e 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 pre-occupied 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