I
It were hard to imagine a contrast more sharply defined than that between
the lives of the men and women of this family: the one so chambered, so
centred in the affections and the sensibilities; the other so active,
healthy, and expeditious. From May to November, Thomas Smith and Robert
Stevenson were on the mail, in the saddle, or at sea; and my grandfather,
in particular, seems to have been possessed with a demon of activity in
travel. In 1802, by direction of the Northern Lighthouse Board, he had
visited the coast of England from St. Bees, in Cumberland, and round by
the Scilly Islands to some place undecipherable by me; in all a distance
of 2500 miles. In 1806 I find him starting ‘on a tour round the south
coast of England, from the Humber to the Severn.’ Peace was not long
declared ere he found means to visit Holland, where he was in time to
see, in the navy-yard at Helvoetsluys, ‘about twenty of Bonaparte’s
_English flotilla_ lying in a state of decay, the object of curiosity to
Englishmen.’ By 1834 he seems to have been acquainted with the coast of
France from Dieppe to Bordeaux; and a main part of his duty as Engineer
to the Board of Northern Lights was one round of dangerous and laborious
travel.
In 1786, when Thomas Smith first received the appointment, the extended
and formidable coast of Scotland was lighted at a single point—the Isle
of May, in the jaws of the Firth of Forth, where, on a tower already a
hundred and fifty years old, an open coal-fire blazed in an iron
chauffer. The whole archipelago, thus nightly plunged in darkness, was
shunned by sea-going vessels, and the favourite courses were north about
Shetland and west about St. Kilda. When the Board met, four new lights
formed the extent of their intentions—Kinnaird Head, in Aberdeenshire, at
the eastern elbow of the coast; North Ronaldsay, in Orkney, to keep the
north and guide ships passing to the south’ard of Shetland; Island Glass,
on Harris, to mark the inner shore of the Hebrides and illuminate the
navigation of the Minch; and the Mull of Kintyre. These works were to be
attempted against obstacles, material and financial, that might have
staggered the most bold. Smith had no ship at his command till 1791; the
roads in those outlandish quarters where his business lay were scarce
passable when they existed, and the tower on the Mull of Kintyre stood
eleven months unlighted while the apparatus toiled and foundered by the
way among rocks and mosses. Not only had towers to be built and
apparatus transplanted; the supply of oil must be maintained, and the men
fed, in the same inaccessible and distant scenes; a whole service, with
its routine and hierarchy, had to be called out of nothing; and a new
trade (that of lightkeeper) to be taught, recruited, and organised. The
funds of the Board were at the first laughably inadequate. They embarked
on their career on a loan of twelve hundred pounds, and their income in
1789, after relief by a fresh Act of Parliament, amounted to less than
three hundred. It must be supposed that the thoughts of Thomas Smith, in
these early years, were sometimes coloured with despair; and since he
built and lighted one tower after another, and created and bequeathed to
his successors the elements of an excellent administration, it may be
conceded that he was not after all an unfortunate choice for a first
engineer.
War added fresh complications. In 1794 Smith came ‘very near to be
taken’ by a French squadron. In 1813 Robert Stevenson was cruising about
the neighbourhood of Cape Wrath in the immediate fear of Commodore
Rogers. The men, and especially the sailors, of the lighthouse service
must be protected by a medal and ticket from the brutal activity of the
press-gang. And the zeal of volunteer patriots was at times
embarrassing.
‘I set off on foot,’ writes my grandfather, ‘for Marazion, a town at
the head of Mount’s Bay, where I was in hopes of getting a boat to
freight. I had just got that length, and was making the necessary
inquiry, when a young man, accompanied by several idle-looking
fellows, came up to me, and in a hasty tone said, “Sir, in the king’s
name I seize your person and papers.” To which I replied that I
should be glad to see his authority, and know the reason of an
address so abrupt. He told me the want of time prevented his taking
regular steps, but that it would be necessary for me to return to
Penzance, as I was suspected of being a French spy. I proposed to
submit my papers to the nearest Justice of Peace, who was immediately
applied to, and came to the inn where I was. He seemed to be greatly
agitated, and quite at a loss how to proceed. The complaint
preferred against me was “that I had examined the Longships
Lighthouse with the most minute attention, and was no less particular
in my inquiries at the keepers of the lighthouse regarding the sunk
rocks lying off the Land’s End, with the sets of the currents and
tides along the coast: that I seemed particularly to regret the
situation of the rocks called the Seven Stones, and the loss of a
beacon which the Trinity Board had caused to be fixed on the Wolf
Rock; that I had taken notes of the bearings of several sunk rocks,
and a drawing of the lighthouse, and of Cape Cornwall. Further, that
I had refused the honour of Lord Edgecombe’s invitation to dinner,
offering as an apology that I had some particular business on hand.”’
My grandfather produced in answer his credentials and letter of credit;
but the justice, after perusing them, ‘very gravely observed that they
were “musty bits of paper,”’ and proposed to maintain the arrest. Some
more enlightened magistrates at Penzance relieved him of suspicion and
left him at liberty to pursue his journey,—‘which I did with so much
eagerness,’ he adds, ‘that I gave the two coal lights on the Lizard only
a very transient look.’
Lighthouse operations in Scotland differed essentially in character from
those in England. The English coast is in comparison a habitable, homely
place, well supplied with towns; the Scottish presents hundreds of miles
of savage islands and desolate moors. The Parliamentary committee of
1834, profoundly ignorant of this distinction, insisted with my
grandfather that the work at the various stations should be let out on
contract ‘in the neighbourhood,’ where sheep and deer, and gulls and
cormorants, and 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.
