consumes about eight hundred gallons in a year,
which cost not far from one dollar a gallon; but perhaps a few lives
would be saved, if better oil were provided. Another light-house keeper
said that the same proportion of winter-strained oil was sent to the
southernmost light-house in the Union as to the most northern. Formerly,
when this light-house had windows with small and thin panes, a severe
storm would sometimes break the glass, and then they were obliged to put
up a wooden shutter in haste to save their lights and reflectors,--and
sometimes in tempests, when the mariner stood most in need of their
guidance, they had thus nearly converted the light-house into a
dark-lantern, which emitted only a few feeble rays, and those commonly
on the land or lee side. He spoke of the anxiety and sense of
responsibility which he felt in cold and stormy nights in the winter,
when he knew that many a poor fellow was depending on him, and his lamps
burned dimly, the oil being chilled. Sometimes he was obliged to warm
the oil in a kettle in his house at midnight, and fill his lamps over
again,--for he could not have a fire in the light-house, it produced
such a sweat on the windows. His successor told me that he could not
keep too hot a fire in such a case. All this because the oil was poor. A
government lighting the mariners on its wintry coast with
summer-strained oil, to save expense! That were surely a summer-strained
mercy!

This keeper's successor, who kindly entertained me the next year, stated
that one extremely cold night, when this and all the neighboring lights
were burning summer oil, but he had been provident enough to reserve a
little winter oil against emergencies, he was waked up with anxiety, and
found that his oil was congealed, and his lights almost extinguished;
and when, after many hours' exertion, he had succeeded in replenishing
his reservoirs with winter oil at the wick-end, and with difficulty had
made them burn, he looked out, and found that the other lights in the
neighborhood, which were usually visible to him, had gone out, and he
heard afterward that the Pamet River and Billingsgate Lights also had
been extinguished.

Our host said that the frost, too, on the windows caused him much
trouble, and in sultry summer nights the moths covered them and dimmed
his lights; sometimes even small birds flew against the thick
plate-glass, and were found on the ground beneath in the morning with
their necks brok