the severe
+gale of the 7th, at a time when it was hardly possible to make up this
+vessel&rsquo;s crew; but the crossness of his manner prevented his reaping
+the benefit of such intentions.<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 22nd June]<br>
+<br>
+The building operations had for some time proceeded more slowly, from
+the higher parts of the lighthouse requiring much longer time than an
+equal tonnage of the lower courses.&nbsp; The duty of the landing-master&rsquo;s
+crew had, upon the whole, been easy of late; for though the work was
+occasionally irregular, yet the stones being lighter, they were more
+speedily lifted from the hold of the stone vessel to the deck of the
+praam-boat, and again to the waggons on the railway, after which they
+came properly under the charge of the foreman builder.&nbsp; It is,
+however, a strange, though not an uncommon, feature in the human character,
+that, when people have least to complain of, they are most apt to become
+dissatisfied, as was now the case with the seamen employed in the Bell
+Rock service about their rations of beer.&nbsp; Indeed, ever since the
+carpenter of the floating light, formerly noticed, had been brought
+to the rock, expressions of discontent had been manifested upon various
+occasions.&nbsp; This being represented to the writer, he sent for Captain
+Wilson, the landing-master, and Mr. Taylor, commander of the tender,
+with whom he talked over the subject.&nbsp; They stated that they considered
+the daily allowance of the seamen in every respect ample, and that,
+the work being now much lighter than formerly, they had no just ground
+for complaint; Mr. Taylor adding that, if those who now complained &lsquo;were
+even to be fed upon soft bread and turkeys, they would not think themselves
+right.&rsquo;&nbsp; At twelve noon the work of the landing-master&rsquo;s
+crew was completed for the day; but at four o&rsquo;clock, while the
+rock was under water, those on the beacon were surprised by the arrival
+of a boat from the tender without any signal having been made from the
+beacon.&nbsp; It brought the following note to the writer from the landing-master&rsquo;s
+crew:-<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<i>&lsquo;Sir Joseph Banks Tender.<br>
+<br>
+</i>&lsquo;SIR, - We are informed by our masters that our allowance
+is to be as before, and it is not sufficient to serve us, for we have
+been at work since four o&rsquo;clock this morning, and we have come
+on board to dinner, and there is no beer for us before to-morrow morning,
+to which a sufficient answer is required before we go from the beacon;
+and we are, Sir, your most obedient servants.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+On reading this, the writer returned a verbal message, intimating that
+an answer would be sent on board of the tender, at the same time ordering
+the boat instantly to quit the beacon.&nbsp; He then addressed the following
+note to the landing-master:-<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<i>&lsquo;Beacon-house, 22nd June</i> 1810<i>,<br>
+Five o&rsquo;clock p.m.<br>
+<br>
+</i>&lsquo;SIR, - I have just now received a letter purporting to be
+from the landing-master&rsquo;s crew and seamen on board of the <i>Sir
+Joseph Banks</i>, though without either date or signature; in answer
+to which I enclose a statement of the daily allowance of provisions
+for the seamen in this service, which you will post up in the ship&rsquo;s
+galley, and at seven o&rsquo;clock this evening I will come on board
+to inquire into this unexpected and most unnecessary demand for an additional
+allowance of beer.&nbsp; In the enclosed you will not find any alteration
+from the original statement, fixed in the galley at the beginning of
+the season.&nbsp; I have, however, judged this mode of giving your people
+an answer preferable to that of conversing with them on the beacon.&nbsp;
+- I am, Sir, your most obedient servant, ROBERT STEVENSON.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;To CAPTAIN WILSON.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<i>&lsquo;Beacon House, 22nd June</i> 1810. - Schedule of the daily
+allowance of provisions to be served out on board of the <i>Sir Joseph
+Banks</i> tender: &ldquo;1&frac12; lb. beef; 1 lb. bread; 8 oz. oatmeal;
+2 oz. barley; 2 oz. butter; 3 quarts beer; vegetables and salt no stated
+allowance.&nbsp; When the seamen are employed in unloading the <i>Smeaton</i>
+and <i>Patriot</i>, a draught of beer is, as formerly, to be allowed
+from the stock of these vessels.&nbsp; Further, in wet and stormy weather,
+or when the work commences very early in the morning, or continues till
+a late hour at night, a glass of spirits will also be served out to
+the crew as heretofore, on the requisition of the landing-master.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+ROBERT STEVENSON.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+On writing this letter and schedule, a signal was made on the beacon
+for the landing-master&rsquo;s boat, which immediately came to the rock,
+and the schedule was afterwards stuck up in the tender&rsquo;s galley.&nbsp;
+When sufficient time had been allowed to the crew to consider of their
+conduct, a second signal was made for a boat, and at seven o&rsquo;clock
+the writer left the Bell Rock, after a residence of four successive
+weeks in the beacon-house.&nbsp; The first thing which occupied his
+attention on board of the tender was to look round upon the lighthouse,
+which he saw, with some degree of emotion and surprise, now vying in
+height with the beacon-house; for although he had often viewed it from
+the extremity of the western railway on the rock, yet the scene, upon
+the whole, seemed far more interesting from the tender&rsquo;s moorings
+at the distance of about half a mile.<br>
+<br>
+The <i>Smeaton</i> having just arrived at her moorings with a cargo,
+a signal was made for Captain Pool to come on board of the tender, that
+he might be at hand to remove from the service any of those who might
+persist in their discontented conduct.&nbsp; One of the two principal
+leaders in this affair, the master of one of the praam-boats, who had
+also steered the boat which brought the letter to the beacon, was first
+called upon deck, and asked if he had read the statement fixed up in
+the galley this afternoon, and whether he was satisfied with it.&nbsp;
+He replied that he had read the paper, but was not satisfied, as it
+held out no alteration in the allowance, on which he was immediately
+ordered into the <i>Smeaton&rsquo;s</i> boat.&nbsp; The next man called
+had but lately entered the service, and, being also interrogated as
+to his resolution, he declared himself to be of the same mind with the
+praam-master, and was also forthwith ordered into the boat.&nbsp; The
+writer, without calling any more of the seamen, went forward to the
+gangway, where they were collected and listening to what was passing
+upon deck.&nbsp; He addressed them at the hatchway, and stated that
+two of their companions had just been dismissed the service and sent
+on board of the <i>Smeaton</i> to be conveyed to Arbroath.&nbsp; He
+therefore wished each man to consider for himself how far it would be
+proper, by any unreasonableness of conduct, to place themselves in a
+similar situation, especially as they were aware that it was optional
+in him either to dismiss them or send them on board a man-of-war.&nbsp;
+It might appear that much inconveniency would be felt at the rock by
+a change of hands at this critical period, by checking for a time the
+progress of a building so intimately connected with the best interests
+of navigation; yet this would be but of a temporary nature, while the
+injury to themselves might be irreparable.&nbsp; It was now therefore,
+required of any man who, in this disgraceful manner, chose to leave
+the service, that he should instantly make his appearance on deck while
+the <i>Smeaton&rsquo;s</i> boat was alongside.&nbsp; But those below
+having expressed themselves satisfied with their situation-viz., William
+Brown, George Gibb, Alexander Scott, John Dick, Robert Couper, Alexander
+Shephard, James Grieve, David Carey, William Pearson, Stuart Eaton,
+Alexander Lawrence, and John Spink - were accordingly considered as