His perils and escapes were beyond counting. I shall only refer to two:
the first, because of the impression made upon himself; the second, from
the incidental picture it presents of the north islanders. On the 9th
October 1794 he took passage from Orkney in the sloop _Elizabeth_ of
Stromness. She made a fair passage till within view of Kinnaird Head,
where, as she was becalmed some three miles in the offing, and wind
seemed to threaten from the south-east, the captain landed him, to
continue his journey more expeditiously ashore. A gale immediately
followed, and the _Elizabeth_ was driven back to Orkney and lost with all
hands. The second escape I have been in the habit of hearing related by
an eye-witness, my own father, from the earliest days of childhood. On a
September night, the _Regent_ lay in the Pentland Firth in a fog and a
violent and windless swell. It was still dark, when they were alarmed by
the sound of breakers, and an anchor was immediately let go. The peep of
dawn discovered them swinging in desperate proximity to the Isle of Swona
{54a} and the surf bursting close under their stern. There was in this
place a hamlet of the inhabitants, fisher-folk and wreckers; their huts
stood close about the head of the beach. All slept; the doors were
closed, and there was no smoke, and the anxious watchers on board ship
seemed to contemplate a village of the dead. It was thought possible to
launch a boat and tow the _Regent_ from her place of danger; and with
this view a signal of distress was made and a gun fired with a red-hot
poker from the galley. Its detonation awoke the sleepers. Door after
door was opened, and in the grey light of the morning fisher after fisher
was seen to come forth, yawning and stretching himself, nightcap on head.
Fisher after fisher, I wrote, and my pen tripped; for it should rather
stand wrecker after wrecker. There was no emotion, no animation, it
scarce seemed any interest; not a hand was raised; but all callously
awaited the harvest of the sea, and their children stood by their side
and waited also. To the end of his life, my father remembered that
amphitheatre of placid spectators on the beach; and with a special and
natural animosity, the boys of his own age. But presently a light air
sprang up, and filled the sails, and fainted, and filled them again; and
little by little the _Regent_ fetched way against the swell, and clawed
off shore into the turbulent firth.
The purpose of these voyages was to effect a landing on open beaches or
among shelving rocks, not for persons only, but for coals and food, and
the fragile furniture of light-rooms. It was often impossible. In 1831
I find my grandfather ‘hovering for a week’ about the Pentland Skerries
for a chance to land; and it was almost always difficult. Much knack and
enterprise were early developed among the seamen of the service; their
management of boats is to this day a matter of admiration; and I find my
grandfather in his diary depicting the nature of their excellence in one
happily descriptive phrase, when he remarks that Captain Soutar had
landed ‘the small stores and nine casks of oil _with all the activity of
a smuggler_.’ And it was one thing to land, another to get on board
again. I have here a passage from the diary, where it seems to have been
touch-and-go. ‘I landed at Tarbetness, on the eastern side of the point,
in a _mere gale or blast of wind_ from west-south-west, at 2 p.m. It
blew so fresh that the captain, in a kind of despair, went off to the
ship, leaving myself and the steward ashore. While I was in the
light-room, I felt it shaking and waving, not with the tremor of the Bell
Rock, but with the _waving of a tree_! This the light-keepers seemed to
be quite familiar to, the principal keeper remarking that “it was very
pleasant,” perhaps meaning interesting or curious. The captain worked
the vessel into smooth water with admirable dexterity, and I got on board
again about 6 p.m. from the other side of the point.’ But not even the
dexterity of Soutar could prevail always; and my grandfather must at
times have been left in strange berths and with but rude provision. I
may instance the case of my father, who was storm-bound three days upon
an islet, sleeping in the uncemented and unchimneyed houses of the
islanders, and subsisting on a diet of nettle-soup and lobsters.
The name of Soutar has twice escaped my pen, and I feel I owe him a
vignette. Soutar first attracted notice as mate of a praam at the Bell
Rock, and rose gradually to be captain of the _Regent_. He was active,
admirably skilled in his trade, and a man incapable of fear. Once, in
London, he fell among a gang of confidence-men, naturally deceived by his
rusticity and his prodigious accent. They plied him with drink—a
hopeless enterprise, for Soutar could not be made drunk; they proposed
cards, and Soutar would not play. At last, one of them, regarding him
with a formidable countenance, inquired if he were not frightened? ‘I’m
no’ very easy fleyed,’ replied the captain. And the rooks withdrew after
some easier pigeon. So many perils shared, and the partial familiarity
of so many voyages, had given this man a stronghold in my grandfather’s
estimation; and there is no doubt but he had the art to court and please
him with much hypocritical skill. He usually dined on Sundays in the
cabin. He used to come down daily after dinner for a glass of port or
whisky, often in his full rig of sou’-wester, oilskins, and long boots;
and I have often heard it described how insinuatingly he carried himself
on these appearances, artfully combining the extreme of deference with a
blunt and seamanlike demeanour. My father and uncles, with the devilish
penetration of the boy, were far from being deceived; and my father,
indeed, was favoured with an object-lesson not to be mistaken. He had
crept one rainy night into an apple-barrel on deck, and from this place
of ambush overheard Soutar and a comrade conversing in their oilskins.
The smooth sycophant of the cabin had wholly disappeared, and the boy
listened with wonder to a vulgar and truculent ruffian. Of Soutar, I may
say _tantum vidi_, having met him in the Leith docks now more than thirty
years ago, when he abounded in the praises of my grandfather, encouraged
me (in the most admirable manner) to pursue his footprints, and left
impressed for ever on my memory the image of his own Bardolphian nose.
