a bandbox affixed to a giant easel. It is alight, although it is broad
daylight; for it is always alight, always gravely revolving, night and
day, alone on this sandbank in the North Sea. It is tended once in three
weeks. The lamp is filled; the wick is trimmed; the screen, which is
ingeniously made to revolve by the heat of the lamp, is lubricated, and
the beacon is left to its solitude and its work.

There must be land to the eastward, though nothing but the spinning mill
is visible. The land is below the level of the sea. There is probably
an entrance to some canal behind the moving sandbank. This is one of the
waste-places of the world--a place left clean on sailors' charts; no
one passes that way. These banks are as deadly as many rocks which have
earned for themselves a dreaded name in maritime story. For they never
relinquish anything that touches them. They are soft and gentle in their
embrace; they slowly suck in the ship that comes within their grasp.
Their story is a long, grim tale of disaster. Their treasure is vast and
stored beneath a weight, half sand, half water, which must ever baffle
the ingenuity of man. Fog, the sailors' deadliest foe, has its home on
these waters, rising on the low-lying lands and creeping out to sea,
where it blows to and fro for weeks and weeks together. When all the
world is blue and sunny, fog-banks lie like a sheet of cotton-wool on
these coasts.

"Barrin' fogs--always barrin' fogs!" Captain Cable had said as his last
word on leaving the Signal House. "If ye wait a month, never move in a
fog in these waters, or ye'll move straight to Davy Jones!"

And chance favored him, for a gale of wind came instead of a fog, one
of those May gales that sweep down from the northwest without warning or
reason.