THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS

"... For the sake
Of these, my kinsmen and my countrymen,
Who early and late in the windy ocean toiled
To plant a star for seamen."


The pirate, Ralph the Rover, so legend tells, while cruising off the
coast of Scotland searching for booty or sport, sank the warning bell on
one of the great rocks, to plague the good Abbot of Arbroath who had put
it there. The following year the Rover returned and perished himself on
the same rock.

In the life of one of Scotland's great men, Robert Louis Stevenson, we
find proud record of his grandfather, Robert Stevenson, having built
Bell Rock Lighthouse on this same spot years afterward.

No story of Robert Louis Stevenson's life would be complete that failed
to mention the work done for Scotland and the world at large by the two
men he held most dear, the engineers, his father and grandfather.

When Robert Stevenson, his grandfather, received his appointment on the
Board of Northern Lights the art of lighthouse building in Scotland had
just begun. Its bleak, rocky shores were world-famous for their danger,
and few mariners cared to venture around them. At that time the coast
"was lighted at a single point, the Isle of May, in the jaws of the
Firth of Forth, where, on a tower already a hundred and fifty years old,
an open coal-fire blazed in an open chaufer. The whole archipelago thus