- airs laden with the perfumes of the highland heather or the Cornish gorse,
tempting you to keep your watch outside the lantern, in the open gallery, instead of in your watch-room chair within; the Channel may be full of stately ships, each guided by your light, or the horizon may be bare of all sign of life, except, remote and far beneath you, the lantern of some fishing-boat at sea,—but, whatever may be going on outside, there is within for you the duty, simple and easy, by virtue of your moral method and orderly training, "to light the lamps every evening at sun-setting, and keep them constantly burning, bright and clear, till sun-rising." You shall be helped to do this easily and well by abundant discipline, first, on probation, at head-quarters, where you shall gain familiarity with all your materials—lamps, oil, wicks, lighting apparatus, revolving machinery, and cleaning stores; you shall be looked at, and over, and through, by keen medical eyes, before you can be admitted to this service, lest, under the exceptional nature of your future life, you, not being a sound man, should break down, to the public detriment and your own; you shall be enjoined "to the constant habit of cleanliness and good order in your own person, and to the invariable exercise of temperance and morality in your habits and proceedings, so that, by your example, you may enforce, as far as lies in your power, the observance of the same laudable conduct by your wife and family." You shall be well paid while you are hale and active, and well pensioned when you are past work; you shall be ennobled, by compulsion, into provident consideration for your helpmate and your children by an insurance on your life; but when all this is done for you, and the highest and completest satisfaction that can fall to the best of us on this side the grave—the sense of being useful to our fellows—is ordered for you in abundant measure, it all recurs to what, as regards the specialty of your life, is the be-all and the end-all of your existence, and this is the burden to the ballad of your story:—"You are to light the lamps every evening at sun-setting, and keep them constantly burning, bright and clear, till sun-rising."
To do this implies a perpetual watch. "He whose watch is about to end is to trim the lamps and leave them burning in perfect order before he quits the lantern and calls the succeeding watch, and he who has the watch at sun-rise, when he has extinguished the lamps, is to commence all necessary preparations for the exhibition of the light at the ensuing sunset;" and, moreover, "no bed, sofa, or other article on which to recline, can be permitted, either in the lantern, or in the apartment under the lantern, known as the watch-room."
Thus far we have a common denominator to the life of every light-*keeper; but in other respects it varies much. At such stations as the Forelands or Harwich, where there are gardens to cultivate and plenty of land room for the men to stretch their legs and renovate themselves after the night watches; where visitors from neighbouring watering-places are constantly coming and going, to talk, to praise, to listen, and, perhaps, to fee, it is all very well; but there are also places "remote, unfriended,