+having returned to their duty.&nbsp; This disposition to mutiny, which
+had so strongly manifested itself, being now happily suppressed, Captain
+Pool got orders to proceed for Arbroath Bay, and land the two men he
+had on board, and to deliver the following letter at the office of the
+workyard:-<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<i>&lsquo;On board of the Tender off the Bell Rock,<br>
+22nd June</i> 1810<i>, eight o&rsquo;clock p.m.<br>
+<br>
+</i>&lsquo;DEAR SIR, - A discontented and mutinous spirit having manifested
+itself of late among the landing-master&rsquo;s crew, they struck work
+to-day and demanded an additional allowance of beer, and I have found
+it necessary to dismiss D-d and M-e, who are now sent on shore with
+the <i>Smeaton</i>.&nbsp; You will therefore be so good as to pay them
+their wages, including this day only.&nbsp; Nothing can be more unreasonable
+than the conduct of the seamen on this occasion, as the landing-master&rsquo;s
+crew not only had their allowance on board of the tender, but, in the
+course of this day, they had drawn no fewer than twenty-four quart pots
+of beer from the stock of the <i>Patriot</i> while unloading her.&nbsp;
+- I remain, yours truly, ROBERT STEVENSON.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;To Mr. LACHLAN KENNEDY,<br>
+Bell Rock Office, Arbroath.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+On despatching this letter to Mr. Kennedy, the writer returned to the
+beacon about nine o&rsquo;clock, where this afternoon&rsquo;s business
+had produced many conjectures, especially when the <i>Smeaton</i> got
+under weigh, instead of proceeding to land her cargo.&nbsp; The bell
+on the beacon being rung, the artificers were assembled on the bridge,
+when the affair was explained to them.&nbsp; He, at the same time, congratulated
+them upon the first appearance of mutiny being happily set at rest by
+the dismissal of its two principal abettors.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 24th June]<br>
+<br>
+At the rock the landing of the materials and the building operations
+of the light-room store went on successfully, and in a way similar to
+those of the provision store.&nbsp; To-day it blew fresh breezes; but
+the seamen nevertheless landed twenty-eight stones, and the artificers
+built the fifty-eighth and fifty-ninth courses.&nbsp; The works were
+visited by Mr. Murdoch, junior, from Messrs. Boulton and Watt&rsquo;s
+works of Soho.&nbsp; He landed just as the bell rung for prayers, after
+which the writer enjoyed much pleasure from his very intelligent conversation;
+and, having been almost the only stranger he had seen for some weeks,
+he parted with him, after a short interview, with much regret.<br>
+<br>
+[Thursday, 28th June]<br>
+<br>
+Last night the wind had shifted to north-east, and, blowing fresh, was
+accompanied with a heavy surf upon the rock.&nbsp; Towards high-water
+it had a very grand and wonderful appearance.&nbsp; Waves of considerable
+magnitude rose as high as the solid or level of the entrance-door, which,
+being open to the south-west, was fortunately to the leeward; but on
+the windward side the sprays flew like lightning up the sloping sides
+of the building; and although the walls were now elevated sixty-four
+feet above the rock, and about fifty-two feet from high-water mark,
+yet the artificers were nevertheless wetted, and occasionally interrupted,
+in their operations on the top of the walls.&nbsp; These appearances
+were, in a great measure, new at the Bell Rock, there having till of
+late been no building to conduct the seas, or object to compare with
+them.&nbsp; Although, from the description of the Eddystone Lighthouse,
+the mind was prepared for such effects, yet they were not expected to
+the present extent in the summer season; the sea being most awful to-day,
+whether observed from the beacon or the building.&nbsp; To windward,
+the sprays fell from the height above noticed in the most wonderful
+cascades, and streamed down the walls of the building in froth as white
+as snow.&nbsp; To leeward of the lighthouse the collision or meeting
+of the waves produced a pure white kind of <i>drift</i>; it rose about
+thirty feet in height, like a fine downy mist, which, in its fall, fell
+upon the face and hands more like a dry powder than a liquid substance.&nbsp;
+The effect of these seas, as they raged among the beams and dashed upon
+the higher parts of the beacon, produced a temporary tremulous motion
+throughout the whole fabric, which to a stranger must have been frightful.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 1st July]<br>
+<br>
+The writer had now been at the Bell Rock since the latter end of May,
+or about six weeks, during four of which he had been a constant inhabitant
+of the beacon without having been once off the rock.&nbsp; After witnessing
+the laying of the sixty-seventh or second course of the bedroom apartment,
+he left the rock with the tender and went ashore, as some arrangements
+were to be made for the future conduct of the works at Arbroath, which
+were soon to be brought to a close; the landing-master&rsquo;s crew
+having, in the meantime, shifted on board of the <i>Patriot</i>.&nbsp;
+In leaving the rock, the writer kept his eyes fixed upon the lighthouse,
+which had recently got into the form of a house, having several tiers
+or stories of windows.&nbsp; Nor was he unmindful of his habitation
+in the beacon - now far overtopped by the masonry, - where he had spent
+several weeks in a kind of active retirement, making practical experiment
+of the fewness of the positive wants of man.&nbsp; His cabin measured
+not more than four feet three inches in breadth on the floor; and though,
+from the oblique direction of the beams of the beacon, it widened towards
+the top, yet it did not admit of the full extension of his arms when
+he stood on the floor; while its length was little more than sufficient
+for suspending a cot-bed during the night, calculated for being triced
+up to the roof through the day, which left free room for the admission
+of occasional visitants.&nbsp; His folding table was attached with hinges,
+immediately under the small window of the apartment, and his books,
+barometer, thermometer, portmanteau, and two or three camp-stools, formed
+the bulk of his movables.&nbsp; His diet being plain, the paraphernalia
+of the table were proportionally simple; though everything had the appearance
+of comfort, and even of neatness, the walls being covered with green
+cloth formed into panels with red tape, and his bed festooned with curtains
+of yellow cotton-stuff.&nbsp; If, in speculating upon the abstract wants
+of man in such a state of exclusion, one were reduced to a single book,
+the Sacred Volume - whether considered for the striking diversity of
+its story, the morality of its doctrine, or the important truths of
+its gospel - would have proved by far the greatest treasure.<br>
+<br>
+[Monday, 2nd July]<br>
+<br>
+In walking over the workyard at Arbroath this morning, the writer found
+that the stones of the course immediately under the cornice were all
+in hand, and that a week&rsquo;s work would now finish the whole, while
+the intermediate courses lay ready numbered and marked for shipping
+to the rock.&nbsp; Among other subjects which had occupied his attention
+to-day was a visit from some of the relations of George Dall, a young
+man who had been impressed near Dundee in the month of February last;
+a dispute had arisen between the magistrates of that burgh and the Regulating
+Officer as to his right of impressing Dall, who was <i>bon&acirc; fide</i>
+one of the protected seamen in the Bell Rock service.&nbsp; In the meantime,
+the poor lad was detained, and ultimately committed to the prison of
+Dundee, to remain until the question should be tried before the Court
+of Session.&nbsp; His friends were naturally very desirous to have him
+relieved upon bail.&nbsp; But, as this was only to be done by the judgment
+of the Court, all that could be said was that his pay and allowances
+should be continued in the same manner as if he had been upon the sick-list.&nbsp;
+The circumstances of Dall&rsquo;s case were briefly these:- He had gone
+to see some of his friends in the neighbourhood of Dundee, in winter,
+while the works were suspended, having got leave of absence from Mr.