He died not long after.
The engineer was not only exposed to the hazards of the sea; he must
often ford his way by land to remote and scarce accessible places, beyond
reach of the mail or the post-chaise, beyond even the tracery of the
bridle-path, and guided by natives across bog and heather. Up to 1807 my
grand-father seems to have travelled much on horseback; but he then gave
up the idea—‘such,’ he writes with characteristic emphasis and capital
letters, ‘is the Plague of Baiting.’ He was a good pedestrian; at the
age of fifty-eight I find him covering seventeen miles over the moors of
the Mackay country in less than seven hours, and that is not bad
travelling for a scramble. The piece of country traversed was already a
familiar track, being that between Loch Eriboll and Cape Wrath; and I
think I can scarce do better than reproduce from the diary some traits of
his first visit. The tender lay in Loch Eriboll; by five in the morning
they sat down to breakfast on board; by six they were ashore—my
grandfather, Mr. Slight an assistant, and Soutar of the jolly nose, and
had been taken in charge by two young gentlemen of the neighbourhood and
a pair of gillies. About noon they reached the Kyle of Durness and
passed the ferry. By half-past three they were at Cape Wrath—not yet
known by the emphatic abbreviation of ‘The Cape’—and beheld upon all
sides of them unfrequented shores, an expanse of desert moor, and the
high-piled Western Ocean. The site of the tower was chosen. Perhaps it
is by inheritance of blood, but I know few things more inspiriting than
this location of a lighthouse in a designated space of heather and air,
through which the sea-birds are still flying. By 9 p.m. the return
journey had brought them again to the shores of the Kyle. The night was
dirty, and as the sea was high and the ferry-boat small, Soutar and Mr.
Stevenson were left on the far side, while the rest of the party embarked
and were received into the darkness. They made, in fact, a safe though
an alarming passage; but the ferryman refused to repeat the adventure;
and my grand-father and the captain long paced the beach, impatient for
their turn to pass, and tormented with rising anxiety as to the fate of
their companions. At length they sought the shelter of a shepherd’s
house. ‘We had miserable up-putting,’ the diary continues, ‘and on both
sides of the ferry much anxiety of mind. Our beds were clean straw, and
but for the circumstance of the boat, I should have slept as soundly as
ever I did after a walk through moss and mire of sixteen hours.’
To go round the lights, even to-day, is to visit past centuries. The
tide of tourists that flows yearly in Scotland, vulgarising all where it
approaches, is still defined by certain barriers. It will be long ere
there is a hotel at Sumburgh or a hydropathic at Cape Wrath; it will be
long ere any _char-à-banc_, laden with tourists, shall drive up to Barra
Head or Monach, the Island of the Monks. They are farther from London
than St. Petersburg, and except for the towers, sounding and shining all
night with fog-bells and the radiance of the light-room, glittering by
day with the trivial brightness of white paint, these island and moorland
stations seem inaccessible to the civilisation of to-day, and even to the
end of my grandfather’s career the isolation was far greater. There ran
no post at all in the Long Island; from the light-house on Barra Head a
boat must be sent for letters as far as Tobermory, between sixty and
seventy miles of open sea; and the posts of Shetland, which had surprised
Sir Walter Scott in 1814, were still unimproved in 1833, when my
grandfather reported on the subject. The group contained at the time a
population of 30,000 souls, and enjoyed a trade which had increased in
twenty years seven-fold, to between three and four thousand tons. Yet
the mails were despatched and received by chance coasting vessels at the
rate of a penny a letter; six and eight weeks often elapsed between
opportunities, and when a mail was to be made up, sometimes at a moment’s
notice, the bellman was sent hastily through the streets of Lerwick.
Between Shetland and Orkney, only seventy miles apart, there was ‘no
trade communication whatever.’
Such was the state of affairs, only sixty years ago, with the three
largest clusters of the Scottish Archipelago; and forty-seven years
earlier, when Thomas Smith began his rounds, or forty-two, when Robert
Stevenson became conjoined with him in these excursions, the barbarism
was deep, the people sunk in superstition, the circumstances of their
life perhaps unique in history. Lerwick and Kirkwall, like Guam or the
Bay of Islands, were but barbarous ports where whalers called to take up
and to return experienced seamen. On the outlying islands the clergy
lived isolated, thinking other thoughts, dwelling in a different country
from their parishioners, like missionaries in the South Seas. My
grandfather’s unrivalled treasury of anecdote was never written down; it
embellished his talk while he yet was, and died with him when he died;
and such as have been preserved relate principally to the islands of
Ronaldsay and Sanday, two of the Orkney group. These bordered on one of
the water-highways of civilisation; a great fleet passed annually in
their view, and of the shipwrecks of the world they were the scene and
cause of a proportion wholly incommensurable to their size. In one year,
1798, my grandfather found the remains of no fewer than five vessels on
the isle of Sanday, which is scarcely twelve miles long.
‘Hardly a year passed,’ he writes, ‘without instances of this kind;
for, owing to the projecting points of this strangely formed island,
the lowness and whiteness of its eastern shores, and the wonderful
manner in which the scanty patches of land are intersected with lakes
and pools of water, it becomes, even in daylight, a deception, and
has often been fatally mistaken for an open sea. It had even become
proverbial with some of the inhabitants to observe that “if wrecks
were to happen, they might as well be sent to the poor isle of Sanday
as anywhere else.” On this and the neighbouring islands the
inhabitants had certainly had their share of wrecked goods, for the
eye is presented with these melancholy remains in almost every form.
