not content with keeping an
encyclopaedic diary himself, he would fain have set all his sons to work
continuing and extending it. They were more happily inspired. My
father's engineering pocket-book was not a bulky volume; with its store
of pregnant notes and vital formulas, it served him through life, and
was not yet filled when he came to die. As for Robert Stevenson and the
Travelling Diary, I should be ungrateful to complain, for it has
supplied me with many lively traits for this and subsequent chapters;
but I must still remember much of the period of my study there as a
sojourn in the Valley of the Shadow.

The duty of the engineer is twofold--to design the work, and to see the
work done. We have seen already something of the vociferous thoroughness
of the man, upon the cleaning of lamps and the polishing of reflectors.
In building, in road-making, in the construction of bridges, in every
detail and byway of his employments, he pursued the same ideal.
Perfection (with a capital P and violently underscored) was his design.
A crack for a penknife, the waste of "six-and-thirty shillings," "the
loss of a day or a tide," in each of these he saw and was revolted by
the finger of the sloven; and to spirits intense as his, and immersed in
vital undertakings, the slovenly is the dishonest, and wasted time is
instantly translated into lives endangered. On this consistent idealism
there is but one thing that now and then trenches with a touch of
incongruity, and that is his love of the picturesque. As when he laid
out a road on Hogarth's line of beauty; bade a foreman be careful, in
quarrying, not "to disfigure the island"; or regretted in a report that
"the great stone, called the _Devil in the Hole_, was blasted or broken
down to make road-metal, and for other purposes of the work."

FOOTNOTE:

[10] This is only a probable hypothesis; I have tried to identify my
father's anecdote in my grandfather's diary, and may very well have
been deceived.--R. L. S.

CHAPTER III

THE BUILDING OF THE BELL ROCK

Off the mouths of the Tay and the Forth, thirteen miles from Fifeness,
eleven from Arbroath, and fourteen from the Red Head of Angus, lies the
Inchcape or Bell Rock. It extends to a length of about fourteen hundred
feet, but the part of it discovered at low water to not more than four
hundred and twenty-seven. At a little more than half-flood in fine
weather the seamless ocean joins over the reef, and