keepers, they disagree so ill. A man who has
a family is assisted by his family; and in this way,
to my experience and present observation, the business
is very much neglected. One keeper is, in my
view, a bad system. This day’s visit to
an English lighthouse convinces me of this, as the
lightkeeper was walking on a staff with the gout,
and the business performed by one of his daughters,
a girl of thirteen or fourteen years of age.’
This man received a hundred a year! It shows
a different reading of human nature, perhaps typical
of Scotland and England, that I find in my grandfather’s
diary the following pregnant entry: ’The
lightkeepers, agreeing ill, keep
one another to their duty.’
But the Scottish system was not alone founded on
this cynical opinion. The dignity and the comfort
of the northern lightkeeper were both attended to.
He had a uniform to ’raise him in his own estimation,
and in that of his neighbour, which is of consequence
to a person of trust. The keepers,’ my
grandfather goes on, in another place, ’are
attended to in all the detail of accommodation in the
best style as shipmasters; and this is believed to
have a sensible effect upon their conduct, and to
regulate their general habits as members of society.’
He notes, with the same dip of ink, that ’the
brasses were not clean, and the persons of the keepers
not trig’; and thus we find him writing
to a culprit: ’I have to complain that
you are not cleanly in your person, and that your manner
of speech is ungentle, and rather inclines to rudeness.
You must therefore take a different view of your
duties as a lightkeeper.’ A high ideal
for the service appears in these expressions, and will
be more amply illustrated further on. But even
the Scottish lightkeeper was frail. During the
unbroken solitude of the winter months, when inspection
is scarce possible, it must seem a vain toil to polish
the brass hand-rail of the stair, or to keep an unrewarded
vigil in the light-room; and the keepers are habitually
tempted to the beginnings of sloth, and must unremittingly
resist. He who temporises with his conscience
is already lost. I must tell here an anecdote
that illustrates the difficulties of inspection.
In the days of my uncle David and my father there was
a station which they regarded with jealousy.
The two engineers compared notes and were agreed.
The tower was always clean, but seemed always to
bear traces of a hasty cleansing, as though the keepers
had been suddenly forewarned. On inquiry, it
proved that such was the case, and that a wandering
fiddler was the unfailing harbinger of the engineer.
At last my father was storm-stayed one Sunday in
a port at the other side of the island. The visit
was quite overdue, and as he walked across upon the
Monday morning he promised himself that he should
at last take the keepers unprepared. They were
both waiting for him in uniform at the gate; the fiddler
had been there on Saturday!