Shortly after this occurrence, the whole party on board the Pharos was exposed to a fearful gale, which kept them from the rock during ten days and exposed them to imminent danger. The floating-light broke adrift, but, providentially, no damage was sustained. This circumstance, however, imparted a character of extreme hazard to life on board the floating-light, that it was difficult to provide sailors to man her. On landing upon the rock the effects of the gale were at once apparent. Six large blocks of granite, which had been landed by way of experiment, had been removed from their places, and by the force of the sea thrown over a rising ledge into a hole at the distance of twelve or fifteen paces; a sufficient evidence of the violence of the storm and the agitation of the sea on the rock. The smith’s forge was also shifted from its place--the ash-pan of the hearth with its ponderous cast-iron back had been washed from their places of supposed security, the chains of attachment broken, and these weighty articles found at a very considerable distance in a hole of the rock. Although the sea often had a most frightful appearance, yet the beacon divested the Bell Rock of many of its terrors: its beams afforded an excellent guide to shipping, and old sailors frequently expressed their admiration at the change of circumstances which led to their cruising with so much confidence both by day and night in the immediate vicinity of this dangerous rock. It also had a beneficial influence on all who were actively engaged about the lighthouse by inducing a greater confidence of safety, so that at all times when a boat could be put to sea or approach this sunken reef, there was not that actual danger in landing which formerly presented itself, because in the event of the tender going adrift or a boat happening to be wrecked upon the rock, the beacon could be looked to as a refuge till assistance arrived. On the 6th October, 1807, the works were relinquished for the season. The time which had been spent in the rock amounted only to one hundred and eighty hours, of which one hundred and thirty-three, or about thirteen and a half days of ten hours each, could be said to have been actively employed, and yet during this period, besides the erection of the principal beams of the beacon-house, some considerable progress had been made in preparing the site of the lighthouse. ‘This reason’s work,’ says the engineer, ‘affords a good example of what may be executed under similar circumstances, when every heart and hand is anxiously and zealously engaged, for the artificers wrought at the erection of the beacon as for life; or somewhat like men stopping a breach in a wall to keep out an overwhelming flood.’