Imperfect, however, as used to be the lighting apparatus, the Eddystone Beacon has always been a great boon to all those "that go down to the sea in great ships," and has robbed these perilous waters of much of their terror. We can readily sympathize with the exultation of the great engineer who reared it, when standing on the Hoe at Plymouth, he spent many an hour, with his telescope, watching the great swollen waves, in powerless fury, dash against his tower, and "fly up in a white column, enwrapping it like a sheet, rising at the least to double the height of the tower, and totally intercepting it from sight." It is now more than a hundred years since Smeaton's Lighthouse first rose upon the Eddystone; but, in spite of the many furious storms which have put its stability to rude and searching proof, it still lifts its head proudly over the waves, and shows no signs of failing strength. II.--THE BELL ROCK. The Inch Cape, or Bell Rock, is a long, narrow reef on the east coast of Scotland, at the mouth of the Frith of Tay, and some dozen of miles from the nearest land. At high water the whole ledge is buried out of sight; and even at the ebb the highest part of it is only three or four feet out of the water. In the days of old, as the tradition goes, one of the abbots of Arbroath, among many good works, exhibited his piety and humanity by placing upon a float attached to the perilous reef a large bell, so suspended as to be tolled by the rising and falling of the waves. "On a buoy, in the storm it floated and swung, And over the waves its warning rung." Many a storm-tossed mariner heard the friendly knell that warned him of the nearness of the fatal rock, and changed his course before it was too late, with blessings on the good old monk who had hung up the bell; but after some years, one of the pirates who infested the coast cut it down in wanton cruelty, and was one of the first who suffered from the loss. Not long after, he perished upon this very rock, which a dense fog shrouded from sight, and no bell gave timely warning of. "And even in his dying fear, One dreadful sound did the rover hear; A sound as if with the Inch Cape Bell, The devil below was ringing his knell." After the lapse of many years, two attempts were made to raise a beacon of spars upon the rock; but one after the other they fell a prey to the angry waves, and were hardly set up before they disappeared. It was not till the beginning of the century that the Commissioners of Northern Lighthouses took up the idea of erecting a lighthouse on this reef, the most dangerous on all the coast. Several years elapsed before they got the sanction of Parliament to the undertaking, and 1807 arrived before it was actually entered upon.