him prisoner until Mr. Winstanley set
him free. He made a slipper also, and laid it on his bedroom floor,
and when anyone put his foot into it he touched a spring that caused
a ghost to rise from the hearth. He made a summer house, too, at the
foot of his garden, on the edge of a canal, and if anyone entered
into it and sat down, he very soon found himself adrift on the canal.

"Such a man was thought to be the best for such a difficult work as
the building of a lighthouse on the Eddystone, so he was asked to
undertake it, and agreed, and began it well. He finished it, too, in
four years, his chief difficulty being the distance of the rock from
land, and the danger of goin' backwards and forwards. The light was
first shown on the 14th November, 1698. Before this the engineer had
resolved to pass a night in the building, which he did with a party
of men; but he was compelled to pass more than a night, for it came
on to blow furiously, and they were kept prisoners for eleven days,
drenched with spray all the time, and hard up for provisions.

"It was said the sprays rose a hundred feet above the lantern of this
first Eddystone Lighthouse. Well, it stood till the year 1703, when
repairs became necessary, and Mr. Winstanley went down to Plymouth to
superintend. It had been prophesied that this lighthouse would
certainly be carried away. But dismal prophecies are always made
about unusual things. If men were to mind prophecies there would be
precious little done in this world. Howsever, the prophecies
unfortunately came true. Winstanley's friends advised him not to go
to stay in it, but he was so confident of the strength of his work
that he said he only wished to have the chance o' bein' there in the
greatest storm that ever blew, that he might see what effect it would
have on the buildin'. Poor man! he had his wish. On the night of the
26th November a terrible storm arose, the worst that had been for
many years, and swept the lighthouse entirely away. Not a vestige of
it or the people on it was ever seen afterwards. Only a few bits of
the iron fastenings were left fixed in the rocks."

"That was terrible," said Forsyth, whose uneasiness was evidently
increasing with the rising storm.

"Ay, but the worst of it was," continued Bremner, "that, owing to the
absence of the light, a large East Indiaman went on the rocks
immediately after, and became a total wreck. This, however, set the
Trinity House on putting up another w