“Our brows are bound with spindrift, and the weed is on our knees,
  Our loins are battered ’neath us by the swinging, smoking seas;
  From reef, and rock, and skerry, over headland, ness, and voe,
  The coastwise lights of England watch the ships of England go.”

There are about twenty of these little islets to be seen at low tide, and very curious are some of their names—­The Megstone, The Crumstone, The Navestone, The Harcars, The Wedums, The Noxes (Knokys), and The Wawmses.  The largest, Farne Island, is the nearest to the coast, and is the one to which St. Aidan retired, and on which St. Cuthbert made himself a cell, and where he lived for some years, leaving Lindisfarne (Holy Island) very often for months together, to dwell alone on this almost bare rock and devote himself to holy meditation and prayer.

To this island came King Ecgfrith of Northumbria with Archbishop Trumwine and other representatives of the Synod to beg the hermit to accept the Bishopric of Hexham; and it was on this island that St. Cuthbert died, the monks who had gone to look after him signalling the news of his death to his brethren at Lindisfarne by means of torches.  The island is rocky and precipitous, with deep chasms between the high cliffs; and when a north wind blows, the columns of foam and spray, from the waters dashing into the chasms and over the tops of the cliffs, may be seen from the mainland rising high into the air.

Before the first lighthouse was built on Farne Island, in 1766, a coal fire was kindled every night on the top of the tower-like building used as a fort.  This method of warning passing vessels had been used continuously since the days of Charles II.  In great contrast to this is the modern lighthouse, with its acetylene gas lights and its automatic flash apparatus.

Close to Stapel Island are the three high basaltic pillars, of rock called the Pinnacles.  On all these islands sea-birds breed, but especially on the Pinnacles, the Big and Little Harcar, and the islet called the Brownsman.

Thousands and thousands of them perch and chatter on the rocks and fly screaming in the air, amongst them being guillemots, kittiwakes, gulls, terns, cormorants, puffins, and eider-ducks, for which latter St. Cuthbert is said to have had great affection; certainly they are the gentlest of these wild sea-fowl.

Bidding farewell to the rocky Farnes, we sail past Budle Bay, into which runs the Warenburn and the Elwick burn, and underneath whose sandy flats is the buried town of Warnmouth, once a busy seaport, to which Henry III. granted a charter.  Approaching Lindisfarne, “Our isle of Saints, low-lying on the blue breast of the curling waters, is hushed and silent in the lightly-purple mists of morning, like the wide aisles of a great cathedral at daybreak, before the feet and tongues of sightseers disturb the solemn stillness.  The tideway is covered with water, and the footprints