The first lighthouse on Minot’s Ledge was built in 1848, and was an octagonal tower resting on the tops of eight wrought-iron piles sixty feet high, eight inches in diameter, and sunk five feet into the rock. These piles were braced together in many ways, and, as they offered less surface to the waves than a solid structure, the lighthouse was considered by all authorities upon the subject to be exceptionally strong. Its great test came in April, 1851. On the fourteenth of that month, two keepers being in the lighthouse, an easterly gale set in, steadily increasing in force.... On Wednesday, the sixteenth, the gale had become a hurricane; and when at times the tower could be seen through the mists and sea-drift, it seemed to bend to the shock of the waves. At four o’clock that afternoon an ominous proof of the fury of the waves on Minot’s Ledge reached the shore—a platform which had been built between the piles only seven feet below the floor of the keeper’s room. The raging seas, then, were leaping fifty feet in the air. Would they reach ten feet higher?—for if so, the house and the keepers were doomed. Nevertheless, when darkness set in the light shone out as brilliantly as ever, but the gale seemed, if possible, then to increase. What agony those two men must have suffered! How that dreadful abode must have swayed in the irresistible hurricane, and trembled at each crashing sea! The poor unfortunates must have known that if those seas, leaping always higher and higher, ever reached their house, it would be flung down into the ocean, and they would be buried with it beneath the waves. [Illustration: A SCREW-PILE OCEAN LIGHTHOUSE.] To those hopeless, terrified watchers the entombing sea came at last. At one o’clock in the morning the lighthouse bell was heard by those on shore to give a mournful clang, and the light was extinguished. It was the funeral knell of two patient heroes. Next day there remained on the rock only eight jagged iron stumps.