ce
of men and materials to and fro....

"A temporary beacon was placed on the reef, while adjacent to the site
selected for the tower a smith's forge was made fast, so as to withstand
the dragging motion of the waves when the rock was submerged. The men
were housed on the _Smeaton_, which, during the spells of work on the
rock, rode at anchor a short distance away in deep water." [Footnote:
Talbot, "Lightships and Lighthouses."]

Once the engineers were all but lost when the _Smeaton_ slipped her
moorings and left them stranded on the rock.

In spite of all the obstacles, the work was completed at the end of two
years and the light was shown for the first time February 1, 1811.

"I found Robert Stevenson an appreciative and intelligent companion,"
writes Sir Walter Scott in his journal, speaking of a cruise he made
among the islands of Scotland with a party of engineers. The notes made
by him on this trip were used afterward in his two stories, "The Pirate"
and "Lord of the Isles."

"My grandfather was king in the service to his finger-tips," wrote Louis
Stevenson. "All should go his way, from the principal light-keeper's
coat to the assistant's fender, from the gravel in the garden walks to
the bad smell in the kitchen, or the oil spots on the storeroom floor.
It might be thought there was nothing more calculated to awaken men's
resentment, and yet his rule was not more thorough than it was
beneficent. His thought for the keepers was continual.... When a keeper
was sick, he lent him his horse and sent him mutton and brandy from the
ship.... They dwelt, many of them, in uninhabited isles or desert
forelands, totally cut off from shops.

"No servant of the Northern Lights came to Edinburgh but he was
entertained at Baxter Place. There at his own table my grandfather sat
down delightedly with his broad-spoken, homespun officers."

As he grew old his "medicine and delight" was his annual trip among his
lighthouses, but at length there came a time when this joy was taken
away from him and there came "the end of all his cruising; the knowledge
that he had looked the last on Sunburgh, and the wild crags of Skye, and
the Sound of Mull; that he was never again to hear the surf break in
Clashcarnock; never again to see lighthouse after lighthouse (all
younger than himself, and the more, part of his own device) open in the
hour of dusk their flower of fire, or the topaz and ruby interchange on
the summit of Bell Rock."