The light in the new lighthouse was pronounced excellent, and boats coming within hail of the rock told of the testimony to its goodness that incoming vessels had brought to Plymouth. Smeaton might well be proud of his work—and so no doubt he was; but he showed no anxiety to return to shore to receive the plaudits and congratulations of mankind. He, and some of his helpers, waited in the lighthouse, attending to its duties, till the two men he had selected as keepers arrived there; then he and his companions sailed back to Plymouth. Thus, as Smeaton himself writes, after ‘innumerable difficulties and dangers, was a happy period put to this undertaking,’ without loss of life or limb. From that day to this not a night has passed on which the Eddystone rocks have been unmarked by a light, though, as the reader was reminded a little way back, Smeaton’s building no longer performs the duty of a lighthouse. As the illuminating power was in Winstanley’s time, so it remained until the opening years of the present century, when a general improvement in coast-lighting was being adopted. It is really surprising that candles, with the trouble they necessitated, lasted so long as they did as lighthouse luminants, for we must remember—what the present generation is probably forgetting—that candles in those days needed continual snuffing to keep them bright; and it is amusing to read in Smeaton’s account of his lighthouse the evident pride with which he refers to a contrivance, worked by the Eddystone clock, which sounded a gong every half-hour, so warning the keeper on duty that he must apply his snuffers to the four-and-twenty candles in the lantern! [Illustration: SECTION OF THE EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE BUILT BY SMEATON.]