For example, although quarries are to be met with generally in these
islands, and the stones are very suitable for building dykes
(_Anglicé_, walls), yet instances occur of the land being enclosed,
even to a considerable extent, with ship-timbers. The author has
actually seen a park (_Anglicé_, meadow) paled round chiefly with
cedar-wood and mahogany from the wreck of a Honduras-built ship; and
in one island, after the wreck of a ship laden with wine, the
inhabitants have been known to take claret to their barley-meal
porridge. On complaining to one of the pilots of the badness of his
boat’s sails, he replied to the author with some degree of
pleasantry, “Had it been His will that you came na’ here wi’ your
lights, we might ‘a’ had better sails to our boats, and more o’ other
things.” It may further be mentioned that when some of Lord Dundas’s
farms are to be let in these islands a competition takes place for
the lease, and it is _bona fide_ understood that a much higher rent
is paid than the lands would otherwise give were it not for the
chance of making considerably by the agency and advantages attending
shipwrecks on the shores of the respective farms.’
The people of North Ronaldsay still spoke Norse, or, rather, mixed it
with their English. The walls of their huts were built to a great
thickness of rounded stones from the sea-beach; the roof flagged, loaded
with earth, and perforated by a single hole for the escape of smoke. The
grass grew beautifully green on the flat house-top, where the family
would assemble with their dogs and cats, as on a pastoral lawn; there
were no windows, and in my grandfather’s expression, ‘there was really no
demonstration of a house unless it were the diminutive door.’ He once
landed on Ronaldsay with two friends. The inhabitants crowded and
pressed so much upon the strangers that the bailiff, or resident factor
of the island, blew with his ox-horn, calling out to the natives to stand
off and let the gentlemen come forward to the laird; upon which one of
the islanders, as spokesman, called out, “God ha’e us, man! thou needsna
mak’ sic a noise. It’s no’ every day we ha’e _three hatted men_ on our
isle.”’ When the Surveyor of Taxes came (for the first time, perhaps) to
Sanday, and began in the King’s name to complain of the unconscionable
swarms of dogs, and to menace the inhabitants with taxation, it chanced
that my grandfather and his friend, Dr. Patrick Neill, were received by
an old lady in a Ronaldsay hut. Her hut, which was similar to the model
described, stood on a Ness, or point of land jutting into the sea. They
were made welcome in the firelit cellar, placed ‘in _casey_ or
straw-worked chairs, after the Norwegian fashion, with arms, and a canopy
overhead,’ and given milk in a wooden dish. These hospitalities attended
to, the old lady turned at once to Dr. Neill, whom she took for the
Surveyor of Taxes. ‘Sir,’ said she, ‘gin ye’ll tell the King that I
canna keep the Ness free o’ the Bangers (sheep) without twa hun’s, and
twa guid hun’s too, he’ll pass me threa the tax on dugs.’
This familiar confidence, these traits of engaging simplicity, are
characters of a secluded people. Mankind—and, above all, islanders—come
very swiftly to a bearing, and find very readily, upon one convention or
another, a tolerable corporate life. The danger is to those from
without, who have not grown up from childhood in the islands, but appear
suddenly in that narrow horizon, life-sized apparitions. For these no
bond of humanity exists, no feeling of kinship is awakened by their
peril; they will assist at a shipwreck, like the fisher-folk of Lunga, as
spectators, and when the fatal scene is over, and the beach strewn with
dead bodies, they will fence their fields with mahogany, and, after a
decent grace, sup claret to their porridge. It is not wickedness: it is
scarce evil; it is only, in its highest power, the sense of isolation and
the wise disinterestedness of feeble and poor races. Think how many
viking ships had sailed by these islands in the past, how many vikings
had landed, and raised turmoil, and broken up the barrows of the dead,
and carried off the wines of the living; and blame them, if you are able,
for that belief (which may be called one of the parables of the devil’s
gospel) that a man rescued from the sea will prove the bane of his
deliverer. It might be thought that my grandfather, coming there
unknown, and upon an employment so hateful to the inhabitants, must have
run the hazard of his life. But this were to misunderstand. He came
franked by the laird and the clergyman; he was the King’s officer; the
work was ‘opened with prayer by the Rev. Walter Trail, minister of the
parish’; God and the King had decided it, and the people of these pious
islands bowed their heads. There landed, indeed, in North Ronaldsay,
during the last decade of the eighteenth century, a traveller whose life
seems really to have been imperilled. A very little man of a swarthy
complexion, he came ashore, exhausted and unshaved, from a long boat
passage, and lay down to sleep in the home of the parish schoolmaster.
But he had been seen landing. The inhabitants had identified him for a
Pict, as, by some singular confusion of name, they called the dark and
dwarfish aboriginal people of the land. Immediately the obscure ferment
of a race-hatred, grown into a superstition, began to work in their
bosoms, and they crowded about the house and the room-door with fearful
whisperings. For some time the schoolmaster held them at bay, and at
last despatched a messenger to call my grand-father. He came: he found
the islanders beside themselves at this unwelcome resurrection of the
dead and the detested; he was shown, as adminicular of testimony, the
traveller’s uncouth and thick-soled boots; he argued, and finding
argument unavailing, consented to enter the room and examine with his own
eyes the sleeping Pict. One glance was sufficient: the man was now a
missionary, but he had been before that an Edinburgh shopkeeper with whom
my grandfather had dealt. He came forth again with this report, and the
folk of the island, wholly relieved, dispersed to their own houses. They
were timid as sheep and ignorant as limpets; that was all. But the Lord
deliver us from the tender mercies of a frightened flock!
