spite, or the huge bulging wave which would dash a ship to pieces and drown her crew in a single effort, now blows the fog-whistle and warns the mariner off.  The sound thus produced has been heard at a distance of seven or eight miles.  It has a peculiar effect, because it has no regular period; depending upon the irregular coming in of the waves, and upon their similarly irregular force, it is blown somewhat as an idle boy would blow his penny trumpet.  It ceases entirely for an hour and a half at low water, when the mouth of the cave or passage is exposed.

[Illustration:  LIGHT-HOUSE ON THE SOUTH FARALLON.]

[Illustration:  ARCH AT WEST END, FARALLON ISLANDS.]

The life of the keepers of the Farallon light is singularly lonely and monotonous.  Their house is built somewhat under the shelter of the rocks, but they live in what to a landsman would seem a perpetual storm; the ocean roars in their ears day and night; the boom of the surf is their constant and only music; the wild scream of the sea-birds, the howl of the sea-lions, the whistle and shriek of the gale, the dull, threatening thunder of the vast breakers, are the dreary and desolate sounds which lull them to sleep at night, and assail their ears when they awake.  In the winter months even their supply vessel, which, for the most part, is their only connection with the world, is sometimes unable to make a landing for weeks at a time.  Chance visitors they see only occasionally, and at that distance at which a steamer is safe from the surf, and at which a girl could not even recognize her lover.  The commerce of San Francisco passes before their eyes, but so far away that they can not tell the ships and steamers which sail by them voiceless and without greeting; and of the events passing on the planet with which they have so frail a social tie they learn only at long and irregular intervals.  The change from sunshine to fog is the chief variety in their lives; the hasty landing of supplies the great event in their months.  They can not even watch the growth of trees and plants; and to a child born and reared in such a place, a sunny lee under the shelter of rocks is probably the ideal of human felicity.

Except the rock of Tristan d’Acunha in the Southern Atlantic Ocean, I have never seen an inhabited spot which seemed so utterly desolate, so entirely separated from the world, whose people appeared to me to have such a slender hold on mankind.  Yet for their solace they know that a powerful Government watches over their welfare, and—­if that is any comfort—­that, thirty miles away, there are lights and music and laughter and singing, as well as crowds, and all the anxieties and annoyances incidental to what we are pleased to call civilization.

But though these lonely rocks contain but a small society of human beings—­the keepers and their families—­they are filled with animal life; for they are the home of a multitude of sea-lions, and of vast numbers of birds and rabbits.