The navigation of the Channel in foggy weather can never be free from danger, and more fine steamers of the great transatlantic lines have been lost between Fastnet and Liverpool through fogs than through any other cause. It was only last summer that the City of Rome ran in a dense fog against Fastnet itself—that perilous, shore-less, horn-shaped rock which stands in the direct pathway of all ingoing and outgoing ships—and barely escaped destruction. A few years earlier, when the Cunarder Aurania was approaching land in a fog, the passengers who were smoking their after-dinner cigars suddenly saw looming above them, and above the topmasts, the cliffs which were supposed to be many miles away. The captain was far out of his reckoning, but was going so slowly that he was able to back into the Channel with slight damage. A similar accident to this happened to the White Star steamer Baltic when she was proceeding up the Channel to Liverpool. One of the most brilliant lights in the Channel is that of the South Stack, which lies under the flank of the mountainous precipice of Holyhead. The Stack is an egg of rock, much higher and much bolder than Fastnet, which has become detached from the main-land, and its apex is crowned with the white tower and crouching buildings of the lighthouse keepers. The sea is eating it away, and has already scooped out a vast cavern which they call the Parliament Hall. It is wider and loftier than any chamber at Westminster, and there is more justification for its name in the babble of the sea-birds flitting in and out of it than in its dimensions. From the foot of it to the low, white wall which encircles the light, it is a sheer precipice of dark, exfoliating rock, forbidding and hopeless, without a resting-place for any living thing less secure than the birds, which cluster like beads on a string upon the edges of the shale. The sea frets itself around it and gurgles in the cavern; ledges and reefs abut on it. All vessels aim to give it a wide berth, and usually keep at such a distance that a glass has to be used to discover its destructive points. To say “ashore at South Stack” is as good as to say a “total wreck.” There is hardly one chance in a hundred that the luckless ship which strikes here will live. [Illustration: Eddystone Lighthouse, English Channel. (Tower about one hundred feet high.)]