I will give two more instances of their superstition. When Sir Walter
Scott visited the Stones of Stennis, my grandfather put in his pocket a
hundred-foot line, which he unfortunately lost.
‘Some years afterwards,’ he writes, ‘one of my assistants on a visit
to the Stones of Stennis took shelter from a storm in a cottage close
by the lake; and seeing a box-measuring-line in the bole or sole of
the cottage window, he asked the woman where she got this well-known
professional appendage. She said: “O sir, ane of the bairns fand it
lang syne at the Stanes; and when drawing it out we took fright, and
thinking it had belanged to the fairies, we threw it into the bole,
and it has layen there ever since.”’
This is for the one; the last shall be a sketch by the master hand of
Scott himself:
‘At the village of Stromness, on the Orkney main island, called
Pomona, lived, in 1814, an aged dame called Bessie Millie, who helped
out her subsistence by selling favourable winds to mariners. He was
a venturous master of a vessel who left the roadstead of Stromness
without paying his offering to propitiate Bessie Millie! Her fee was
extremely moderate, being exactly sixpence, for which she boiled her
kettle and gave the bark the advantage of her prayers, for she
disclaimed all unlawful acts. The wind thus petitioned for was sure,
she said, to arrive, though occasionally the mariners had to wait
some time for it. The woman’s dwelling and appearance were not
unbecoming her pretensions. Her house, which was on the brow of the
steep hill on which Stromness is founded, was only accessible by a
series of dirty and precipitous lanes, and for exposure might have
been the abode of Eolus himself, in whose commodities the inhabitant
dealt. She herself was, as she told us, nearly one hundred years
old, withered and 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 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!
My grandfather, as will appear from the following extracts, was much a
martinet, and had a habit of expressing himself on paper with an almost
startling emphasis. Personally, with his powerful voice, sanguine
countenance, and eccentric and original locutions, he was well qualified
to inspire a salutary terror in the service.
‘I find that the keepers have, by some means or another, got into the
way of cleaning too much with rotten-stone and oil. I take the
principal keeper to _task_ on this subject, and make him bring a
clean towel and clean one of the brazen frames, which leaves the
towel in an odious state. This towel I put up in a sheet of paper,
seal, and take with me to confront Mr. Murdoch, who has just left the
station.’ ‘This letter’—a stern enumeration of complaints—‘to lie a
week on the light-room book-place, and to be put in the Inspector’s
hands when he comes round.’ ‘It is the most painful thing that can
occur for me to have a correspondence of this kind with any of the
keepers; and when I come to the Lighthouse, instead of having the
satisfaction to meet them with approbation, it is distressing when
one is obliged to put on a most angry countenance and demeanour; but
from such culpable negligence as you have shown there is no avoiding
it. I hold it as a fixed maxim that, when a man or a family put on a
slovenly appearance in their houses, stairs, and lanterns, I always
find their reflectors, burners, windows, and light in general, ill
attended to; and, therefore, I must insist on cleanliness
throughout.’ ‘I find you very deficient in the duty of the high
tower. You thus place your appointment as Principal Keeper in
jeopardy; and I think it necessary, as an old servant of the Board,
to put you upon your guard once for all at this time. I call upon
you to recollect what was formerly and is now said to you. The state
of the backs of the reflectors at the high tower was disgraceful, as
I pointed out to you on the spot. They were as if spitten upon, and
greasy finger-marks upon the back straps. I demand an explanation of
this state of things.’ ‘The cause of the Commissioners dismissing
you is expressed in the minute; and it must be a matter of regret to
you that you have been so much engaged in smuggling, and also that
the Reports relative to the cleanliness of the Lighthouse, upon being
referred to, rather added to their unfavourable opinion.’ ‘I do not
go into the dwelling-house, but severely chide the lightkeepers for
the disagreement that seems to subsist among them.’ ‘The families of
the two lightkeepers here agree very ill. I have effected a
reconciliation for the present.’ ‘Things are in a very _humdrum_
state here. There is no painting, and in and out of doors no taste
or tidiness displayed. Robert’s wife _greets_ and M’Gregor’s scolds;
and Robert is so down-hearted that he says he is unfit for duty. I
told him that if he was to mind wives’ quarrels, and to take them up,
the only way was for him and M’Gregor to go down to the point like
Sir G. Grant and Lord Somerset.’ ‘I cannot say that I have
experienced a more unpleasant meeting than that of the lighthouse
folks this morning, or ever saw a stronger example of unfeeling
barbarity than the conduct which the ---s exhibited. These two
cold-hearted persons, not contented with having driven the daughter
of the poor nervous woman from her father’s house, _both_ kept
_pouncing_ at her, lest she should forget her great misfortune.
Write me of their conduct. Do not make any communication of the
state of these families at Kinnaird Head, as this would be like
_Tale-bearing_.’
There is the great word out. Tales and Tale-bearing, always with the
emphatic capitals, run continually in his correspondence. I will give
but two instances:—
‘Write to David [one of the lightkeepers] and caution him to be more
prudent how he expresses himself. Let him attend his duty to the
Lighthouse and his family concerns, and give less heed to
Tale-bearers.’ ‘I have not your last letter at hand to quote its
date; but, if I recollect, it contains some kind of tales, which
nonsense I wish you would lay aside, and notice only the concerns of
your family and the important charge committed to you.’
