reported that a signal of distress was out, but that was all they knew. Many attempts to approach the rock were made, but fruitlessly. The boats could not get near enough to hail, they could only return to make the bewildered agent and the anxious relatives of the keepers more bewildered and more anxious by the statement that there was always what seemed to be the dim figure of a man in one corner of the outside gallery, but whether he spoke or moved, or not, they could not tell. Night after night the light was watched for with great misgiving whether it would ever show again. But the light failed not. Punctually as the sun set it seemed to leave a fragment of its fire gleaming in the lantern glasses, which burnt there till it rose again, showing this much at least, that some one was alive at the Smalls; but whether both the men, or which, no anxious mother or loving wife could tell. Four months of this, and then, in calmer weather, a Milford boat brought into the agency at Solva one lightkeeper and one dead man.
What the living man had suffered can never now be known. Whether, when first he came distinctly to believe his comrade would die he stood in blank despair, or whether he implored him on his knees, in an agony of selfish terror, to live; whether when, perhaps for the first time in his life, he stood face to face, and so very close, to death, he thought of immediate burial, or whether he rushed at once to the gallery to shout out to the nearest sail, perhaps a mile away;—at what exact moment it was that the thought flashed across him that he must not bury the body in the sea, lest those on shore should question him as Cain was questioned for his brother, and he, failing to produce him, should be branded with Cain's curse and meet a speedier fate—is unrecorded. What he did was to make a coffin. He had been a cooper by trade, and by breaking up a bulk-head in the living room, he got the dead man covered in; then, with infinite labour he took him to the gallery and lashed him there. Perhaps with an instinctive wisdom he set himself to work, cleaned and re-cleaned his lamps, unpacked and packed his stores. Perhaps he made a point of walking resolutely up to the coffin three or four times a day, perhaps he never went near it, and even managed to look over it rather than at it, when he was scanning the whole horizon for a sail. In his desperation it may have occurred to him that as his light was a warning to keep vessels off, so its absence would speedily betray some ship to a dangerous vicinity to his forlornness, whose crew would be companions to him even though he had caused them to be wrecked. But this he did not do. No lives were risked to alleviate his desolation, but when he came on shore with his dead companion he was a sad, reserved, emaciated man, so strangely worn that his associates did not know him.
The immediate result of this sad occurrence was, that three men were always kept at the lighthouse, and this wise rule pertains in the public service.
Among the minor miseries of life at the Smalls would be such things as a storm, in which the central flooring was entirely displaced, the stove
