The remaining contribution to the complement of the lighting service is the light-vessel. There are, unfortunately, too many outlying dangers on our coasts where it is either impossible to fix a lighthouse, or where, from the shifting character of the shoal, it is necessary to move the light from time to time. Of these the most notable are the Goodwin Sands. There are constantly propositions for lighthouses on the Goodwin; and some men, mortified that dry lands once belonging to the men of Kent should be water-wastes for ever, have proposed boldly to reclaim them, believing that the scheme would pay, not merely by the acreage added to the county, but by the buried treasures to be exhumed. At present they are marked with three light-vessels, one at each end and one in the middle. There are other floating stations still farther remote from land; and at one--the Seven Stones, between the Scilly Islands and the main--the vessel is in forty fathoms water. These light-ships ride by chains of a peculiarly prepared and toughened iron; and in heavy weather the strain on the moorings is relieved by paying out fathom after fathom, until sometimes the whole cable (at the Seven Stones, 315 fathoms) is in the water. These vessels, of course, are manned by sailors, and the discipline is that of shipboard; but here, as on shore, the burden of the main story meets us at the first clause of the instructions--“You are to light the lamps every evening at sun-setting, and keep them constantly burning, bright and clear, till sun-rising,” unless you break adrift, and then, if you have shifted your position before you could bring up with your spare anchor, you are to put them out and wait till you can be replaced. Among the curiosities of lighthouse experience are these two. The one that it is an occupation in which the modern claim for feminine participation has been forestalled. There is at this moment a woman light-keeper, and as she retains her employment it may be inferred that she does her duty properly. The other is an odd fact, namely, that so far back as the last century the rationale of the cod-liver oil fashion was foreshadowed at the “Smalls.” As in the wool-combing districts of Yorkshire, where the wool is dressed with oil, consumption and strumous affections of the like character are rare, so it is said that people going out to the “Smalls” as keepers, thin, hectic and emaciated, have returned plump, jocund, and robust, on account of living in an unctuous atmosphere, where every breath was laden with whale oil, and every meal might be enriched with fish.