“If I were in England, I should imagine madame was speaking of the reform bill, or the millennium,—but I am in ignorance.”
And just as I spoke, the great folding-doors were thrown open wide, and every one started to their feet to greet a little old lady, leaning on a thin black wand—and—
“Madame la Féemarraine,” was announced by a chorus of sweet shrill voices.
And in a moment I was lying in the grass close by a hollow oak tree, with the slanting glory of the dawning day shining full in my face, and thousands of little birds and delicate insects piping and warbling out their welcome to the ruddy splendour.
Life among the Lighthouses.
A minister of state, whose duties brought him into constant attendance upon royalty, once made a memorandum in his diary to watch the king into a good humour, that he might ask him for a Lighthouse. It is probable that the wish of Lord Grenville (for it was he) was not to learn what living in a lighthouse would be like, but rather to realize the very considerable living to be got out of one.
Whether his lordship ever got what he desired, we do not know; but could he have foreseen the serious penalties the nation would have to pay for having the “well-beloved cousins and councillors” of its kings quartered in this free and easy way upon its mercantile marine, surely he would have been too generous to seek it. Henry VIII. and his daughter Elizabeth were alive to the true policy in such matters, for he put the custody of such things into the charge of a chartered body, whose interests were made identical with the public welfare; and she, making her Lord High Admiral Howard surrender his authority in regard to beacons, buoys, marks and signs for the sea to their custody, gave the Elder Brethren of the Trinity House their first Act of Parliament, and set them forward upon an ever-widening career of usefulness, which has resulted in our channels being almost as well lighted as our streets.
Not but what among the proprietors of “private lights,” as those not under the control of the Trinity House were called, there were men of sagacity, energy, and self-devotion. Men who were proud of the means whereby they lived, and took the same pleasure in having their lighthouse a credit to them that an opulent manufacturer does in having his mills up to the mark with all the most recent improvements. But the same motive did not exist in the one case as does in the other. If a manufacturer does not keep in the front rank as regards machinery, the character of his goods is degraded in the market. He must choose between spinning well or not at all. But with the private manufacturers of light for bewildered sailors the case was different: they were authorized to levy tolls on all vessels passing, using, or deriving benefit from the light in question; a certain range of distance appears to have been assumed within which the vessel was liable; and although at one lighthouse the oil might be bad, at another the candles unsnuffed, whilst at a third the coal fire would be reeking in its embers, still so long as the light was there the dues were chargeable.
Things came to a crisis at last. In districts where at the time when the king’s good-humour had been availed of vessels from fishing-village to fishing-village crept round by twos and threes, the waters got crowded daily and hourly with ships of mighty tonnage, and every ton had to pay. It was difficult to tell what the recipients of the royal benevolence were making; but from the style in which their mere collectors throve, it was evidently something far too good to be talked about. It must have been very hard to have been insulted with an offer of three hundred and fifty thousand pounds for a barren rock in the ocean, nothing like that number of feet square, subjecting the proprietor to the necessity of making a pathetic rejoinder to the effect “that if he must sell, it must be for five hundred and fifty thousand pounds, and that would not pay him;” but a jury was appealed to, and four hundred and forty-five thousand pounds was carried off as the vested right in one lighthouse, with a heavy sigh that it was so little. Another leviathan of the deep realized three hundred thousand pounds; and if these were whales among the tritons, the tritons and the minnows too, all plethoric of their kind, fared well. The scale was freighted heavily with compulsory purchase-money before they were all bought out, and the shipping interest had to pay surplus light dues for many years before the official custodians of the lighthouse fund had got quit of their huge debt.
Even on these terms it was the right thing to do. When the lighthouse on the Smalls rock in the Bristol Channel was in private hands, the annual consumption of oil, which is another way of stating the annual amount of light produced, was as little as two hundred gallons; at this present time fifteen hundred gallons are burnt within the year. The dues payable in those days were twopence per ton, whilst now vessels pay at the rate of one halfpenny per ton over-sea, and one-sixteenth part of a penny per ton for coasting voyages, less an abatement in the latter cases of thirty-five per cent. But bad lighting, private proprietorship, public debt, and, to a great extent, even surplus light dues, have gone for ever, and lighthouses have got back to what Queen Elizabeth meant them to be—public trusts in public hands for public uses.