Apparently, however, my grandfather was not himself inaccessible to the
Tale-bearer, as the following indicates:
‘In walking along with Mr. --- , I explain to him that I should be
under the necessity of looking more closely into the business here
from his conduct at Buddonness, which had given an instance of
weakness in the Moral principle which had staggered my opinion of
him. His answer was, “That will be with regard to the lass?” I told
him I was to enter no farther with him upon the subject.’ ‘Mr.
Miller appears to be master and man. I am sorry about this foolish
fellow. Had I known his train, I should not, as I did, have rather
forced him into the service. Upon finding the windows in the state
they were, I turned upon Mr. Watt, and especially upon Mr. Stewart.
The latter did not appear for a length of time to have visited the
light-room. On asking the cause—did Mr. Watt and him (_sic_)
disagree; he said no; but he had got very bad usage from the
assistant, “who was a very obstreperous man.” I could not bring Mr.
Watt to put in language his objections to Miller; all I could get was
that, he being your friend, and saying he was unwell, he did not like
to complain or to push the man; that the man seemed to have no liking
to anything like work; that he was unruly; that, being an educated
man, he despised them. I was, however, determined to have out of
these _unwilling_ witnesses the language alluded to. I fixed upon
Mr. Stewart as chief; he hedged. My curiosity increased, and I
urged. Then he said, “What would I think, just exactly, of Mr. Watt
being called an Old B-?” You may judge of my surprise. There was
not another word uttered. This was quite enough, as coming from a
person I should have calculated upon quite different behaviour from.
It spoke a volume of the man’s mind and want of principle.’ ‘Object
to the keeper keeping a Bull-Terrier dog of ferocious appearance. It
is dangerous, as we land at all times of the night.’ ‘Have only to
complain of the storehouse floor being spotted with oil. Give orders
for this being instantly rectified, so that on my return to-morrow I
may see things in good order.’ ‘The furniture of both houses wants
much rubbing. Mrs. ---’s carpets are absurd beyond anything I have
seen. I want her to turn the fenders up with the bottom to the
fireplace: the carpets, when not likely to be in use, folded up and
laid as a hearthrug partly under the fender.’
My grandfather was king in the service to his finger-tips. All should go
in his way, from the principal lightkeeper’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 store-room floor. It might be thought
there was nothing more calculated to awake men’s resentment, and yet his
rule was not more thorough than it was beneficent. His thought for the
keepers was continual, and it did not end with their lives. He tried to
manage their successions; he thought no pains too great to arrange
between a widow and a son who had succeeded his father; he was often
harassed and perplexed by tales of hardship; and I find him writing,
almost in despair, of their improvident habits and the destitution that
awaited their families upon a death. ‘The house being completely
furnished, they come into possession without necessaries, and they go out
NAKED. The insurance seems to have failed, and what next is to be
tried?’ While they lived he wrote behind their backs to arrange for the
education of their children, or to get them other situations if they
seemed unsuitable for the Northern Lights. When he was at a lighthouse
on a Sunday he held prayers and heard the children read. When a keeper
was sick, he lent him his horse and sent him mutton and brandy from the
ship. ‘The assistant’s wife having been this morning confined, there was
sent ashore a bottle of sherry and a few rusks—a practice which I have
always observed in this service,’ he writes. They dwelt, many of them,
in uninhabited isles or desert forelands, totally cut off from shops.
Many of them were, besides, fallen into a rustic dishabitude of life, so
that even when they visited a city they could scarce be trusted with
their own affairs, as (for example) he who carried home to his children,
thinking they were oranges, a bag of lemons. And my grandfather seems to
have acted, at least in his early years, as a kind of gratuitous agent
for the service. Thus I find him writing to a keeper in 1806, when his
mind was already preoccupied with arrangements for the Bell Rock: ‘I am
much afraid I stand very unfavourably with you as a man of promise, as I
was to send several things of which I believe I have more than once got
the memorandum. All I can say is that in this respect you are not
singular. This makes me no better; but really I have been driven about
beyond all example in my past experience, and have been essentially
obliged to neglect my own urgent affairs.’ No servant of the Northern
Lights came to Edinburgh but he was entertained at Baxter’s Place to
breakfast. There, at his own table, my grandfather sat down delightedly
with his broad-spoken, homespun officers. His whole relation to the
service was, in fact, patriarchal; and I believe I may say that
throughout its ranks he was adored. I have spoken with many who knew
him; I was his grandson, and their words may have very well been words of
flattery; but there was one thing that could not be affected, and that
was the look and light that came into their faces at the name of Robert
Stevenson.
In the early part of the century the foreman builder was a young man of
the name of George Peebles, a native of Anstruther. My grandfather had
placed in him a very high degree of confidence, and he was already
designated to be foreman at the Bell Rock, when, on Christmas-day 1806,
on his way home from Orkney, he was lost in the schooner _Traveller_.
The tale of the loss of the _Traveller_ is almost a replica of that of
the _Elizabeth_ of Stromness; like the _Elizabeth_ she came as far as
Kinnaird Head, was then surprised by a storm, driven back to Orkney, and
bilged and sank on the island of Flotta. It seems it was about the dusk
of the day when the ship struck, and many of the crew and passengers were
drowned. About the same hour, my grandfather was in his office at the
writing-table; and the room beginning to darken, he laid down his pen and
fell asleep. In a dream he saw the door open and George Peebles come in,
‘reeling to and fro, and staggering like a drunken man,’ with water
streaming from his head and body to the floor. There it gathered into a
wave which, sweeping forward, submerged my grandfather. Well, no matter
how deep; versions vary; and at last he awoke, and behold it was a dream!
