It reached the Eddystone about ten o'clock, when the fire had been raging for eight hours. The building was wholly destroyed; and the keepers, who had been driven away by the falling beams, the red-hot iron, and molten lead, were found, in a panic-stricken condition, crouching in a recess or cavern on the east side of the rock. They were carried into the boat, and conveyed ashore. Curious to relate, they were no sooner landed than one of them stole away, and was never afterwards heard of. His flight gave rise to a suspicion that the fire was not accidental; yet, when we remember that a lighthouse rock affords no means of escape for its inmates, we can hardly suppose it to be the place an incendiary would select for the scene of his wicked attempt. It is possible that the man's nerves had been so tried by the terrible nature of the peril he had undergone, that he knew not what he did. [Sidenote: The lightkeeper's fate.] Of the other two light-keepers, one, named Henry Hall, met with a singular fate. While engaged in dashing some buckets of water on the burning roof of the cupola, he chanced to look upwards, and a mass of molten lead fell down upon his head, face, and shoulders, burning him severely. On his arrival ashore, he persisted in asserting that a portion of the liquefied metal had gone down his throat. His medical attendant regarded the assertion as the offspring of a disordered imagination; but the man rapidly grew worse, and on the twelfth day of his illness, after an attack of violent convulsions, expired. A _post-mortem_ examination of his body then took place, and Hall's story was found to be true; for in the stomach lay a flat, oval piece of lead, seven ounces and five drachms in weight! [Sidenote: John Smeaton.] Acting on the old maxim of "Try, try, and try again," the Trinity House Corporation determined to erect another light-tower on the Eddystone, and intrusted the work to a mathematical instrument maker, named John Smeaton, who had already acquired a reputation as an ingenious mechanician. Smeaton at this time was thirty-two years of age. As we shall tell the story of his brave and industrious life hereafter, it will suffice us now to state that he had shown himself in a variety of experiences, skilful, prompt, patient, and indefatigable; never baffled by a difficulty, fertile in resource, and incapable of faltering in any enterprise he had deliberately undertaken. [Sidenote: Design of his lighthouse.]