+Taylor, who commanded the Bell Rock tender, and had in his possession
+one of the Protection Medals.&nbsp; Unfortunately, however, for Dall,
+the Regulating Officer thought proper to disregard these documents,
+as, according to the strict and literal interpretation of the Admiralty
+regulations, a seaman does not stand protected unless he is actually
+on board of his ship, or in a boat belonging to her, or has the Admiralty
+protection in his possession.&nbsp; This order of the Board, however,
+cannot be rigidly followed in practice; and therefore, when the matter
+is satisfactorily stated to the Regulating Officer, the impressed man
+is generally liberated.&nbsp; But in Dall&rsquo;s case this was peremptorily
+refused, and he was retained at the instance of the magistrates.&nbsp;
+The writer having brought the matter under the consideration of the
+Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouses, they authorised it to be
+tried on the part of the Lighthouse Board, as one of extreme hardship.&nbsp;
+The Court, upon the first hearing, ordered Dall to be liberated from
+prison; and the proceedings never went further.<br>
+<br>
+[Wednesday, 4th July]<br>
+<br>
+Being now within twelve courses of being ready for building the cornice,
+measures were taken for getting the stones of it and the parapet-wall
+of the light-room brought from Edinburgh, where, as before noticed,
+they had been prepared and were in readiness for shipping.&nbsp; The
+honour of conveying the upper part of the lighthouse, and of landing
+the last stone of the building on the rock, was considered to belong
+to Captain Pool of the <i>Smeaton</i>, who had been longer in the service
+than the master of the <i>Patriot</i>.&nbsp; The <i>Smeaton</i> was,
+therefore, now partly loaded with old iron, consisting of broken railways
+and other lumber which had been lying about the rock.&nbsp; After landing
+these at Arbroath, she took on board James Craw, with his horse and
+cart, which could now be spared at the workyard, to be employed in carting
+the stones from Edinburgh to Leith.&nbsp; Alexander Davidson and William
+Kennedy, two careful masons, were also sent to take charge of the loading
+of the stones at Greenside, and stowing them on board of the vessel
+at Leith.&nbsp; The writer also went on board, with a view to call at
+the Bell Rock and to take his passage up the Firth of Forth.&nbsp; The
+wind, however, coming to blow very fresh from the eastward, with thick
+and foggy weather, it became necessary to reef the mainsail and set
+the second jib.&nbsp; When in the act of making a tack towards the tender,
+the sailors who worked the head-sheets were, all of a sudden, alarmed
+with the sound of the smith&rsquo;s hammer and anvil on the beacon,
+and had just time to put the ship about to save her from running ashore
+on the northwestern point of the rock, marked &lsquo;James Craw&rsquo;s
+Horse.&rsquo;&nbsp; On looking towards the direction from whence the
+sound came, the building and beacon-house were seen, with consternation,
+while the ship was hailed by those on the rock, who were no less confounded
+at seeing the near approach of the <i>Smeaton</i>; and, just as the
+vessel cleared the danger, the smith and those in the mortar gallery
+made signs in token of their happiness at our fortunate escape.&nbsp;
+From this occurrence the writer had an experimental proof of the utility
+of the large bells which were in preparation to be rung by the machinery
+of the revolving light; for, had it not been the sound of the smith&rsquo;s
+anvil, the <i>Smeaton</i>, in all probability, would have been wrecked
+upon the rock.&nbsp; In case the vessel had struck, those on board might
+have been safe, having now the beacon-house, as a place of refuge; but
+the vessel, which was going at a great velocity, must have suffered
+severely, and it was more than probable that the horse would have been
+drowned, there being no means of getting him out of the vessel.&nbsp;
+Of this valuable animal and his master we shall take an opportunity
+of saying more in another place.<br>
+<br>
+[Thursday, 5th July]<br>
+<br>
+The weather cleared up in the course of the night, but the wind shifted
+to the N.E. and blew very fresh.&nbsp; From the force of the wind, being
+now the period of spring-tides, a very heavy swell was experienced at
+the rock.&nbsp; At two o&rsquo;clock on the following morning the people
+on the beacon were in a state of great alarm about their safety, as
+the sea had broke up part of the floor of the mortar gallery!, which
+was thus cleared of the lime-casks and other buoyant articles; and,
+the alarm-bell being rung, all hands were called to render what assistance
+was in their power for the safety of themselves and the materials.&nbsp;
+At this time some would willingly have left the beacon and gone into
+the building: the sea, however, ran so high that there was no passage
+along the bridge of communication, and, when the interior of the lighthouse
+came to be examined in the morning, it appeared that great quantities
+of water had come over the walls - now eighty feet in height - and had
+run down through the several apartments and out at the entrance door.<br>
+<br>
+The upper course of the lighthouse at the workyard of Arbroath was completed
+on the 6th, and the whole of the stones were, therefore, now ready for
+being shipped to the rock.&nbsp; From the present state of the works
+it was impossible that the two squads of artificers at Arbroath and
+the Bell Rock could meet together at this period; and as in public works
+of this kind, which had continued for a series of years, it is not customary
+to allow the men to separate without what is termed a &ldquo;finishing-pint,&rdquo;
+five guineas were for this purpose placed at the disposal of Mr. David
+Logan, clerk of works.&nbsp; With this sum the stone-cutters at Arbroath
+had a merry meeting in their barrack, collected their sweethearts and
+friends, and concluded their labours with a dance.&nbsp; It was remarked,
+however, that their happiness on this occasion was not without alloy.&nbsp;
+The consideration of parting and leaving a steady and regular employment,
+to go in quest of work and mix with other society, after having been
+harmoniously lodged for years together in one large &ldquo;guildhall
+or barrack,&rdquo; was rather painful.<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 6th July]<br>
+<br>
+While the writer was at Edinburgh he was fortunate enough to meet with
+Mrs. Dickson, only daughter of the late celebrated Mr. Smeaton, whose
+works at the Eddystone Lighthouse had been of such essential consequence
+to the operations at the Bell Rock.&nbsp; Even her own elegant accomplishments
+are identified with her father&rsquo;s work, she having herself made
+the drawing of the vignette on the title-page of the <i>Narrative of</i>
+<i>the Eddystone Lighthouse</i>.&nbsp; Every admirer of the works of
+that singularly eminent man must also feel an obligation to her for
+the very comprehensive and distinct account given of his life, which
+is attached to his reports, published, in three volumes quarto, by the
