At all the lighthouses built on rocks and ledges the keepers have to be supplied with fresh water from the mainland, that collected from rains in cisterns and tanks being generally insufficient for their needs. Each lighthouse keeper is supplied by the Government with a well-selected library of fifty volumes. There are five hundred and fifty of these libraries, and they are continually kept moving from station to station, the inspector, when he makes his quarterly visit, bringing a fresh library, and taking the old one with him, to his next stopping-place. Captain Oliver Brooks, now living in honored and well-earned retirement, besides being for thirty years keeper of the great light on Faulkner's Island, five miles off the Connecticut coast in Long Island Sound, was also one of the most remarkable men ever connected with the lighthouse service. He had been a sea captain before he became a lighthouse keeper and was a man of signal mechanical skill and marked inventive genius. His knowledge of electricity, and of light and sound was thorough and exact, and the results of many of his experiments, adopted by the Lighthouse Board, have contributed greatly to the improvement of the service. All the apparatus with which he conducted his experiments was constructed by him in a little workshop he had fitted up in the lighthouse tower. But his fondness for the theoretical never caused him to neglect in the slightest detail the practical side of his work, and he was, indeed, a model keeper. Faulkner's Island lies directly in the path of all vessels passing either in or out of the Sound, and its light is one of the most important ones on our coasts, but there has not been a night in more than a hundred years that it has not flashed out its warning to sailors. The island was a barren and desolate spot when Captain Brooks settled there, but he and his family turned it into a paradise. All of his large family of boys and girls were born there, and there grew up to sturdy manhood and splendid womanhood. One daughter was an authority on ornithology; another, a gifted water-color artist, and every one of the children was a skilled musician, their family concerts, in which not less than five different instruments were brought into play, being treats to hear. All of the children had noble records as life-savers, and many were the men, women and children they saved from death in the treacherous waters surrounding their island home. It was not until his youngest child had left the island that the captain gave up his place as keeper to spend his last days on shore.