Out in the Atlantic Ocean, six miles off the harbor entrance, and ten miles from Portsmouth, is one of the strangest places existing, the collection of crags and reefs known as the Isles of Shoals, their dim and shadowy outline lying like a cloud along the edge of the horizon. There are nine islands in the group, the chief being Appledore, rising from the sea much like a hog's back, and hence the original name of Hog Island. It covers about four hundred acres, and the whole group does not have much over six hundred acres. Star Island is smaller; Haley's or Smutty Nose, with Malaga and Cedar, are connected by a sort of breakwater; and there are four little islets--Duck, White's, Seavey's and Londoner's--and upon White Island is the lighthouse for the group, with a revolving light of alternating red and white flashes, elevated eighty-seven feet and visible fifteen miles at sea. A covered way leads back over the crags from the tower to the keeper's cottage. To this light there come answering signals from the Whale's Back Light at the Piscataqua entrance, from solitary Boon Island out at sea to the northward, and from the twin beacons of Thatcher's Island off Cape Ann to the south. As darkness falls, one after another these beacons blaze out as so many guiding stars across the waters. One of the noted sayings of John Quincy Adams was that he never saw these coast lights in the evening without recalling the welcoming light which Columbus said he saw flashing from the shore, when he discovered the New World. "I lit the lamps in the lighthouse tower, For the sun dropped down and the day was dead; They shone like a brilliant clustered flower, Two golden and five red."