THE SERVICE OF THE NORTHERN LIGHTS
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 clamorous 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[10] 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
lightroom, I felt it shaking and waving, not with the tremor of the Bell
Rock, but with the _waving of a tree_! This the lightkeepers 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 nettlesoup 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 grandfather 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 grandfather 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-a-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
lighthouse 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 sevenfold, 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
(_Anglice_, walls), yet instances occur of the land being enclosed,
even to a considerable extent, with ship-timbers. The author has
actually seen a park (_Anglice_, 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 camena' 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 grandfather.
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 lightroom; 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 lightroom 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 lightroom. 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 fingertips. 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 pre-occupied 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 L5 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 undercut," 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 grandfather 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--engineering looks one way, and literature
another--was what my grandfather 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 grandfather
(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 underscored) 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."
FOOTNOTE:
[10] This is only a probable hypothesis; I have tried to identify my
father's anecdote in my grandfather's diary, and may very well have
been deceived.--R. L. S.