+Society of Civil Engineers.&nbsp; Mrs. Dickson, being at this time returning
+from a tour to the Hebrides and Western Highlands of Scotland, had heard
+of the Bell Rock works, and from their similarity to those of the Eddystone
+was strongly impressed with a desire of visiting the spot.&nbsp; But
+on inquiring for the writer at Edinburgh, and finding from him that
+the upper part of the lighthouse, consisting of nine courses, might
+be seen in the immediate vicinity, and also that one of the vessels
+which, in compliment to her father&rsquo;s memory, had been named the
+<i>Smeaton</i>, might also now be seen in Leith, she considered herself
+extremely fortunate; and having first visited the works at Greenside,
+she afterwards went to Leith to see the <i>Smeaton</i>, then loading
+for the Bell Rock.&nbsp; On stepping on board, Mrs. Dickson seemed to
+be quite overcome with so many concurrent circumstances, tending in
+a peculiar manner to revive and enliven the memory of her departed father,
+and, on leaving the vessel, she would not be restrained from presenting
+the crew with a piece of money.&nbsp; The <i>Smeaton</i> had been named
+spontaneously, from a sense of the obligation which a public work of
+the description of the Bell Rock owed to the labours and abilities of
+Mr. Smeaton.&nbsp; The writer certainly never could have anticipated
+the satisfaction which he this day felt in witnessing the pleasure it
+afforded to the only representative of this great man&rsquo;s family.<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 20th July]<br>
+<br>
+The gale from the N.E. still continued so strong, accompanied with a
+heavy sea, that the <i>Patriot</i> could not approach her moorings;
+and although the tender still kept her station, no landing was made
+to-day at the rock.&nbsp; At high-water it was remarked that the spray
+rose to the height of about sixty feet upon the building.&nbsp; The
+<i>Smeaton</i> now lay in Leith loaded, but, the wind and weather being
+so unfavourable for her getting down the Firth, she did not sail till
+this afternoon.&nbsp; It may be here proper to notice that the loading
+of the centre of the light-room floor, or last principal stone of the
+building, did not fail, when put on board, to excite an interest among
+those connected with the work.&nbsp; When the stone was laid upon the
+cart to be conveyed to Leith, the seamen fixed an ensign-staff and flag
+into the circular hole in the centre of the stone, and decorated their
+own hats, and that of James Craw, the Bell Rock carter, with ribbons;
+even his faithful and trusty horse Brassey was ornamented with bows
+and streamers of various colours.&nbsp; The masons also provided themselves
+with new aprons, and in this manner the cart was attended in its progress
+to the ship.&nbsp; When the cart came opposite the Trinity House of
+Leith, the officer of that corporation made his appearance dressed in
+his uniform, with his staff of office; and when it reached the harbour,
+the shipping in the different tiers where the <i>Smeaton</i> lay hoisted
+their colours, manifesting by these trifling ceremonies the interest
+with which the progress of this work was regarded by the public, as
+ultimately tending to afford safety and protection to the mariner.&nbsp;
+The wind had fortunately shifted to the S.W., and about five o&rsquo;clock
+this afternoon the <i>Smeaton</i> reached the Bell Rock.<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 27th July]<br>
+<br>
+The artificers had finished the laying of the balcony course, excepting
+the centre-stone of the light-room floor, which, like the centres of
+the other floors, could not be laid in its place till after the removal
+of the foot and shaft of the balance-crane.&nbsp; During the dinner-hour,
+when the men were off work the writer generally took some exercise by
+walking round the walls when the rock was under water; but to-day his
+boundary was greatly enlarged, for, instead of the narrow wall as a
+path, he felt no small degree of pleasure in walking round the balcony
+and passing out and in at the space allotted for the light-room door.&nbsp;
+In the labours of this day both the artificers and seamen felt their
+work to be extremely easy compared with what it had been for some days
+past.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 29th July]<br>
+<br>
+Captain Wilson and his crew had made preparations for landing the last
+stone, and, as may well be supposed, this was a day of great interest
+at the Bell Rock.&nbsp; &lsquo;That it might lose none of its honours,&rsquo;
+as he expressed himself, the <i>Hedderwick</i> praam-boat, with which
+the first stone of the building had been landed, was appointed also
+to carry the last.&nbsp; At seven o&rsquo;clock this evening the seamen
+hoisted three flags upon the <i>Hedderwick</i>, when the colours of
+the <i>Dickie</i> praam-boat, tender, <i>Smeaton</i>, floating light,
+beacon-house, and lighthouse were also displayed; and, the weather being
+remarkably fine, the whole presented a very gay appearance, and, in
+connection with the associations excited, the effect was very pleasing.&nbsp;
+The praam which carried the stone was towed by the seamen in gallant
+style to the rock, and, on its arrival, cheers were given as a finale
+to the landing department.<br>
+<br>
+[Monday, 30th July]<br>
+<br>
+The ninetieth or last course of the building having been laid to-day,
+which brought the masonry to the height of one hundred and two feet
+six inches, the lintel of the light-room door, being the finishing-stone
+of the exterior walls, was laid with due formality by the writer, who,
+at the same time, pronounced the following benediction: &ldquo;May the
+Great Architect of the Universe, under whose blessing this perilous
+work has prospered, preserve it as a guide to the mariner.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 3rd Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+At three p.m., the necessary preparations having been made, the artificers
+commenced the completing of the floors of the several apartments, and
+at seven o&rsquo;clock the centre-stone of the light-room floor was
+laid, which may be held as finishing the masonry of this important national
+edifice.&nbsp; After going through the usual ceremonies observed by
+the brotherhood on occasions of this kind, the writer, addressing himself
+to the artificers and seamen who were present, briefly alluded to the
+utility of the undertaking as a monument of the wealth of British commerce,
+erected through the spirited measures of the Commissioners of the Northern
+Lighthouses by means of the able assistance of those who now surrounded
+him.&nbsp; He then took an opportunity of stating that toward those
+connected with this arduous work he would ever retain the most heartfelt
+regard in all their interests.<br>
+<br>
+[Saturday, 4th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+When the bell was rung as usual on the beacon this morning, every one
+seemed as if he were at a loss what to make of himself.&nbsp; At this
+period the artificers at the rock consisted of eighteen masons, two
+joiners, one millwright, one smith, and one mortar-maker, besides Messrs.
