rocking of the house on its pillars, and the spirting of water through the seams of the doors and windows: symptoms which, to one suddenly aroused from sound sleep, recalled the appalling fate of the former barrack, which had been engulfed in the foam not twenty yards from our dwelling, and for a moment seemed to summon us to a similar fate. On two occasions, in particular, those sensations were so vivid as to cause almost every one to spring out of bed; and some of the men flew from the barrack by a temporary gangway to the more stable but less comfortable shelter afforded by the bare wall of the lighthouse tower, then unfinished, where they spent the remainder of the night in the darkness and the cold.” Yet life on the Skerryvore was by no means destitute of its peculiar pleasures. The grandeur of the ocean’s rage, the deep murmur of the waves, the hoarse cry of the sea-birds, were varied by peaceful hours, when the sea was glassy and the deep blue vault of heaven was studded with a thousand stars. “Among the many wonders of the ‘great deep,’” says Stevenson, “which we witnessed at the Skerryvore, not the least is the agility and power displayed by the unshapely seal. I have often seen half a dozen of these animals round the rock, playing on the surface or riding on the crests of curling waves, come so close as to permit us to see their eyes and head, and lead us to expect that they would be thrown _high and dry_ at the foot of the tower; when suddenly they performed a somersault within a few feet of the rock, and diving into the flaky and wreathing foam, disappeared, and as suddenly re-appeared a hundred yards off, uttering a strange low cry.” On one occasion the tender could not come off to the poor people on the rock for seven weeks. The seamen passed a most dreary time. Their provisions and fuel were short; their clothes were worn to rags; and, what was to them of more importance still, they _were out of tobacco_!