But it may be conceived how profoundly the impression was written even on
the mind of a man averse from such ideas, when the news came of the wreck
on Flotta and the death of George.
George’s vouchers and accounts had perished with himself; and it appeared
he was in debt to the Commissioners. But my grandfather wrote to Orkney
twice, collected evidence of his disbursements, and proved him to be
seventy pounds ahead. With this sum, he applied to George’s brothers,
and had it apportioned between their mother and themselves. He
approached the Board and got an annuity of £5 bestowed on the widow
Peebles; and we find him writing her a long letter of explanation and
advice, and pressing on her the duty of making a will. That he should
thus act executor was no singular instance. But besides this we are able
to assist at some of the stages of a rather touching experiment; no less
than an attempt to secure Charles Peebles heir to George’s favour. He is
despatched, under the character of ‘a fine young man’; recommended to
gentlemen for ‘advice, as he’s a stranger in your place, and indeed to
this kind of charge, this being his first outset as Foreman’; and for a
long while after, the letter-book, in the midst of that thrilling first
year of the Bell Rock, is encumbered with pages of instruction and
encouragement. The nature of a bill, and the precautions that are to be
observed about discounting it, are expounded at length and with
clearness. ‘You are not, I hope, neglecting, Charles, to work the
harbour at spring-tides; and see that you pay the greatest attention to
get the well so as to supply the keeper with water, for he is a very
helpless fellow, and so unfond of hard work that I fear he could do ill
to keep himself in water by going to the other side for it.’—‘With regard
to spirits, Charles, I see very little occasion for it.’ These abrupt
apostrophes sound to me like the voice of an awakened conscience; but
they would seem to have reverberated in vain in the ears of Charles.
There was trouble in Pladda, his scene of operations; his men ran away
from him, there was at least a talk of calling in the Sheriff. ‘I fear,’
writes my grandfather, ‘you have been too indulgent, and I am sorry to
add that men do not answer to be too well treated, a circumstance which I
have experienced, and which you will learn as you go on in business.’ I
wonder, was not Charles Peebles himself a case in point? Either death,
at least, or disappointment and discharge, must have ended his service in
the Northern Lights; and in later correspondence I look in vain for any
mention of his name—Charles, I mean, not Peebles: for as late as 1839 my
grandfather is patiently writing to another of the family: ‘I am sorry
you took the trouble of applying to me about your son, as it lies quite
out of my way to forward his views in the line of his profession as a
Draper.’
III
A professional life of Robert Stevenson has been already given to the
world by his son David, and to that I would refer those interested in
such matters. But my own design, which is to represent the man, would be
very ill carried out if I suffered myself or my reader to forget that he
was, first of all and last of all, an engineer. His chief claim to the
style of a mechanical inventor is on account of the Jib or Balance Crane
of the Bell Rock, which are beautiful contrivances. But the great merit
of this engineer was not in the field of engines. He was above all
things a projector of works in the face of nature, and a modifier of
nature itself. A road to be made, a tower to be built, a harbour to be
constructed, a river to be trained and guided in its channel—these were
the problems with which his mind was continually occupied; and for these
and similar ends he travelled the world for more than half a century,
like an artist, note-book in hand.
He once stood and looked on at the emptying of a certain oil-tube; he did
so watch in hand, and accurately timed the operation; and in so doing
offered the perfect type of his profession. The fact acquired might
never be of use: it was acquired: another link in the world’s huge chain
of processes was brought down to figures and placed at the service of the
engineer. ‘The very term mensuration sounds _engineer-like_,’ I find him
writing; and in truth what the engineer most properly deals with is that
which can be measured, weighed, and numbered. The time of any operation
in hours and minutes, its cost in pounds, shillings, and pence, the
strain upon a given point in foot-pounds—these are his conquests, with
which he must continually furnish his mind, and which, after he has
acquired them, he must continually apply and exercise. They must be not
only entries in note-books, to be hurriedly consulted; in the actor’s
phrase, he must be _stale_ in them; in a word of my grandfather’s, they
must be ‘fixed in the mind like the ten fingers and ten toes.’
These are the certainties of the engineer; so far he finds a solid
footing and clear views. But the province of formulas and constants is
restricted. Even the mechanical engineer comes at last to an end of his
figures, and must stand up, a practical man, face to face with the
discrepancies of nature and the hiatuses of theory. After the machine is
finished, and the steam turned on, the next is to drive it; and
experience and an exquisite sympathy must teach him where a weight should
be applied or a nut loosened. With the civil engineer, more properly so
called (if anything can be proper with this awkward coinage), the
obligation starts with the beginning. He is always the practical man.
The rains, the winds and the waves, the complexity and the fitfulness of
nature, are always before him. He has to deal with the unpredictable,
with those forces (in Smeaton’s phrase) that ‘are subject to no
calculation’; and still he must predict, still calculate them, at his
peril. His work is not yet in being, and he must foresee its influence:
how it shall deflect the tide, exaggerate the waves, dam back the
rain-water, or attract the thunderbolt. He visits a piece of sea-board;
and from the inclination and soil of the beach, from the weeds and
shell-fish, from the configuration of the coast and the depth of
soundings outside, he must deduce what magnitude of waves is to be looked
for. He visits a river, its summer water babbling on shallows; and he
must not only read, in a thousand indications, the measure of winter
freshets, but be able to predict the violence of occasional great floods.
Nay, and more; he must not only consider that which is, but that which
may be. Thus I find my grandfather writing, in a report on the North Esk
Bridge: ‘A less waterway might have sufficed, but the _valleys may come
to be meliorated by drainage_.’ One field drained after another through
all that confluence of vales, and we come to a time when they shall
precipitate by so much a more copious and transient flood, as the gush of
the flowing drain-pipe is superior to the leakage of a peat.
