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I then took the helm; my own signal-light shone clearly on the shore; and, except for the rain which fell in torrents, the waves which washed over our canoe, and uneasiness about the ship and about you, and our fear that the wind might carry us into the open sea, we should have had a delightful little maritime excursion.
His articles in BLACKWOOD and his lectures on Mont Blanc in London advertised it and made people as anxious to see it as if it owed them money. As we strolled along the road we looked up and saw a red signal-light glowing in the darkness of the mountainside. It seemed but a trifling way up perhaps a hundred yards, a climb of ten minutes.
During this agitating period, and on the evening of the 2d February 1804, the person who kept watch on the commanding station of Home Castle, being deceived by some accidental fire in the county of Northumberland, which he took for the corresponding signal-light in that county with which his orders were to communicate, lighted up his own beacon.
Suddenly as I gazed I made out the glint of a light, and then the whole bay and the beach were lit up in a moment by a vivid blue glare. They were burning a coloured signal-light on board of the vessel. There she lay on her beam ends right in the centre of the jagged reef, hurled over to such an angle that I could see all the planking of her deck.
Night after night, in order to fix the apex of his triangle, he had to linger on the watch for the assistant's signal-light, but he did not forget that his predecessors, Arago and Biot, had had to wait sixty-one days for a similar purpose.
But he thought he could see now. At low tide, or better, at half-tide, access could be got to the floor of the extension and, if this floor held a trap, the mystery would be explainable. So would be the hovering boat the signal-light and yes! this sound overheard of steps on a rattling planking. "I hear nothing," whispered Mr. Grey from the other end.
Every vessel perceives the signal-light during one instant, and immediately after it is seen to disappear; and if, in a great extent of coast, the different lights revolve in different times, the various signals become thus individualized.
"Sewing, probably," mused Roger. "Poor little thing." As he watched, the lamp was put out. Then a white shadow moved painfully toward the window, bent, and struck a match. Star-like, Barbara's signal-light flamed out into the gloom, with its eager message. "She wants me," he said to himself. The joy was inextricably mingled with pain. "She wants me," he thought, "and I must not go."
By a natural confusion of ideas, as his agitation turns to delirium, this day torturing him, this day upon which he calls a malediction, becomes his old enemy, the Day which used to keep him from her, and shifts from that into the signal-light which even at night used to warn him off.
The Keokuk, the most vulnerable of all the ships engaged, sank under the northwest wind in the heavy sea of the next day. It was long after midnight when Carleton finished the closing lines of his letter, and then stepped out upon the steamer's guard for a little fresh air. Over on Sumter's walls the signal-light was being waved. The black monitors lay at their anchorage.
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