ld be one of years; and my father was now looking for
a shore station where the stones might be quarried and dressed, the men
live, and the tender, with some degree of safety, lie at anchor.

I saw Earraid next from the stern-thwart of an Iona lugger, Sam Bough
and I sitting there cheek by jowl, with our feet upon our baggage, in a
beautiful, clear, northern summer eve. And behold! there was now a pier
of stone, there were rows of sheds, railways, travelling-cranes, a
street of cottages, an iron house for the resident engineer, wooden
bothies for the men, a stage where the courses of the tower were put
together experimentally, and behind the settlement a great gash in the
hillside where granite was quarried. In the bay, the steamer lay at her
moorings. All day long there hung about the place the music of chinking
tools; and even in the dead of night, the watchman carried his lantern
to and fro, in the dark settlement, and could light the pipe of any
midnight muser. It was, above all, strange to see Earraid on the Sunday,
when the sound of the tools ceased, and there fell a crystal quiet. All
about the green compound men would be sauntering in their Sunday's best,
walking with those lax joints of the reposing toiler, thoughtfully
smoking, talking small, as if in honour of the stillness, or hearkening
to the wailing of the gulls. And it was strange to see our Sabbath
services, held, as they were, in one of the bothies, with Mr. Brebner
reading at a table, and the congregation perched about in the double
tier of sleeping-bunks; and to hear the singing of the psalms, "the
chapters," the inevitable Spurgeon's sermon, and the old, eloquent
lighthouse prayer.

In fine weather, when by the spy-glass on the hill the sea was observed
to run low upon the reef, there would be a sound of preparation in the
very early morning; and before the sun had risen from behind Ben More,
the tender would steam out of the bay. Over fifteen sea-miles of the
great blue Atlantic rollers she ploughed her way, trailing at her tail a
brace of wallowing stone-lighters. The open ocean widened upon either
board, and the hills of the mainland began to go down on the horizon,
before she came to her unhomely destination, and lay-to at last where
the rock clapped its black head above the swell, with the tall iron
barrack on its spider legs, and the truncated tower, and the cranes
waving their arms, and the smoke of the engine-fire rising in the
mid-sea. An