Apart from everything else, the destruction of the Eddystone lighthouse was a very heavy financial loss to Mrs. Winstanley: the principal part of her husband’s capital had been invested in the undertaking; he had, we learn from official papers, expended on the building and maintenance of the lighthouse at the time of its destruction, £6,814 7_s._ 6_d._—for this vouchers were forthcoming—and he had received from dues £4,721 19_s._ 3_d._, which left him at least £2,000 and more out of pocket; but it was also shown that quite £1,000—for which the vouchers had perished in the lighthouse—had been paid by Winstanley, from first to last, over the building, so that his estate was the loser of something over £3,000 by the disaster. That being so, Mrs. Winstanley might reasonably look, with assurance of success, to the petition that was quickly presented to the crown—pointing out that she was a fit and deserving object for the bestowal of a pension from the royal bounty. After due time had been wasted in official correspondence this was given in the shape of a donation of £200 and pension of £100 a year. CHAPTER XIII THE SECOND EDDYSTONE It was unlikely that the Eddystone lighthouse, which in the few years of its existence had proved so beneficial to navigation, would be allowed to remain for long unrestored, more especially as the loss of life and treasure upon the Eddystone reef, which followed on the destruction of the lighthouse, bore terrible testimony to its utility. John Lovett, a London merchant, purchased Winstanley’s interest in the patent, and entered into an agreement with the Trinity House, by which it was arranged that the corporation’s name should be used in applying to Parliament for licence to gather tolls for a new Eddystone lighthouse so soon as it should be erected. Parliament readily passed the requisite bill, and the new building was commenced. The structure then raised is generally spoken of as ‘Rudyerd’s lighthouse,’ being built and designed by the John Rudyerd already referred to, who was, as we pointed out, a silk mercer in Ludgate Hill. A silk mercer is not, perhaps, quite the man we should go to nowadays to act as architect and engineer for a lighthouse; but to him his fellow merchant, Lovett, entrusted the erection, and Rudyerd, aided by a couple of shipwrights from Woolwich Dockyard, set to work and erected a wooden tower built, for some distance up, around a core of granite, which managed to withstand for more than half a century the gales that swept the Channel, and might, for all we know, have been standing there to-day, had it not been consumed by fire. [Illustration: RUDYERD’S EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE.]