ouse 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 togeth