United States or El Salvador ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Now, reader, we feel bound to tell you in confidence that there are few things more difficult than drawing a story to a close! Our tale is done, for Ruby is married to Minnie, and the Bell Rock Lighthouse is finished, and most of those who built it are scattered beyond the possibility of reunion. Yet we are loath to shake hands with them and to bid you farewell.
It suggests the policeman going his rounds. How the exile forced to sojourn here must detest this obtrusive beacon of the first class! It must become maddening in time for the eyes. Even in bed it has the effect of mild sheet-lightning. Municipality of Calais! move it away at once to a rational spot to the end of the pier, where a lighthouse ought to be.
The French had fallen back upon the town. Their fears now were for the very fortress itself, that fortress which they had so proudly boasted was impregnable alike by land and sea! Before the dawn of the morning Humphrey came back to the main body, seeking speech with Wolfe. "They have abandoned their battery on Lighthouse Point. It is ours without striking a blow.
Don't you dare take that crowd at that seance as a fair sample of Wellmouth folks, because they're not." "Why, Miss Phipps " "Because they're not. Every town and every neighborhood, city or country, has its freaks and every freak within five miles will be over in that lighthouse parlor to-night. Just take 'em for freaks, that's all, but DON'T take 'em for samples of our people down here."
"And if it be so, what then?" said Rudyerd with a smile; "you don't suppose they'll fire a broadside at an unfinished lighthouse, do you? or are you afraid they'll take the Eddystone Rock in tow, and carry you into a French port?" "I don't know, sir," replied Williamson with an offended look; "I only thought that as we are at war with France just now, it was my duty to report what I had seen."
The murmur of the tide is heard beyond; but no wave passes the archway, over which his lamp burns red behind his curtain, as if the building were a Lighthouse. They enter, locking themselves in, descend the rugged steps, and are down in the Crypt. The lantern is not wanted, for the moonlight strikes in at the groined windows, bare of glass, the broken frames for which cast patterns on the ground.
The ends of these iron posts, and a bit of chain firmly imbedded in a cleft of the rock, were all that the new party of builders found remaining of the old lighthouse. Rudyerd determined to guard against a similar catastrophe, by cutting the rock into a succession of flat steps or terraces, so that the weight of his structure should rest perpendicularly on its foundation.
Thus the late James A. Herne inserted into a charming idyllic picture of rural life, entitled Shore Acres, a melodramatic scene in a lighthouse, which was hopelessly out of key with the rest of the play.
It is, as George remarked, exposed to winds and waves, for the heavy swells from the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic Ocean send the waves breaking over the rock with prodigious fury. The first Lighthouse erected on these rocks was the work of a gentleman named Winstanley; it stood four years, when he was so confident of its stability that he determined to encounter a storm in the building himself.
Assured that it was no false alarm, we pushed on with redoubled speed, and in fifteen minutes more landed at the head of the gulf. Arnold and Robinson, with the Russian pilot, Kerrillof, had already gone off to the vessel in the government whale-boat, so that there remained nothing for us to do but climb to the summit of lighthouse bluff and watch impatiently for their return.
Word Of The Day