+Peter Logan and Francis Watt, foremen, counting in all twenty-five;
+and matters were arranged for proceeding to Arbroath this afternoon
+with all hands.&nbsp; The <i>Sir Joseph Banks</i> tender had by this
+time been afloat, with little intermission, for six months, during greater
+part of which the artificers had been almost constantly off at the rock,
+and were now much in want of necessaries of almost every description.&nbsp;
+Not a few had lost different articles of clothing, which had dropped
+into the sea from the beacon and building.&nbsp; Some wanted jackets;
+others, from want of hats, wore nightcaps; each was, in fact, more or
+less curtailed in his wardrobe, and it must be confessed that at best
+the party were but in a very tattered condition.&nbsp; This morning
+was occupied in removing the artificers and their bedding on board of
+the tender; and although their personal luggage was easily shifted,
+the boats had, nevertheless, many articles to remove from the beacon-house,
+and were consequently employed in this service till eleven a.m.&nbsp;
+All hands being collected and just ready to embark, as the water had
+nearly overflowed the rock, the writer, in taking leave, after alluding
+to the harmony which had ever marked the conduct of those employed on
+the Bell Rock, took occasion to compliment the great zeal, attention,
+and abilities of Mr. Peter Logan and Mr. Francis Watt, foremen; Captain
+James Wilson, landing-master; and Captain David Taylor, commander of
+the tender, who, in their several departments, had so faithfully discharged
+the duties assigned to them, often under circumstances the most difficult
+and trying.&nbsp; The health of these gentlemen was drunk with much
+warmth of feeling by the artificers and seamen, who severally expressed
+the satisfaction they had experienced in acting under them; after which
+the whole party left the rock.<br>
+<br>
+In sailing past the floating light mutual compliments were made by a
+display of flags between that vessel and the tender; and at five p.m.
+the latter vessel entered the harbour of Arbroath, where the party were
+heartily welcomed by a numerous company of spectators, who had collected
+to see the artificers arrive after so long an absence from the port.&nbsp;
+In the evening the writer invited the foremen and captains of the service,
+together with Mr. David Logan, clerk of works at Arbroath, and Mr. Lachlan
+Kennedy, engineer&rsquo;s clerk and book-keeper, and some of their friends,
+to the principal inn, where the evening was spent very happily; and
+after &lsquo;His Majesty&rsquo;s Health&rsquo; and &lsquo;The Commissioners
+of the Northern Lighthouses&rsquo; had been given, &lsquo;Stability
+to the Bell Rock Lighthouse&rsquo; was hailed as a standing toast in
+the Lighthouse service.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 5th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+The author has formerly noticed the uniformly decent and orderly deportment
+of the artificers who were employed at the Bell Rock Lighthouse, and
+to-day, it is believed, they very generally attended church, no doubt
+with grateful hearts for the narrow escapes from personal danger which
+all of them had more or less experienced during their residence at the
+rock.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 14th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+The <i>Smeaton</i> sailed to-day at one p.m., having on board sixteen
+artificers, with Mr. Peter Logan, together with a supply of provisions
+and necessaries, who left the harbour pleased and happy to find themselves
+once more afloat in the Bell Rock service.&nbsp; At seven o&rsquo;clock
+the tender was made fast to her moorings, when the artificers landed
+on the rock and took possession of their old quarters in the beacon-house,
+with feelings very different from those of 1807, when the works commenced.<br>
+<br>
+The barometer for some days past had been falling from 29.90, and to-day
+it was 29.50, with the wind at N.E., which, in the course of this day,
+increased to a strong gale accompanied with a sea which broke with great
+violence upon the rock.&nbsp; At twelve noon the tender rode very heavily
+at her moorings, when her chain broke at about ten fathoms from the
+ships bows. The kedge-anchor was immediately let go, to hold her till
+the floating buoy and broken chain should be got on board.&nbsp; But
+while this was in operation the hawser of the kedge was chafed through
+on the rocky bottom and parted, when the vessel was again adrift.&nbsp;
+Most fortunately, however, she cast off with her head from the rock,
+and narrowly cleared it, when she sailed up the Firth of Forth to wait
+the return of better weather.&nbsp; The artificers were thus left upon
+the rock with so heavy a sea running that it was ascertained to have
+risen to a height of eighty feet on the building.&nbsp; Under such perilous
+circumstances it would be difficult to describe the feelings of those
+who, at this time, were cooped up in the beacon in so forlorn a situation,
+with the sea not only raging under them, but occasionally falling from
+a great height upon the roof of their temporary lodging, without even
+the attending vessel in view to afford the least gleam of hope in the
+event of any accident.&nbsp; It is true that they now had the masonry
+of the lighthouse to resort to, which, no doubt, lessened the actual
+danger of their situation; but the building was still without a roof,
+and the deadlights, or storm-shutters, not being yet fitted, the windows
+of the lower story were stove in and broken, and at high-water the sea
+ran in considerable quantities out at the entrance door.<br>
+<br>
+[Thursday, 16th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+The gale continues with unabated violence to-day, and the sprays rise
+to a still greater height, having been carried over the masonry of the
+building, or about ninety feet above the level of the sea.&nbsp; At
+four o&rsquo;clock this morning it was breaking into the cook&rsquo;s
+berth, when he rang the alarm-bell, and all hands turned out to attend
+to their personal safety.&nbsp; The floor of the smith&rsquo;s, or mortar
+gallery, was now completely burst up by the force of the sea, when the
+whole of the deals and the remaining articles upon the floor were swept
+away, such as the cast-iron mortar-tubs, the iron hearth of the forge,
+the smith&rsquo;s bellows, and even his anvil were thrown down upon
+the rock.&nbsp; Before the tide rose to its full height to-day some
+of the artificers passed along the bridge into the lighthouse, to observe
+the effects of the sea upon it, and they reported that they had felt
+a slight tremulous motion in the building when great seas struck it
+in a certain direction, about high-water mark.&nbsp; On this occasion
+the sprays were again observed to wet the balcony, and even to come
+over the parapet wall into the interior of the light-room.<br>
+<br>
+[Thursday, 23rd Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+The wind being at W.S.W., and the weather more moderate, both the tender
+and the <i>Smeaton</i> got to their moorings on the 23rd, when all hands
+were employed in transporting the sash-frames from on board of the <i>Smeaton</i>
