And it was
strange to see our Sabbath services, held, as they were, in one of
the bothies, with Mr. Brebner reading at a table, and the
congregation perched about in the double tier of sleeping bunks;
and to hear the singing of the psalms, "the chapters," the
inevitable Spurgeon's sermon, and the old, eloquent lighthouse
prayer.
In fine weather, when by the spy-glass on the hill the sea was
observed to run low upon the reef, there would be a sound of
preparation in the very early morning; and before the sun had risen
from behind Ben More, the tender would steam out of the bay. Over
fifteen sea-miles of the great blue Atlantic rollers she ploughed
her way, trailing at her tail a brace of wallowing stone-lighters.
The open ocean widened upon either board, and the hills of the
mainland began to go down on the horizon, before she came to her
unhomely destination, and lay-to at last where the rock clapped its
black head above the swell, with the tall iron barrack on its
spider legs, and the truncated tower, and the cranes waving their
arms, and the smoke of the engine-fire rising in the mid-sea. An
ugly reef is this of the Dhu Heartach; no pleasant assemblage of
shelves, and pools, and creeks, about which a child might play for
a whole summer without weariness, like the Bell Rock or the
Skerryvore, but one oval nodule of black-trap, sparsely bedabbled
with an inconspicuous fucus, and alive in every crevice with a
dingy insect between a slater and a bug.
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