a few ragged gillies, perhaps crouching in a bee-hive house, made up the only neighbours.  In such situations repairs and improvements could only be overtaken by collecting (as my grandfather expressed it) a few ‘lads,’ placing them under charge of a foreman, and despatching them about the coast as occasion served.  The particular danger of these seas increased the difficulty.  The course of the lighthouse tender lies amid iron-bound coasts, among tide-races, the whirlpools of the Pentland Firth, flocks of islands, flocks of reefs, many of them uncharted.  The aid of steam was not yet.  At first in random coasting sloop, and afterwards in the cutter belonging to the service, the engineer must ply and run amongst these multiplied dangers, and sometimes late into the stormy autumn.  For pages together my grandfather’s diary preserves a record of these rude experiences; of hard winds and rough seas; and of ’the try-sail and storm-jib, those old friends which I never like to see.’  They do not tempt to quotation, but it was the man’s element, in which he lived, and delighted to live, and some specimen must be presented.  On Friday, September 10th, 1830, the Regent lying in Lerwick Bay, we have this entry:  ‘The gale increases, with continued rain.’  On the morrow, Saturday, 11th, the weather appeared to moderate, and they put to sea, only to be driven by evening into Levenswick.  There they lay, ‘rolling much,’ with both anchors ahead and the square yard on deck, till the morning of Saturday, 18th.  Saturday and Sunday they were plying to the southward with a ’strong breeze and a heavy sea,’ and on Sunday evening anchored in Otterswick.  ’Monday, 20th, it blows so fresh that we have no communication with the shore.  We see Mr. Rome on the beach, but we cannot communicate with him.  It blows “mere fire,” as the sailors express it.’  And for three days more the diary goes on with tales of davits unshipped, high seas, strong gales from the southward, and the ship driven to refuge in Kirkwall or Deer Sound.  I have many a passage before me to transcribe, in which my grandfather draws himself as a man of minute and anxious exactitude about details.  It must not be forgotten that these voyages in the tender were the particular pleasure and reward of his existence; that he had in him a reserve of romance which carried him delightedly over these hardships and perils; that to him it was ‘great gain’ to be eight nights and seven days in the savage bay of Levenswick—­to read a book in the much agitated cabin—­to go on deck and hear the gale scream in his ears, and see the landscape dark with rain and the ship plunge at her two anchors—­and to turn in at night and wake again at morning, in his narrow berth, to the glamorous and continued voices of the gale.