+to the rock.&nbsp; In the act of setting up one of these frames upon
+the bridge, it was unguardedly suffered to lose its balance, and in
+saving it from damage Captain Wilson met with a severe bruise in the
+groin, on the seat of a gun-shot wound received in the early part of
+his life.&nbsp; This accident laid him aside for several days.<br>
+<br>
+[Monday, 27th Aug.]<br>
+<br>
+The sash-frames of the light-room, eight in number, and weighing each
+254 pounds, having been got safely up to the top of the building, were
+ranged on the balcony in the order in which they were numbered for their
+places on the top of the parapet-wall; and the balance-crane, that useful
+machine having now lifted all the heavier articles, was unscrewed and
+lowered, to use the landing-master&rsquo;s phrase, &lsquo;in mournful
+silence.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 2nd Sept.]<br>
+<br>
+The steps of the stair being landed, and all the weightier articles
+of the light-room got up to the balcony, the wooden bridge was now to
+be removed, as it had a very powerful effect upon the beacon when a
+heavy sea struck it, and could not possibly have withstood the storms
+of a winter.&nbsp; Everything having been cleared from the bridge, and
+nothing left but the two principal beams with their horizontal braces,
+James Glen, at high-water, proceeded with a saw to cut through the beams
+at the end next the beacon, which likewise disengaged their opposite
+extremity, inserted a few inches into the building.&nbsp; The frame
+was then gently lowered into the water, and floated off to the <i>Smeaton</i>
+to be towed to Arbroath, to be applied as part of the materials in the
+erection of the lightkeepers&rsquo; houses.&nbsp; After the removal
+of the bridge, the aspect of things at the rock was much altered.&nbsp;
+The beacon-house and building had both a naked look to those accustomed
+to their former appearance; a curious optical deception was also remarked,
+by which the lighthouse seemed to incline from the perpendicular towards
+the beacon.&nbsp; The horizontal rope-ladder before noticed was again
+stretched to preserve the communication, and the artificers were once
+more obliged to practise the awkward and straddling manner of their
+passage between them during 1809.<br>
+<br>
+At twelve noon the bell rung for prayers, after which the artificers
+went to dinner, when the writer passed along the rope-ladder to the
+lighthouse, and went through the several apartments, which were now
+cleared of lumber.&nbsp; In the afternoon all hands were summoned to
+the interior of the house, when he had the satisfaction of laying the
+upper step of the stair, or last stone of the building.&nbsp; This ceremony
+concluded with three cheers, the sound of which had a very loud and
+strange effect within the walls of the lighthouse.&nbsp; At six o&rsquo;clock
+Mr. Peter Logan and eleven of the artificers embarked with the writer
+for Arbroath, leaving Mr. James Glen with the special charge of the
+beacon and railways, Mr. Robert Selkirk with the building, with a few
+artificers to fit the temporary windows to render the house habitable.<br>
+<br>
+[Sunday, 14th Oct.]<br>
+<br>
+On returning from his voyage to the Northern Lighthouses, the writer
+landed at the Bell Rock on Sunday, the 14th of October, and had the
+pleasure to find, from the very favourable state of the weather, that
+the artificers had been enabled to make great progress with the fitting-up
+of the light-room.<br>
+<br>
+[Friday, 19th Oct.]<br>
+<br>
+The light-room work had proceeded, as usual, to-day under the direction
+of Mr. Dove, assisted in the plumber-work by Mr. John Gibson, and in
+the brazier-work by Mr. Joseph Fraser; while Mr. James Slight, with
+the joiners, were fitting up the storm-shuttters of the windows.&nbsp;
+In these several departments the artificers were at work till seven
+o&rsquo;clock p.m., and it being then dark, Mr. Dove gave orders to
+drop work in the light-room; and all hands proceeded from thence to
+the beacon-house, when Charles Henderson, smith, and Henry Dickson,
+brazier, left the work together.&nbsp; Being both young men, who had
+been for several weeks upon the rock, they had become familiar, and
+even playful, on the most difficult parts about the beacon and building.&nbsp;
+This evening they were trying to outrun each other in descending from
+the light-room, when Henderson led the way; but they were in conversation
+with each other till they came to the rope-ladder distended between
+the entrance-door of the lighthouse and the beacon.&nbsp; Dickson, on
+reaching the cook-room, was surprised at not seeing his companion, and
+inquired hastily for Henderson.&nbsp; Upon which the cook replied, &lsquo;Was
+he before you upon the rope-ladder?&rsquo;&nbsp; Dickson answered, &lsquo;Yes;
+and I thought I heard something fall.&rsquo;&nbsp; Upon this the alarm
+was given, and links were immediately lighted, with which the artificers
+descended on the legs of the beacon, as near the surface of the water
+as possible, it being then about full tide, and the sea breaking to
+a considerable height upon the building, with the wind at S.S.E.&nbsp;
+But, after watching till low-water, and searching in every direction
+upon the rock, it appeared that poor Henderson must have unfortunately
+fallen through the rope-ladder, and been washed into the deep water.<br>
+<br>
+The deceased had passed along this rope-ladder many hundred times, both
+by day and night, and the operations in which he was employed being
+nearly finished, he was about to leave the rock when this melancholy
+catastrophe took place.&nbsp; The unfortunate loss of Henderson cast
+a deep gloom upon the minds of all who were at the rock, and it required
+some management on the part of those who had charge to induce the people
+to remain patiently at their work; as the weather now became more boisterous,
+and the nights long, they found their habitation extremely cheerless,
+while the winds were howling about their ears, and the waves lashing
+with fury against the beams of their insulated habitation.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 23rd Oct.]<br>
+<br>
+The wind had shifted in the night to N.W., and blew a fresh gale, while
+the sea broke with violence upon the rock.&nbsp; It was found impossible
+to land, but the writer, from the boat, hailed Mr. Dove, and directed
+the ball to be immediately fixed.&nbsp; The necessary preparations were
+accordingly made, while the vessel made short tacks on the southern
+side of the rock, in comparatively smooth water.&nbsp; At noon Mr. Dove,
+assisted by Mr. James Slight, Mr. Robert Selkirk, Mr. James Glen, and
+Mr. John Gibson, plumber, with considerable difficulty, from the boisterous
+state of the weather, got the gilded ball screwed on, measuring two
+feet in diameter, and forming the principal ventilator at the upper
+extremity of the cupola of the light-room.&nbsp; At Mr. Hamilton&rsquo;s
+desire, a salute of seven guns was fired on this occasion, and, all
+hands being called to the quarter-deck, &lsquo;Stability to the Bell
+Rock Lighthouse&rsquo; was not forgotten.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 30th Oct.]<br>
+<br>
+On reaching the rock it was found that a very heavy sea still ran upon
