That was a worthy and a noble idea by which Smeaton’s old lighthouse-tower, superseded from its watch and ward over the Eddystone, was rebuilt on the Hoe in 1882. From the gallery of it you may glimpse its successor, diminished by the distance of fourteen miles to the semblance of a tiny stalk rising lonely amidst the waste of waters. It was no reflection upon the stability of the tower that it was found necessary to remove it, after it had safely weathered the storms of a hundred and twenty years in that exposed situation. It was the reef on which it stood that had decayed. The interior of this wave-washed tower, come ashore again after so many years, is open to inspection, and there, around the cornice of what was the store-room, you read the expression of the piety of those who built, in the text, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it,” while above the lantern is the further inscription, “24th August, 1759, _Laus Deo_.” Unhappily for the romantic associations of the Hoe, fifth-rate and utterly unhistoric streets and tramways conspire to render sordid the immediate neighbourhood, and the place-name has itself been, time beyond the memory of man, the sport of the H-less. It was H. J. Byron, the dramatist, who made a crushing retort to an actor, who, late for rehearsal, had excused himself by saying he had been for a “walk round the ’oe.” “Next time,” said Byron, “don’t wander so far. Take a stroll round the H.” CHAPTER XXVII THE STORY OF THE EDDYSTONE—THE GUILDHALL—ST. ANDREW’S Excursion steamers in summer take thousands of visitors from the Hoe Pier out to the Eddystone, and so in many minds renew the moving story of that fatal reef. The existing lighthouse is the fourth to be built in this terrible isolation, whose loneliness appeals more to the imagination when viewing the solitary tower in the hazy distance, from the Hoe, than when it is seen at close quarters. At a distance its puny proportions in relation to the surrounding leagues of restless sea are realised with a shudder at the temerity of its builders, but near at hand the massive character of its masonry is the first thing to attract attention. If the daring of modern engineers inspires respect, what should be those emotions with which we look back upon the first audacious attempts to rear a lighthouse upon the tiny foothold of the exposed Eddystone, so far back as 1696?