"I reckon you'll be wantin' to take a look at Carys' Ledge before you leave us?" Captain Eph said when the lad was at liberty. "An' seein's how its nigh to low water, you may not have a better chance, although I'm free to admit we haven't got much to show you. If you feel like crawlin' 'round over the rocks, come with me." Sidney was not particularly eager to make a tour of the ledge, perhaps because it was not very interesting from whatever point you might view it; but it seemed as if he was in duty bound to accept the invitation, and the two set off across the brown, jagged boulders, on which, before the tower was built, so many good vessels had foundered. When Captain Eph and the boy were at the extreme southern point of the ledge, looking back at the tower, Sidney asked in a tone of wonderment: "How did they build the light-house on these rocks?" "Well, I'll allow it was a pretty tough job; but nothing to be compared with what the Board has done in other places. Now I was reading, not a great while ago, in one of the books the inspector sends us, about their building a tower on a rock off the coast of Oregon called Tillamook. Putting one up here wasn't a marker alongside the trouble they had with that, because there wasn't many days in the summer when a full crew couldn't work here." "And was Tillamook Rock worse than this ledge, sir?" Sidney asked. "Why bless your heart, lad, Carys' Ledge ain't to be compared with it, 'cording to what I've read. It's just one big stone, so to speak, standin' high out of fifteen fathom of water, an' a full mile from the mainland. As I remember, it's located twenty miles south of the mouth of the Columbia River. It seems, 'cordin' to the printed story, that that 'ere rock was split in two, with a wide crack running east an' west, an' the top of it was about a hundred feet above the level of the sea. Nothin' larger than fifty foot square could be built on it, an' it was a mighty ticklish job for even sailormen to get a footin' there, even in the fairest of fair weather. Why, the foreman of the first crew that went off was drownded when the natives thereabouts allowed that the sea was calm. That put a damper, so to speak, on the work; but the Board was bound to have a light there, an' when they get their minds set on a thing, it's pretty sure to be brought about. "If I remember rightly, it was sometime in October of 1879, when the steam tender landed four men with drills, hammers, and such like, to say nothing of provisions, fuel, a stove, an' some canvas for them to make a shanty of. There those poor, wretched creeters hung to the rock like starfish, not able to do much of anything more than keep themselves from tumbling off into the water. It was three days before they got five other men an' a small derrick on to that blessed rock, an' for near to two weeks they had nothin' to shelter them from the rain and the spray but that 'ere square of canvas they had carried out."