"It'd be your last," was the response. "Nobody could get out alive from that poundin'. More'n one good man's been drowned there. The first man that ever tried to build a lighthouse on this rock got washed off. That was the end of him."

"Tell me about it?" pleaded the boy. "There's just time enough!"

"Ask your dad," said the other; "he's got the early history o' Tillamook by heart. Meantime, I wish you all sorts of luck, lad, an' if ever you're in a Coast Guard vessel on this coast and see Tillamook flashin', don't forget the boys that never let a light go out!"

"Father," said Eric, a little later, when they had boarded the lighthouse-tender and got into dry clothes, "tell me the story of the building of Tillamook Lighthouse. They told me, over there, that you knew all about it."

"I ought to," the inspector replied, "I helped build it. And it was a job! I suppose Tillamook would be classed among the dozen hardest lighthouse-building jobs of the world."

"What would be the others?"

"Well, in America, on the Pacific Coast there's St. George's Reef. Spectacle Reef in the Great Lakes, and Minot's Ledge off Boston, were bad. There are a lot around England and Scotland, like Eddystone, Wolf Rock, the Long Ships, and Bell Rock—that's the old 'Inchcape Rock' you read about in school—and there was a particularly bad one called Or-Mar, in the Bay of Biscay. It took the engineer one year and a week before he could make the first landing on Or-Mar."

"Over a year!"

"A year and a week," the inspector repeated. "And Tillamook wasn't much better. It was in December 1878 that we got orders for a preliminary survey of the reef for the purpose of choosing a lighthouse site. After a dozen or more attempts, the engineer returned baffled. In the following June, six months later, the rock was still unviolated. No human foot had ever trodden it.

"Then the Department began to make demands. Washington got insistent. Urgent orders were issued that the rock would have to be scaled. The engineer was instructed to make a landing. Fortunately, toward the end of the month there came a spell of calm weather."