thrown from its position "into the boiling surf below, and the time-piece hurled into a sleeping berth opposite the place it usually hung."
Midway between a rock lighthouse and a shore station, both as to structure and as to the experiences of life in it, is that mongrel breed amongst edifices, the Pile Lighthouse. There are many sands at the mouths of tidal rivers where the water is not deep enough, nor are the channels sufficiently wide to make a light-vessel suitable, and which yet need marking, and marking, too, at a spot where not only the ordinary foundations of masonry, but even the pile foundations used for many purposes, would be at fault. Here it is that two very ingenious plans have been of service. The one is to fit the lower extremity of piles with broad-flanged screws, something like the screw of a steam-vessel, and then setting them upright in the sand, screw them down with capstans worked from the decks of dumb lighters. These bottom piles once secured, the spider legs are bolted on to them, and the spider bodies on the top; a ladder draws up, and a boat swings ready to be lowered. The other mode of meeting the difficulty of mud or loose silt and sand, is by hollow cylinders, which, placed upright on the sand, have the air exhausted from the inside of them, and on the principle that nature abhors a vacuum (at all events in cylinders), the weight of the atmosphere on the sand outside forces it up into the exhausted receiver, and the pile sinks at a rate which, until one gets accustomed to it, is rather surprising. Here, as in the screw pile, the foundation once established, the superstructure, whether of straight shafts or spider legs, is only a matter of detail.
These, then, be the variations of lighthouse structure: rock lighthouses, solitary giants rising from the ocean deeps; pile lighthouses, stuck about the shallow estuaries on long red legs, like so many flamingoes fishing; safer, but with less of dignity and more of ague;—and lastly, the real bonâ fide shore lighthouse, with its broad sweep of down, its neat cottages, and trim inclosures. If my Lord Grenville had had any thought of occupying the residence that he calculated to eliminate from the king's good-humour, we take it there is very little doubt on which class in the foregoing category he would have fixed his choice.
The remaining contribution to the complement of the lighting service is the light-vessel. There are, unfortunately, too many outlying dangers on our coasts where it is either impossible to fix a lighthouse, or where, from the shifting character of the shoal, it is necessary to move the light from time to time. Of these the most notable are the Goodwin Sands. There are constantly propositions for lighthouses on the Goodwin; and some men, mortified that dry lands once belonging to the men of Kent should be water-wastes for ever, have proposed boldly to reclaim them, believing that the scheme would pay, not merely by the acreage added to the county, but by the buried treasures to be exhumed. At present they are marked with three light-vessels, one at each end and one in the middle. There are other floating stations still farther remote from land; and at one—the Seven Stones, between the Scilly Islands and the main—the vessel is in
