The first man
that ever tried to build a lighthouse on this rock got washed off. That
was the end of him."

"Tell me about it?" pleaded the boy. "There's just time enough!"

"Ask your dad," said the other; "he's got the early history o' Tillamook
by heart. Meantime, I wish you all sorts of luck, lad, an' if ever
you're in a Coast Guard vessel on this coast and see Tillamook flashin',
don't forget the boys that never let a light go out!"

"Father," said Eric, a little later, when they had boarded the
lighthouse-tender and got into dry clothes, "tell me the story of the
building of Tillamook Lighthouse. They told me, over there, that you
knew all about it."

"I ought to," the inspector replied, "I helped build it. And it was a
job! I suppose Tillamook would be classed among the dozen hardest
lighthouse-building jobs of the world."

"What would be the others?"

"Well, in America, on the Pacific Coast there's St. George's Reef.
Spectacle Reef in the Great Lakes, and Minot's Ledge off Boston, were
bad. There are a lot around England and Scotland, like Eddystone, Wolf
Rock, the Long Ships, and Bell Rock--that's the old 'Inchcape Rock' you
read about in school--and there was a particularly bad one called
Or-Mar, in the Bay of Biscay. It took the engineer one year and a week
before he could make the first landing on Or-Mar."

"Over a year!"

"A year and a week," the inspector repeated. "And Tillamook wasn't much
better. It was in December 1878 that we got orders for a preliminary
survey of the reef for the purpose of choosing a lighthouse site. After
a dozen or more attempts, the engineer returned baffled. In the
following June, six months later, the rock was still unviolated. No
human foot had ever trodden it.

"Then the Department began to make demands. Washington got insistent.
Urgent orders were issued that the rock would have to be scaled. The
engineer was instructed to make a landing. Fortunately, toward the end
of the month there came a spell of calm weather."

"Like the calm to-day?"

"Just about. That's as calm as Tillamook ever gets. After several more
attempts, lasting nearly a week, the boat was run close to the rocks and
two sailors got ashore. A line was to be thrown to them. No sooner were
they ashore than the boat backed away, to keep from being stove in.
Remembering that it had been six months before the boat had a chance of
getting as near the rock as it had the minute before, the two sailors
be