nchanged; 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