e and tug at their cables. That's their business. But it
isn't the business of one hundred and twenty upright feet of granite
to quiver and tremble like a steel spring. No, I wasn't on the Bishop
when the bell went. But I was there when a wave climbed up from the
base of the rock and smashed in the glass wall of the lantern, and put
the light out. That was last spring at four o'clock in the morning.
The day was breaking very cold and wild, and one could just see the
waves below, a lashing tumble of grey and white water as far as the
eye could reach. I was in the lantern reading 'It's never too late to
mend.' I had come to where the chaplain knocks down the warder, and I
was thinking how I'd like to have a go at that warder myself, when all
the guns in the world went off together in my ears. And there I was
dripping wet, and fairly sliced with splinters of glass, and the wind
blowing wet in my face, and the lamp out, and a bitter grey light of
morning, as though there never, never had been any sun, and all the
dead men in the sea shouting out for me one hundred feet below," and
Garstin shivered, and rose to his feet. "Well, I have only one more
winter of it."

"And then?" I asked.

"Then I get the North Foreland, and the trippers come out from
Margate, and I live on shore with my wife and--By the way, I wanted to
speak to you about my boy. He's getting up in years. What shall I make
of him? A linen-draper, eh? In the Midlands, what? or something in a
Free Library, handing out Charles Reade's books? He's at home now.
Come and see him!"

In Garstin's quarters, within the coastguard enclosure, I was
introduced to his wife and the lad, Leopold. "What shall we call him?"
Mrs. Garstin had asked, some fifteen years before. "I don't know any
seafaring man by the name of Leopold," Garstin had replied, after a
moment of reflection. So Leopold he was named.

Mrs. Garstin was a buxom, unimaginative woman, but she shared to the
full her husband's horror of the sea. She told me of nights when she
lay alone listening to the moan of the wind overhead, and seeing the
column of the Bishop rock upon its base, and of mornings when she
climbed from the sheltered barracks up the gorse, with her heart
tugging in her breast, certain, certain that this morning, at least,
there would be no Bishop lighthouse visible from the top of the
garrison.

"It seems a sort of insult to the works of God," said she, in a hushed
voice. "It seems as if i