d, 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 hav