Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 2: Great Britain and Ireland, Part 2
General
Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 2: Great Britain and Ireland, Part 2
Great Britain -- Description and travel; Ireland -- Description and travel
A large proportion of the edifices in the Rows must be comparatively
modern; but there are some very ancient ones, with oaken frames visible
on the exterior. The Row, passing through these houses, is railed with
oak, so old that it has turned black, and grown to be as hard as stone,
which it might be mistaken for, if one did not see where names and
initials have been cut into it with knives at some bygone period.
Overhead, cross-beams project through the ceiling so low as almost to
hit the head. On the front of one of these buildings was the
inscription, "God's Providence is mine Inheritance," said to have been
put there by the occupant of the house two hundred years ago, when the
plague spared this one house only in the whole city. Not improbably the
inscription has operated as a safeguard to prevent the demolition of the
house hitherto; but a shopman of an adjacent dwelling told us that it
was soon to be taken down. Here and there, about some of the streets
through which the Rows do not run, we saw houses of very aged aspect,
with steep, peaked gables. The front gable-end was supported on stone
pillars, and the sidewalk passed beneath. Most of these old houses
seemed to be taverns,--the Black Bear, the Green Dragon, and such names.
We thought of dining at one of them, but, on inspection, they looked
rather too dingy and close, and of questionable neatness. So we went to
the Royal Hotel, where we probably fared just as badly at much more
expense, and where there was a particularly gruff and crabbed old
waiter, who, I suppose, thought himself free to display his surliness
because we arrived at the hotel on foot. For my part, I love to see John
Bull show himself. I must go again and again and again to Chester, for
I suppose there is not a more curious place in the world.
EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE [Footnote: From "Lightships and Lighthouses."
Courtesy of J. B. Lippincott Co., the publishers.]
BY FREDERICK A. TALBOT.
It is doubtful whether the name of any lighthouse is so familiar
throughout the English-speaking world as the "Eddystone." Certainly no
other "pillar of fire by night, of cloud by day," can offer so romantic
a story of dogged engineering perseverance, of heartrending
disappointments, disaster, blasted hopes, and brilliant success.
Standing out in the English Channel, about sixty miles east of the
Lizard, is a straggling ridge of rocks which stretches for hundreds of
yards across the marine thoroughfare, and also obstructs the western
approach to Plymouth Harbor. But at a point some nine and a half miles
south of Rame Head on the mainland the reef rises somewhat abruptly to
the surface, so that at low-water two or three ugly granite knots are
bared, which tell only too poignantly the complete destruction they
could wreak upon a vessel which had the temerity or the ill luck to
scrape over them at high-tide. Even in the calmest weather the sea curls
and eddies viciously around these stones; hence the name "Eddystone," is
derived....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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