That is the story of Burnham lights: the lighthouse one sees there to-day was put up in 1836, very shortly after the Trinity House had bought out the parson. About the other lighthouses on the Bristol Channel, on either bank, there is not much to say, so we will pass on to consider some of those on the Welsh coast. Probably one of the first attempts to erect a lighthouse here, as an object of profit, was not made till fully sixty years after such an undertaking had been projected for the east coast. In 1662, and again in 1665, petitions to the crown requested leave to set up lighthouses on St. Anne’s Head, at Milford Haven. A patent was duly granted and the buildings erected, but—likely enough through opposition in the usual quarter—the lights therein were not maintained, and the buildings fell into decay. The scheme was, however, successfully revived in the closing years of Queen Anne’s reign, Joseph Allen, the then projector, paying the Trinity House £10 a year in order to stop opposition—as things went, he got off cheap. [Illustration: THE SMALLS LIGHTHOUSE.] Another sixty years or so after this, ‘the Smalls’—a group of rocks off St. David’s Head—were first marked by a lighthouse. The project to put it there was a bold one, and surely would never have been dreamed of had Winstanley not taught lighthouse projectors that isolated rocks might form a field for their labours. The proposal came from a wealthy Quaker merchant at Liverpool named Phillips, who said it was his mission in life to perform ‘a great and holy good to serve and save humanity.’ How could he better do this than by building a lighthouse, and by building it on the then almost unlit coast of Wales? It was just the kind of profitable philanthropy that a man of his tenets would love to indulge in—there was money to be made and good to be done by it. Call to mind for a moment the period when this wealthy Quaker set about carrying out his design, in the year 1775, or about that time: there were then plenty of experienced engineers in practice—John Smeaton, to mention one—and Liverpool possessed its share of them. But to these the Quaker did not turn: they would have their own ideas on the subject of lighthouse building, based on practice and scientific principles: he had his, based on economy, and so he went, not to an engineer, but to one Henry Whiteside, a maker of musical instruments; he might not know much about lighthouse building, but he would be ‘cheap,’ and in the construction of his violins, spinettes, and harpsichords he displayed considerable ingenuity. Whiteside was young and enterprising, he liked the idea of the work proposed to him, and before many months had passed he had laid aside his half-finished musical instruments, and was on the Smalls with a gang of Cornish miners, quarrying sockets in the hard stone into which were to be fastened the iron pillars that the lighthouse was to stand upon.