INTRODUCTION. EVERY native of our sea-girt kingdom ought to feel an interest in the questionsWhat do we owe to our lighthouses? and what would our country be without them? —but we suspect that, from lack of information, these questions are not viewed with the attention which they demand. A stormy wind may rudely drift the sleet against our windows and disturb our rest; and perhaps our sympathies may be awakened for the men who patrol our dark streets as guardians of our property : but seldom in those dismal nights do our thoughts extend to the solitary outposts of our land, where, confined to the narrow ¿cabin of a lightship, or watching in towers B perched on bleak headlands or sunken rocks, the true guardians of this country's naval greatness keep their quiet and unostentatious vigil unthought of, because remote and unknown. What, indeed, would our country be without its lighthouses?-A rugged inhospitable land truly. Our shores no coaster could safely navigate, and no oversea vessel could confidently approach; while ever and anon, as in early times, our seabeaches would be strewed with the timbers of stranded vessels, and the bodies of their ill-fated crews? So common, indeed, were such calamities at the beginning of the present century, that the inhabitants of our Northern Isles regarded shipwrecks with indifference, if not with real complaIt had, indeed, become proverbial to observe, “that if wrecks were to happen, they might as well be sent to their poor islands as anywhere else;" and, acting on cency. this convenient principle, the natives unsparingly availed themselves of the "pro vidential" supplies thus laid to their hands, occasionally using claret to their barleymeal porridge, and even fencing their fields with Honduras mahogany, shipped from its native forests to grace the interiors of our palatial mansions! But the introduction of the lighthouse system put an end to this wholesale and indiscriminate consignment of property to the hands of the "wrecker;" and at a later period, on complaining to an Orcadian pilot of the badness of his sails, his reply was, "Had it been God's will that you came na' here wi' your lights we might a' had better sails to our boats and more o' other things." What we owe to our lighthouse system is well exemplified in the Bell or Inchcape Rock. Even in early times this reef was so great a terror to mariners, that a certain Abbot of Aberbrothock, as chronicled in Southey's well-known lines, placed on it a bell, moved by the restless waves : "As a buoy in the storm it floated and swung, And, as tradition has it, the pirate, Sir Ralph the Rover, was himself wrecked on that very reef from which he had, with murderous hands, removed the danger-signal of the pious monk. But leaving tradition and coming to facts, we learn that when Robert Stevenson made his first landing on the Bell Rock, in the year 1800, he found lodged in almost every crevice sad proofs of the dismal tragedies which had been enacted on that treacherous spot. These melancholy evidences of death consisted of bayonets, musket-balls, and innumerable fragments of iron. All more perishable materials had been swept away, and a silver shoe-buckle was the only vestige of wearing-apparel to commemorate the graves of many who doubtless drew their last breath among the boiling surges of the Inchcape Rock. Nor was it only on the rock itself, unbeaconed by day, and unlighted by night, that vessels were driven to pieces and lost. Many ships were stranded on the neighbouring shores in trying to avoid the track, where, buried in the waves and concealed by their glassy covering, the dreaded hidden danger lay. Mr. Stevenson records a melancholy example of this, which happened in 1799, when a three-days' gale from the southeast drove from their moorings, in the Downs and Yarmouth Roads, and from their southward courses, a large fleet of vessels. Borne north by the gale, these ships might easily have reached the anchorage of the Firth of Forth, for which the wind was fair; but night came on, and fearing the Bell Rock, their ill-fated pilots resolved to keep at sea, and so escape its dangers, but driven before the |