[Illustration: WESTCLIFFE.] The South Foreland lighthouse has always been used more or less experimentally. Here magnifying lenses were first installed, in 1810, and here Faraday, in 1853, experimented with the electric light. In 1862 lime-light was tried. It now displays from its height above the sea of 374 feet a powerful electric occulting beam distinguishable at a distance of twenty-six miles. The lower lighthouse, used in conjunction with the upper light before the installation of the present brilliant flash, was discontinued in 1905, and the building has since been let as a private residence. Some day in the near future, when St. Margaret’s Bay is joined to Dover by the foreshore road at the foot of the cliffs--a road now in the making--it will be a magnificent route of some three miles between those now sundered places. But again, woe the day! At present to climb up out of the bay and up across the foreland, and so along the coastguard path, and past the Convict Prison and by the North Fall Meadow behind the Castle, to Dover is a weariful business. Less weary, perhaps, but longer, and along by-roads, is the way past the tiny secluded village of Westcliffe; and then down the main road, past the Duke of York’s School, and still steeply down Dover Castle Hill, into the town, lying there, seething populously in the constricted valley of the Dour. CHAPTER XIX DOVER--THE CASTLE AND ROMAN PHAROS--“QUEEN ELIZABETH’S POCKET-PISTOL”--THE WESTERN HEIGHTS The great and growing town of Dover looks forward to a greater fame than even the historic past has conferred upon it. The measure of Dover’s greatness is not the usual measurement, that of population, for the town numbers only some 44,000. Rather does it lie in its defensible and strategic situation. Dover has ever, from Roman times, been a place of arms, and was, an old chronicler tells us, the “lock and key of the whole kingdom.” That being so, it has always behoved us to make it one of the most strongly fortified places on our coasts. On either side of the deep and narrow valley in which the town lies, the great chalk downs and cliffs rise steeply and massively, and all are in military occupation. The morning drum-beat reverberates from the Western Heights to welcome the rising sun, and the Last Post from the Castle sounds the requiem of the departed day; and in between them the tootling and the fifing, the words of command, the gun-firing, and all the military alarms and excursions of a garrison-town help to convince even the most timid that we are being taken care of.