+it; but the writer having been disappointed on two former occasions,
+and, as the erection of the house might now be considered complete,
+there being nothing wanted externally, excepting some of the storm-shutters
+for the defence of the windows, he was the more anxious at this time
+to inspect it.&nbsp; Two well-manned boats were therefore ordered to
+be in attendance; and, after some difficulty, the wind being at N.N.E.,
+they got safely into the western creek, though not without encountering
+plentiful sprays.&nbsp; It would have been impossible to have attempted
+a landing to-day, under any other circumstances than with boats perfectly
+adapted to the purpose, and with seamen who knew every ledge of the
+rock, and even the length of the sea-weeds at each particular spot,
+so as to dip their oars into the water accordingly, and thereby prevent
+them from getting entangled.&nbsp; But what was of no less consequence
+to the safety of the party, Captain Wilson, who always steered the boat,
+had a perfect knowledge of the set of the different waves, while the
+crew never shifted their eyes from observing his motions, and the strictest
+silence was preserved by every individual except himself.<br>
+<br>
+On entering the house, the writer had the pleasure to find it in a somewhat
+habitable condition, the lower apartments being closed in with temporary
+windows, and fitted with proper storm-shutters.&nbsp; The lowest apartment
+at the head of the staircase was occupied with water, fuel, and provisions,
+put up in a temporary way until the house could be furnished with proper
+utensils.&nbsp; The second, or light-room store, was at present much
+encumbered with various tools and apparatus for the use of the workmen.&nbsp;
+The kitchen immediately over this had, as yet, been supplied only with
+a common ship&rsquo;s caboose and plate-iron funnel, while the necessary
+cooking utensils had been taken from the beacon.&nbsp; The bedroom was
+for the present used as the joiners&rsquo; workshop, and the strangers&rsquo;
+room, immediately under the light-room, was occupied by the artificers,
+the beds being ranged in tiers, as was done in the barrack of the beacon.&nbsp;
+The light-room, though unprovided with its machinery, being now covered
+over with the cupola, glazed and painted, had a very complete and cleanly
+appearance.&nbsp; The balcony was only as yet fitted with a temporary
+rail, consisting of a few iron stanchions, connected with ropes; and
+in this state it was necessary to leave it during the winter.<br>
+<br>
+Having gone over the whole of the low-water works on the rock, the beacon,
+and lighthouse, and being satisfied that only the most untoward accident
+in the landing of the machinery could prevent the exhibition of the
+light in the course of the winter, Mr. John Reid, formerly of the floating
+light, was now put in charge of the lighthouse as principal keeper;
+Mr. James Slight had charge of the operations of the artificers, while
+Mr. James Dove and the smiths, having finished the frame of the light-room,
+left the rock for the present.&nbsp; With these arrangements the writer
+bade adieu to the works for the season.&nbsp; At eleven a.m. the tide
+was far advanced; and there being now little or no shelter for the boats
+at the rock, they had to be pulled through the breach of sea, which
+came on board in great quantities, and it was with extreme difficulty
+that they could be kept in the proper direction of the landing-creek.&nbsp;
+On this occasion he may be permitted to look back with gratitude on
+the many escapes made in the course of this arduous undertaking, now
+brought so near to a successful conclusion.<br>
+<br>
+[Monday, 5th Nov.]<br>
+<br>
+On Monday, the 5th, the yacht again visited the rock, when Mr. Slight
+and the artificers returned with her to the workyard, where a number
+of things were still to prepare connected with the temporary fitting
+up of the accommodation for the lightkeepers.&nbsp; Mr. John Reid and
+Peter Fortune were now the only inmates of the house.&nbsp; This was
+the smallest number of persons hitherto left in the lighthouse.&nbsp;
+As four lightkeepers were to be the complement, it was intended that
+three should always be at the rock.&nbsp; Its present inmates, however,
+could hardly have been better selected for such a situation; Mr. Reid
+being a person possessed of the strictest notions of duty and habits
+of regularity from long service on board of a man-of-war, while Mr.
+Fortune had one of the most happy and contented dispositions imaginable.<br>
+<br>
+[Tuesday, 13th Nov.]<br>
+<br>
+From Saturday the 10th till Tuesday the 13th, the wind had been from
+N.E. blowing a heavy gale; but to-day, the weather having greatly moderated,
+Captain Taylor, who now commanded the <i>Smeaton</i>, sailed at two
+o&rsquo;clock a.m. for the Bell Rock.&nbsp; At five the floating light
+was hailed and found to be all well.&nbsp; Being a fine moonlight morning,
+the seamen were changed from the one ship to the other.&nbsp; At eight,
+the <i>Smeaton</i> being off the rock, the boats were manned, and taking
+a supply of water, fuel, and other necessaries, landed at the western
+side, when Mr. Reid and Mr. Fortune were found in good health and spirits.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Reid stated that during the late gales, particularly on Friday,
+the 30th, the wind veering from S.E. to N.E., both he and Mr. Fortune
+sensibly felt the house tremble when particular seas struck, about the
+time of high-water; the former observing that it was a tremor of that
+sort which rather tended to convince him that everything about the building
+was sound, and reminded him of the effect produced when a good log of
+timber is struck sharply with a mallet; but, with every confidence in
+the stability of the building, he nevertheless confessed that, in so
+forlorn a situation, they were not insensible to those emotions which,
+he emphatically observed, &lsquo;made a man look back upon his former
+life.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+[1881 Friday, 1st Feb.]<br>
+<br>
+The day, long wished for, on which the mariner was to see a light exhibited
+on the Bell Rock at length arrived.&nbsp; Captain Wilson, as usual,
+hoisted the float&rsquo;s lanterns to the topmast on the evening of
+the 1st of February; but the moment that the light appeared on the rock,
+the crew, giving three cheers, lowered them, and finally extinguished
+the lights.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Footnotes:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote2a"></a><a href="#citation2a">{2a}</a>&nbsp; An error:
+Stevensons owned at this date the barony of Dolphingston in Haddingtonshire,
+Montgrennan in Ayrshire, and several other lesser places.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote3a"></a><a href="#citation3a">{3a}</a>&nbsp; Pitcairn&rsquo;s
+<i>Criminal Trials</i>, at large. - [R. L. S.]<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote4a"></a><a href="#citation4a">{4a}</a>&nbsp; Fountainhall&rsquo;s
+<i>Decisions</i>, vol. i. pp. 56, 132, 186, 204, 368.- [R. L. S.]<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote4b"></a><a href="#citation4b">{4b}</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid</i>.
