were unhooked, her
bows given a sharp shove and she was off.

Down at water level, the slight swell seemed considerably larger.
Indeed, it actually was increasing. And, as they pulled in toward the
entrance of the reef, the boat met a rip in the current that seemed to
try to twist the oars from the hands of the boat-pullers. But
lighthouse-tender sailors are picked men, and though the little boat was
thrown about like a cork, she fairly clawed her way through the rip. As
they neared the entrance in the reef, the surf rushed between the
rocks, throwing up spume and spray as though a storm were raging. Eric
had to look back out to sea to convince himself that the ocean was still
as calm as it had seemed a moment or two before. In among the crags to
which the boat was driving, there was a turmoil of seething waters,
which came thundering in and which shrank away with a sucking sound, as
though disappointed of a long hoped-for vengeance.

"It's like a witches' pot!" shouted Eric to his father.

"This is about as calm as it ever gets," was the inspector's unmoved
reply. "You ought to see Tillamook when it's rough weather! I've seen it
with a real gale blowing, when it seemed impossible that the rock could
stand up five minutes against the terrific battering. Yet it just stands
there and defies the Pacific at its worst, as it has, I suppose, for a
hundred thousand years or more, and the light shines on serenely."

With consummate steering and a finer handling of the oars than Eric had
ever seen before--and he was something of an oarsman himself--the boat
from the lighthouse-tender neared the Rock. It was held immediately
under the crane and a rope was lowered with a loop on the end of it. The
inspector swung himself into this and went shooting up in the air, like
some oilskin-covered sea-gull. He took it as a matter of course, all a
part of the day's work, but, just the same, it gave Eric a queer
sensation. It was his turn next.

In a moment the loop was down again for him. The rest of the boat's crew
were busy getting ready the mail bag, the provisions and the other
supplies that they had brought with them, so the boy stepped
unhesitatingly into the loop.

Swish! He was on his upward flight almost before he knew it. The back
curl of a breaker, baffled in its attack on the rock, drenched him to
the skin. He laughed, for this was just what he had bargained for.
Beneath him, already but a small spot on the sea, was the b