r passage is exposed.

[Illustration: LIGHT-HOUSE ON THE SOUTH FARALLON.]

[Illustration: ARCH AT WEST END, FARALLON ISLANDS.]

The life of the keepers of the Farallon light is singularly lonely and
monotonous. Their house is built somewhat under the shelter of the rocks,
but they live in what to a landsman would seem a perpetual storm; the
ocean roars in their ears day and night; the boom of the surf is their
constant and only music; the wild scream of the sea-birds, the howl of
the sea-lions, the whistle and shriek of the gale, the dull, threatening
thunder of the vast breakers, are the dreary and desolate sounds which
lull them to sleep at night, and assail their ears when they awake. In the
winter months even their supply vessel, which, for the most part, is their
only connection with the world, is sometimes unable to make a landing for
weeks at a time. Chance visitors they see only occasionally, and at that
distance at which a steamer is safe from the surf, and at which a girl
could not even recognize her lover. The commerce of San Francisco passes
before their eyes, but so far away that they can not tell the ships and
steamers which sail by them voiceless and without greeting; and of the
events passing on the planet with which they have so frail a social tie
they learn only at long and irregular intervals. The change from sunshine
to fog is the chief variety in their lives; the hasty landing of supplies
the great event in their months. They can not even watch the growth of
trees and plants; and to a child born and reared in such a place, a sunny
lee under the shelter of rocks is probably the ideal of human felicity.

Except the rock of Tristan d'Acunha in the Southern Atlantic Ocean, I have
never seen an inhabited spot which seemed so utterly desolate, so entirely
separated from the world, whose people appeared to me to have such a
slender hold on mankind. Yet for their solace they know that a powerful
Government watches over their welfare, and--if that is any comfort--that,
thirty miles away, there are lights and music and laughter and singing, as
well as crowds, and all the anxieties and annoyances incidental to what we
are pleased to call civilization.

But though these lonely rocks contain but a small society of human
beings--the keepers and their families--they are filled with animal life;
for they are the home of a multitude of sea-lions, and of vast numbers of
birds and rabbits.

The rabbits, which l