+pp. 158, 299. - [R. L. S.]<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote4c"></a><a href="#citation4c">{4c}</a>&nbsp; Working
+farmer:&nbsp; Fr. <i>laboureur.<br>
+<br>
+</i><a name="footnote7a"></a><a href="#citation7a">{7a}</a>&nbsp; This
+John Stevenson was not the only &lsquo;witness&rsquo; of the name; other
+Stevensons were actually killed during the persecutions, in the Glen
+of Trool, on Pentland, etc.; and it is very possible that the author&rsquo;s
+own ancestor was one of the mounted party embodied by Muir of Caldwell,
+only a day too late for Pentland.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote7b"></a><a href="#citation7b">{7b}</a>&nbsp; Wodrow
+Society&rsquo;s <i>Select Biographies</i>, vol. ii.- [R. L. S.]<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote9a"></a><a href="#citation9a">{9a}</a>&nbsp; Though
+the districts here named are those in which the name of Stevenson is
+most common, it is in point of fact far more wide-spread than the text
+indicates, and occurs from Dumfries and Berwickshire to Aberdeen and
+Orkney.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote12a"></a><a href="#citation12a">{12a}</a>&nbsp; Mr.
+J. H. Stevenson is satisfied that these speculations as to a possible
+Norse, Highland, or French origin are vain.&nbsp; All we know about
+the engineer family is that it was sprung from a stock of Westland Whigs
+settled in the latter part of the seventeenth century in the parish
+of Neilston, as mentioned at the beginning of the next chapter.&nbsp;
+It may be noted that the Ayrshire parish of Stevenston, the lands of
+which are said to have received the name in the twelfth century, lies
+within thirteen miles south-west of this place.&nbsp; The lands of Stevenson
+in Lanarkshire first mentioned in the next century, in the Ragman Roll,
+lie within twenty miles east.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote54a"></a><a href="#citation54a">{54a}</a>&nbsp; This
+is only a probable hypothesis; I have tried to identify my father&rsquo;s
+anecdote in my grandfather&rsquo;s diary, and may very well have been
+deceived. - [R. L. S.]<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote91a"></a><a href="#citation91a">{91a}</a>&nbsp; This
+is, of course, the tradition commemorated by Southey in his ballad of
+&lsquo;The Inchcape Bell.&rsquo;&nbsp; Whether true or not, it points
+to the fact that from the infancy of Scottish navigation, the seafaring
+mind had been fully alive to the perils of this reef.&nbsp; Repeated
+attempts had been made to mark the place with beacons, but all efforts
+were unavailing (one such beacon having been carried away within eight
+days of its erection) until Robert Stevenson conceived and carried out
+the idea of the stone tower.&nbsp; But the number of vessels actually
+lost upon the reef was as nothing to those that were cast away in fruitless
+efforts to avoid it.&nbsp; Placed right in the fairway of two navigations,
+and one of these the entrance to the only harbour of refuge between
+the Downs and the Moray Firth, it breathed abroad along the whole coast
+an atmosphere of terror and perplexity; and no ship sailed that part
+of the North Sea at night, but what the ears of those on board would
+be strained to catch the roaring of the seas on the Bell Rock.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote92a"></a><a href="#citation92a">{92a}</a>&nbsp; The
+particular event which concentrated Mr. Stevenson&rsquo;s attention
+on the problem of the Bell Rock was the memorable gale of December 1799,
+when, among many other vessels, H.M.S. <i>York</i>, a seventy-four-gun
+ship, went down with all hands on board.&nbsp; Shortly after this disaster
+Mr. Stevenson made a careful survey, and prepared his models for a stone
+tower, the idea of which was at first received with pretty general scepticism,
+Smeaton&rsquo;s Eddystone tower could not be cited as affording a parallel,
+for there the rock is not submerged even at high-water, while the problem
+of the Bell Rock was to build a tower of masonry on a sunken reef far
+distant from land, covered at every tide to a depth of twelve feet or
+more, and having thirty-two fathoms&rsquo; depth of water within a mile
+of its eastern edge.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote94a"></a><a href="#citation94a">{94a}</a>&nbsp; The
+grounds for the rejection of the Bill by the House of Lords in 1802-3
+had been that the extent of coast over which dues were proposed to be
+levied would be too great.&nbsp; Before going to Parliament again, the
+Board of Northern Lights, desiring to obtain support and corroboration
+for Mr. Stevenson&rsquo;s views, consulted first Telford, who was unable
+to give the matter his attention, and then (on Stevenson&rsquo;s suggestion)
+Rennie, who concurred in affirming the practicability of a stone tower,
+and supported the Bill when it came again before Parliament in 1806.&nbsp;
+Rennie was afterwards appointed by the Commissioners as advising engineer,
+whom Stevenson might consult in cases of emergency.&nbsp; It seems certain
+that the title of chief engineer had in this instance no more meaning
+than the above.&nbsp; Rennie, in point of fact, proposed certain modifications
+in Stevenson&rsquo;s plans, which the latter did not accept; nevertheless
+Rennie continued to take a kindly interest in the work, and the two
+engineers remained in friendly correspondence during its progress.&nbsp;
+The official view taken by the Board as to the quarter in which lay
+both the merit and the responsibility of the work may be gathered from
+a minute of the Commissioners at their first meeting held after Stevenson
+died; in which they record their regret &lsquo;at the death of this
+zealous, faithful, and able officer, <i>to whom is due the honour of
+conceiving</i> <i>and executing the Bell Rock Lighthouse</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+The matter is briefly summed up in the <i>Life</i> of Robert Stevenson
+by his son David Stevenson (A. &amp; C. Black, 1878), and fully discussed,
+on the basis of official facts and figures, by the same writer in a
+letter to the <i>Civil Engineers&rsquo; and Architects&rsquo; Journal</i>,
+1862.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote122a"></a><a href="#citation122a">{122a}</a>&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Nothing was said, but I was <i>looked out of countenance</i>,&rsquo;
+he says in a letter.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote171a"></a><a href="#citation171a">{171a}</a>&nbsp;
+Ill-formed - ugly. - [R. L. S.]<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote174a"></a><a href="#citation174a">{174a}</a>&nbsp;
+This is an incurable illusion of my grandfather&rsquo;s; he always writes
+&lsquo;distended&rsquo; for &lsquo;extended.&rsquo; - [R. L. S.]<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, RECORDS OF A FAMILY OF ENGINEERS ***<br>
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