“That’s true,” said Ruby.  “Come, Bremner, I have heard you say that you had read all about that business.  Let’s hear the story; it will help to while away the time, for there’s no chance of anyone gettin’ to sleep with such a row outside.”

“I wish it may be no worse than a row outside,” said Forsyth in a doleful tone, as he shook his head and looked round on the party anxiously.

“Wot! another fit o’ the toothick?” enquired O’Connor ironically.

“Don’t try to put us in the dismals,” said Jamie Dove, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, and refilling that solace of his leisure hours.  “Let us hear about the Eddystone, Bremner; it’ll cheer up our spirits a bit.”

“Will it though?” said Bremner, with a look that John Watt described as “awesome”.  “Well, we shall see.”

“You must know, boys——­”

’"Ere, light your pipe, my ’earty,” said Dumsby.

“Hold yer tongue, an’ don’t interrupt him,” cried one of the men, flattening Dumsby’s cap over his eyes.

“And don’t drop yer Aaitches,” observed another, “’cause if ye do they’ll fall into the sea an’ be drownded, an’ then yell have none left to put into their wrong places when ye wants ’em.”

“Come, Bremner, go on.”

“Well, then, boys,” began Bremner, “you must know that it is more than a hundred years since the Eddystone Lighthouse was begun—­in the year 1696, if I remember rightly—­that would be just a hundred and thirteen years to this date.  Up to that time these rocks were as great a terror to sailors as the Bell Rock is now, or, rather, as it was last year, for now that this here comfortable beacon has been put up, it’s no longer a terror to nobody——­”

“Except Geordie Forsyth,” interposed O’Connor.

“Silence,” cried the men.

“Well,” resumed Bremner, “as you all know, the Eddystone Rocks lie in the British Channel, fourteen miles from Plymouth and ten from the Ram Head, an’ open to a most tremendious sea from the Bay o’ Biscay and the Atlantic, as I knows well, for I’ve passed the place in a gale, close enough a’most to throw a biscuit on the rocks.

“They are named the Eddystone Rocks because of the whirls and eddies that the tides make among them; but for the matter of that, the Bell Rock might be so named on the same ground.  Howsever, it’s six o’ one an’ half a dozen o’ t’other.  Only there’s this difference, that the highest point o’ the Eddystone is barely covered at high water, while here the rock is twelve or fifteen feet below water at high tide.

“Well, it was settled by the Trinity Board in 1696, that a lighthouse should be put up, and a Mr. Winstanley was engaged to do it.  He was an uncommon clever an’ ingenious man.  He used to exhibit wonderful waterworks in London; and in his house, down in Essex, he used to astonish his friends, and frighten them sometimes, with his queer contrivances.  He had invented an easy chair which laid hold of anyone that sat down in it, and held 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.