dried up like a mummy.  A clay-coloured kerchief, folded round her neck, corresponded in colour to her corpse-like complexion.  Two light blue eyes that gleamed with a lustre like that of insanity, an utterance of astonishing rapidity, a nose and chin that almost met together, and a ghastly expression of cunning, gave her the effect of Hecate.  Such was Bessie Millie, to whom the mariners paid a sort of tribute with a feeling between jest and earnest.’

II

From about the beginning of the century up to 1807 Robert Stevenson was in partnership with Thomas Smith.  In the last-named year the partnership was dissolved; Thomas Smith returning to his business, and my grandfather becoming sole engineer to the Board of Northern Lights.

I must try, by excerpts from his diary and correspondence, to convey to the reader some idea of the ardency and thoroughness with which he threw himself into the largest and least of his multifarious engagements in this service.  But first I must say a word or two upon the life of lightkeepers, and the temptations to which they are more particularly exposed.  The lightkeeper occupies a position apart among men.  In sea-towers the complement has always been three since the deplorable business in the Eddystone, when one keeper died, and the survivor, signalling in vain for relief, was compelled to live for days with the dead body.  These usually pass their time by the pleasant human expedient of quarrelling; and sometimes, I am assured, not one of the three is on speaking terms with any other.  On shore stations, which on the Scottish coast are sometimes hardly less isolated, the usual number is two, a principal and an assistant.  The principal is dissatisfied with the assistant, or perhaps the assistant keeps pigeons, and the principal wants the water from the roof.  Their wives and families are with them, living cheek by jowl.  The children quarrel; Jockie hits Jimsie in the eye, and the mothers make haste to mingle in the dissension.  Perhaps there is trouble about a broken dish; perhaps Mrs. Assistant is more highly born than Mrs. Principal and gives herself airs; and the men are drawn in and the servants presently follow.  ’Church privileges have been denied the keeper’s and the assistant’s servants,’ I read in one case, and the eminently Scots periphrasis means neither more nor less than excommunication, ’on account of the discordant and quarrelsome state of the families.  The cause, when inquired into, proves to be tittle-tattle on both sides.’  The tender comes round; the foremen and artificers go from station to station; the gossip flies through the whole system of the service, and the stories, disfigured and exaggerated, return to their own birthplace with the returning tender.  The English Board was apparently shocked by the picture of these dissensions.  ‘When the Trinity House can,’ I find my grandfather writing at Beachy Head, in 1834, ’they do not appoint two