As a result of the lax keeping of the lights, Whiston’s mad proposals were made to Parliament in 1716; he suggested that from one of the Scilly Islands there should be discharged into the air, at intervals throughout the night, huge fire-balls, to warn mariners of their whereabouts. But people only laughed at his suggestions, and nothing came of them. Later on we hear that the ‘badness’ of the Scilly lights was ‘the talk of the Exchange’; and indeed it seemed that each successive keeper fell more or less into the evil habits of his predecessor: the idle life led many into drunken habits, and that probably accounts a good deal for the lax keeping. ‘You drink so much,’ wrote the Trinity House Secretary to one keeper, ‘that you are not fit for business.’ This was in 1740, and the particular keeper was no doubt the man referred to by Robert Heath—a writer on the Scilly Islands in 1750—as having kept his fire so badly that often it was scarcely visible on the neighbouring island of St. Mary. ‘Some,’ continues Heath, ‘think that often this keeper left his fire _unlit_ all through the night,’ or else kept it so low that by daybreak nothing but lifeless embers filled the grate. However, things mended soon after this: the Trinity House placed better-class keepers at St. Agnes—men of better education and less likely to be contaminated by the ill-example of the inhabitants of the islands; and after the closed-in coal fire had been changed, in 1790, for a powerful oil lamp, we hear no more complaints about the Scilly lights. The then owner of the islands bought the cradle, or grate, in which the coal fire had burned, and turned it into a flower-stand, which he placed in the wonderful gardens at Tresco, where it may still be seen—certainly it is an interesting relic. [Illustration: THE BISHOP’S ROCK LIGHTHOUSE.] The lighthouse at St. Agnes remained the most westerly in England till the year 1858, when that on the Bishop’s rock was erected; it is a massive structure of grey granite. A much less solid erection—similar in construction to that upon ‘the Smalls,’ of which I shall presently speak—was all but completed some eight years before; but on the night of February 6, 1850, the whole affair was demolished by the force of a storm which snapped off the iron supports that had been fixed into the rock, as though they had been so much matchwood. CHAPTER XVIII LIGHTHOUSES ON THE WESTERN COAST