The wooden structure at the Smalls was conceived originally by a Mr. Phillips, of Liverpool, a member of the Society of Friends. He set himself to establish “a great holy good to serve and save humanity,” and even in this world he had his reward; for sixty years afterwards, when his representatives had to surrender it to the Trinity House, they got one hundred and seventy thousand pounds by way of compensation for it. Like most sagacious men, he knew how to choose his instruments. At that time there resided in Liverpool a young man of the name of Whiteside, a maker of “violins, spinettes, and upright harpsichords,” with a strongly marked mechanical genius. In the summer of 1772, this young fiddle-maker found himself at Solva, twenty miles from the rock, with a gang of Cornish miners, who were to quarry sockets into the stone, into which it was originally intended that iron pillars should be soldered. The first essay was sufficiently appalling. The surface of the rock is called twelve feet above the level of high water, that is, in smooth weather; but in tempestuous seas, and when the waves are rolling in from the south-west, it is as many feet below it. The party had landed from their cutter, and had got a long iron rod worked a few feet into the rock, when the weather suddenly got “dirty.” The wind and the sea rose together, and the cutter had to sheer off lest she should be wrecked. The men on the rock clung, as best they might, to the half-fastened shaft, and a desperate struggle ensued between brute nature and that passive fortitude which is greater than brute nature,--all through the night into the morning, all through the day into the night again, until the third day, when the storm abated and they were saved.