It is plain there is here but a restricted use for formulas. In this
sort of practice, the engineer has need of some transcendental sense.
Smeaton, the pioneer, bade him obey his ‘feelings’; my father, that
‘power of estimating obscure forces which supplies a coefficient of its
own to every rule.’ The rules must be everywhere indeed; but they must
everywhere be modified by this transcendental coefficient, everywhere
bent to the impression of the trained eye and the _feelings_ of the
engineer. A sentiment of physical laws and of the scale of nature, which
shall have been strong in the beginning and progressively fortified by
observation, must be his guide in the last recourse. I had the most
opportunity to observe my father. He would pass hours on the beach,
brooding over the waves, counting them, noting their least deflection,
noting when they broke. On Tweedside, or by Lyne or Manor, we have spent
together whole afternoons; to me, at the time, extremely wearisome; to
him, as I am now sorry to think, bitterly mortifying. The river was to
me a pretty and various spectacle; I could not see—I could not be made to
see—it otherwise. To my father it was a chequer-board of lively forces,
which he traced from pool to shallow with minute appreciation and
enduring interest. ‘That bank was being under-cut,’ he might say. ‘Why?
Suppose you were to put a groin out here, would not the _filum fluminis_
be cast abruptly off across the channel? and where would it impinge upon
the other shore? and what would be the result? Or suppose you were to
blast that boulder, what would happen? Follow it—use the eyes God has
given you—can you not see that a great deal of land would be reclaimed
upon this side?’ It was to me like school in holidays; but to him, until
I had worn him out with my invincible triviality, a delight. Thus he
pored over the engineer’s voluminous handy-book of nature; thus must,
too, have pored my grand-father and uncles.
But it is of the essence of this knowledge, or this knack of mind, to be
largely incommunicable. ‘It cannot be imparted to another,’ says my
father. The verbal casting-net is thrown in vain over these evanescent,
inferential relations. Hence the insignificance of much engineering
literature. So far as the science can be reduced to formulas or
diagrams, the book is to the point; so far as the art depends on intimate
study of the ways of nature, the author’s words will too often be found
vapid. This fact—that engineering looks one way, and literature
another—was what my grand-father overlooked. All his life long, his pen
was in his hand, piling up a treasury of knowledge, preparing himself
against all possible contingencies. Scarce anything fell under his
notice but he perceived in it some relation to his work, and chronicled
it in the pages of his journal in his always lucid, but sometimes inexact
and wordy, style. The Travelling Diary (so he called it) was kept in
fascicles of ruled paper, which were at last bound up, rudely indexed,
and put by for future reference. Such volumes as have reached me contain
a surprising medley: the whole details of his employment in the Northern
Lights and his general practice; the whole biography of an enthusiastic
engineer. Much of it is useful and curious; much merely otiose; and much
can only be described as an attempt to impart that which cannot be
imparted in words. Of such are his repeated and heroic descriptions of
reefs; monuments of misdirected literary energy, which leave upon the
mind of the reader no effect but that of a multiplicity of words and the
suggested vignette of a lusty old gentleman scrambling among tangle. It
is to be remembered that he came to engineering while yet it was in the
egg and without a library, and that he saw the bounds of that profession
widen daily. He saw iron ships, steamers, and the locomotive engine,
introduced. He lived to travel from Glasgow to Edinburgh in the inside
of a forenoon, and to remember that he himself had ‘often been twelve
hours upon the journey, and his grand-father (Lillie) two days’! The
profession was still but in its second generation, and had already broken
down the barriers of time and space. Who should set a limit to its
future encroachments? And hence, with a kind of sanguine pedantry, he
pursued his design of ‘keeping up with the day’ and posting himself and
his family on every mortal subject. Of this unpractical idealism we
shall meet with many instances; there was not a trade, and scarce an
accomplishment, but he thought it should form part of the outfit of an
engineer; and not content with keeping an encyclopaedic diary himself, he
would fain have set all his sons to work continuing and extending it.
They were more happily inspired. My father’s engineering pocket-book was
not a bulky volume; with its store of pregnant notes and vital formulas,
it served him through life, and was not yet filled when he came to die.
As for Robert Stevenson and the Travelling Diary, I should be ungrateful
to complain, for it has supplied me with many lively traits for this and
subsequent chapters; but I must still remember much of the period of my
study there as a sojourn in the Valley of the Shadow.
The duty of the engineer is twofold—to design the work, and to see the
work done. We have seen already something of the vociferous thoroughness
of the man, upon the cleaning of lamps and the polishing of reflectors.
In building, in road-making, in the construction of bridges, in every
detail and byway of his employments, he pursued the same ideal.
Perfection (with a capital P and violently under-scored) was his design.
A crack for a penknife, the waste of ‘six-and-thirty shillings,’ ‘the
loss of a day or a tide,’ in each of these he saw and was revolted by the
finger of the sloven; and to spirits intense as his, and immersed in
vital undertakings, the slovenly is the dishonest, and wasted time is
instantly translated into lives endangered. On this consistent idealism
there is but one thing that now and then trenches with a touch of
incongruity, and that is his love of the picturesque. As when he laid
out a road on Hogarth’s line of beauty; bade a foreman be careful, in
quarrying, not ‘to disfigure the island’; or regretted in a report that
‘the great stone, called the _Devil in the Hole_, was blasted or broken
down to make road-metal, and for other purposes of the work.’