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.'