At last came a lull in the storm, the cutter reached the lighthouse, and brought from it the two men—one alive the other dead. Sickness had seized the dead man almost at the outset of the tempest, and despite the care of his companion his illness terminated fatally, and left the living soul that now returned to shore to endure a loneliness a thousand times more lonely and more horrible from the fact that it was passed with a lifeless body. He dared not commit that body to the waves; had he done so, the suspicion of murder must infallibly have rested on him; and who could then have lifted from him the mantle of suspicion? There was nothing for it but to live with the corpse till help arrived from shore, and so he did the best thing he could under the circumstances, and lashed his dead mate to the ironwork of the gallery that ran outside the lantern—this was the crouching figure that had been seen through the sleet and snow by those who got within sight of the lighthouse. Subsequent isolations of the Smalls have taken place—some for lengthy periods; but no such gruesome incident has attended them. Nor, indeed, could it well do so, for a rule was soon afterwards put in force for this lighthouse, by which _three_ persons were always on duty there. The wisdom and charity of this arrangement—which was soon afterwards generally adopted at isolated lighthouse stations—has been since constantly demonstrated, and most of us will recollect that within the last two or three years illness seized one of the keepers at the very lighthouse of which we have been speaking, during a storm that precluded communication with the rock for a considerable time: the sick man’s lot was, of course, far less hard from the fact that whilst one of his companions was on duty, the other could minister to his wants. Not long before the acquirement of this lighthouse by the Trinity House it was almost demolished during the fury of a storm; the boards of the floor of the living room, beneath the lantern, being forced up so close to the ceiling that one of the men was almost crushed between the two before he could extricate himself from his perilous position. After this, the erection of a lighthouse at the Smalls more stable and more fitted for the comfort of its inmates was undertaken: a granite tower was completed in 1885, and it is certainly quaint to compare the accounts of the building of this lighthouse—directed by the Trinity House engineer and carried out by a band of from fifty to sixty skilled workmen—with the primitive arrangements and appliances with which, a century before, the Liverpool fiddle-maker and his half-dozen Cornish miners had set up the first lighthouse there. But this comparison must not create in our minds any contempt for the earlier enterprise so pluckily carried out. [Illustration: LIGHTHOUSE AT HOLYHEAD.]