when you are past work; you shall be ennobled, by compulsion, into provident consideration for your helpmate and your children by an insurance on your life; but when all this is done for you, and the highest and completest satisfaction that can fall to the best of us on this side the grave--the sense of being useful to our fellows--is ordered for you in abundant measure, it all recurs to what, as regards the specialty of your life, is the be-all and the end-all of your existence, and this is the burden to the ballad of your story:--“You are to light the lamps every evening at sun-setting, and keep them constantly burning, bright and clear, till sun-rising.” To do this implies a perpetual watch. “He whose watch is about to end is to trim the lamps and leave them burning in perfect order before he quits the lantern and calls the succeeding watch, and he who has the watch at sun-rise, when he has extinguished the lamps, is to commence all necessary preparations for the exhibition of the light at the ensuing sunset;” and, moreover, “no bed, sofa, or other article on which to recline, can be permitted, either in the lantern, or in the apartment under the lantern, known as the watch-room.” Thus far we have a common denominator to the life of every light-keeper; but in other respects it varies much. At such stations as the Forelands or Harwich, where there are gardens to cultivate and plenty of land room for the men to stretch their legs and renovate themselves after the night watches; where visitors from neighbouring watering-places are constantly coming and going, to talk, to praise, to listen, and, perhaps, to fee, it is all very well; but there are also places “remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,” where the walk is limited to the circle of the gallery-railing, or the diameter of the lighthouse column; where the only incidents are the inspections of the committee, the visits of the district superintendent, or the monthly relief which takes the men back to shore. At these stations, when the sea is making fun of them, it sweeps up clean over the roof, and makes the lantern-glasses ring again, and in calmer weather the men may creep carefully out upon the rock to solace themselves with a little fishing; or if of more nervous temperament, may do it, as Winstanley did, with greater security from the kitchen window. Not but what some people like that sort of life. Smeaton tells a story of a shoemaker who went out as light-keeper to the Eddystone because he did not like confinement, having found himself in effect a greater prisoner at his lapstone than he would be at the rock; but then Smeaton confesses a few pages farther on that at times the keepers have been so short of provisions as to be compelled to eat the candles.