“Now, Dove,” cried the landing-master, “come along; the crabs will be attacking your toes if you don’t.”

“It’s a shame to gi’e Ruby the chance o’ a sair throat the very first day,” cried John Watt.

“Just half a minute more,” said the smith, examining a pickaxe, which he was getting up to that delicate point of heat which is requisite to give it proper temper.

While he gazed earnestly into the glowing coals a gentle hissing sound was heard below the frame of the forge, then a gurgle, and the fire became suddenly dark and went out!

“I knowed it! always the way!” cried Dove, with a look of disappointment.  “Come, lad, up with the bellows now, and don’t forget the tongs.”

In a few minutes more the boats pushed off and returned to the Pharos, three and a half hours of good work having been accomplished before the tide drove them away.

Soon afterwards the sea overflowed the whole of the rock, and obliterated the scene of those busy operations as completely as though it had never been!

CHAPTER IX

STORMS AND TROUBLES

A week of fine weather caused Ruby Brand to fall as deeply in love with the work at the Bell Rock as his comrades had done.

There was an amount of vigour and excitement about it, with a dash of romance, which quite harmonized with his character.  At first he had imagined it would be monotonous and dull, but in experience he found it to be quite the reverse.

Although there was uniformity in the general character of the work, there was constant variety in many of the details; and the spot on which it was carried on was so circumscribed, and so utterly cut off from all the world, that the minds of those employed became concentrated on it in a way that aroused strong interest in every trifling object.

There was not a ledge or a point of rock that rose ever so little above the general level, that was not named after, and intimately associated with, some event or individual.  Every mass of seaweed became a familiar object.  The various little pools and inlets, many of them not larger than a dining-room table, received high-sounding and dignified names—­such as Port Stevenson, Port, Erskine, Taylor’s Track, Neill’s Pool, &c.  Of course the fish that frequented the pools, and the shell-fish that covered the rock, became subjects of much attention, and, in some cases, of earnest study.

Robinson Crusoe himself did not pry into the secrets of his island-home with half the amount of assiduity that was displayed at this time by many of the men who built the Bell Rock Lighthouse.  The very fact that their time was limited acted as a spur, so that on landing each tide they rushed hastily to the work, and the amateur studies in natural history to which we have referred were prosecuted hurriedly during brief intervals of rest.  Afterwards, when the beacon house was erected, and the men dwelt upon the rock, these studies (if we may not call them amusements) were continued more leisurely, but with unabated ardour, and furnished no small amount of comparatively thrilling incident at times.