On the 17th of April 1842, I made my first landing on the Skerryvore, for the season, and found traces of very heavy seas having passed over the Rock during the preceding winter. Its surface was washed quite clean from all the scattered materials which were left lying on it at the end of the last season; and the building, to the height of 6 or 8 feet from the foundation, was covered with a thick coating of green sea-weed. The railway had suffered considerably from large stones having been thrown upon it; and several blocks of about half a ton in weight were found wedged into the deep fissures of the Rock, and lying among the main timbers of the Barrack. Heavy sprays had been playing over the Tower, in the upper uncovered apartment of which a great number of water-worn pebbles or boulders were found. Those stones had been raised by the heavy surf and deposited on the floor of the apartment and on the top of the wall at a height of no less than 60 feet above high watermark; but the balance-crane, which had stood all winter on the top of the Tower, had sustained no damage, although the canvass cover was torn to shreds by the action of the weather. In the Barrack every thing was in good order except the smoke-funnel, which, from the effects of the sea-water, was riddled full of holes and required to be completely renewed. ~Commencement of Rock operations.~ As I had resolved to keep, during the summer of 1842, a complement of about eighteen or twenty seamen on the Rock, in addition to the usual detachment of masons, in order to work the crabs for raising the materials to the top of the Tower by successive stages; my first step was to set about preparing additional accommodation in the Barrack, by converting the open gallery (called _store for coals_, &c., in Plate V.), immediately below the cook-house, into a covered apartment for lodgings for the additional hands. I accordingly landed on the 20th of April, with a stock of provisions, water and fuel and a party of joiners and a smith, to prepare that apartment by simply flooring over the joists of the gallery and closing the _triangular_, or rather _trapezoïdal_, spaces between the uprights of the Barrack, with double planking, protected on the seams with painted canvass, so as to render them impervious to the heavy sprays which, even in summer, dashed forcibly on the lower parts of the Barrack. Windows were formed on the sides least exposed to the intrusion of the sea; but, with all our precautions, we could not succeed in keeping dry even the cots or hammocks, which were suspended there; and it must be admitted that the addition to the Barrack proved, in bad weather, but a comfortless retreat, the inconveniences of which few but seamen would have patiently endured. Those discomforts, however, were to a certain extent, counterbalanced by some advantages which that singular abode possessed in hot weather; for, at such times, its inhabitants enjoyed