It was with the greatest difficulty that they were got into the boat; and they had no sooner reached the shore than one of them, crazed by the terrors he had undergone, ran away, and was never heard of more. The old man lingered on for a few days in great agony, and died from the injuries he had received. Such was the fate of the second lighthouse on the Eddystone,--one element revenging, as it were, the conquest over another. In spite of the fatality which seemed to attend these lighthouses, the lessees of the Eddystone--for it was then in private hands, and did not come into the hands of the Trinity House till many years after--resolved to make another attempt; and this time they selected as the architect one of the ablest professional men of the day, and with sagacious liberality, adopted his advice to build it of stone and granite. Smeaton truly belonged to the class of heaven-born engineers. From his earliest years the bent of his genius unmistakably revealed itself. Before he was six years old, he one day terrified his parents by climbing to the top of a barn to fix up some contrivance he had put together, after the fashion of a windmill; and another time he constructed a pump that raised water, after watching some workmen sinking one. And as he grew older, his efforts took a more ambitious range, and were all equally remarkable for their originality and success. His father destined him for the bar; but his inclination for engineering was so irresistible, that he allowed him to resign all chance of the woolsack, and set up in business as a mathematical instrument maker. He gradually advanced to the profession of civil engineering,--which he was the first man in England to pursue, and which he may be said to have created. It was in 1756 he commenced the construction of the great work which may be regarded as the monument of his fame. Having decided that his lighthouse should be of stone, the next point to be settled was its form. His thoughts, he tells us in his book, instinctively reverted to the analogy between a lighthouse shaft and the trunk of a stately oak. He remarked the spreading roots taking a broad, firm grip of the soil, the rise of the swelling base, gradually lessening in girth in a graceful curve, till a preparation being required for the support of the spreading boughs, a renewed swelling of diameter takes place; and he held that cutting off the branches we have, in the trunk of an oak, a type of such a lighthouse column as is best adapted to resist the influence of the winds and waves. Whether or not Smeaton arrived at the form of his lighthouse, which has since become the model for all others, from this fanciful analogy, its appearance rising from the rock presents a strong resemblance to a noble tree stripped of its boughs and foliage.