The daily morning journal and courier., 1895-08-20

used to watch for her fathers boat af- ter dark, with a lantern between her feet, afraid neither of the darkness nor the winds nor the waves, because she was "a part of the Lords universe" and had to let her little star shine as well as the great light In the lantern on the tower.
 The cliff of White island is the high est point in the vicinity and Is not cas- fly climbed. Mrs. Thaxter visited 1t last year, only week before she died. climbed to It's summit last week and sat there thinking of the genius that had enshrined its memories, of the wrecks that had strewn the surround ing waters, and of the ships that had safely passed by since the friendly light had been set on the tower. Then I gained permission to mount the tower itself from which there Is a wide pros pect of all the group, as we'll as of the coast-llne of New Hampshire and parts of Maine and Massachusetts, On very clear days the White mountains are dimly seen, and almost always there Is a good view of Agamenticus and other hills nearer by,
 This is light of the second magni- tude, and is what is termed flash light" alternately red and white. The new house was erected in 1857. The res idence is near the landing and Is staunch and comfortable mansion, where the keeper and his family live all the year around. The government fur nish the rooms and provides medicine chest and a library of thirty-seven vol umes changed every six months MT. James Burke is the preent keeper, for merly at Boone Island and also at Booth Bay harbor. Following MT. Burke through long covered way sloping upward at an angle of twenty degrees, we passed through the old | lighthouse and climbed by winding stairway to the lantern some eighty feet above tide level The violence Of | the winter storms can be inferred from | the fact that their spray dashes com pletely over this tower and so coats the l windows with salt as to require them to | be cleaned twice a day. On the cliff below we saw boulder weighing many tons that was tossed by the waves to | it's present resting place. Out a little distance is Anderson's rock, on which | is a spindle with a wrought iron shaft thirteen inches in diameter; the one nine inches thick which was formerly 1 in its place was snapped off last winter Hike pipe-stem." Sea-birds rarely strike the lantern; but thousands of land birds do so, and sometimes hun dreds in a single night. The faithful keeper admits no visitors to the lantern by night, but does so by day-never, however, within the lens itself, only Into the watch-room and the balcony. The lens rests on friction wheels so per- fectly adjusted that the slightest object on the track will stop the machinery. The clockwork is wound up every four hours The so-called Hens" is made up of two hundred and eighty prisms, with twenty great bull s-eyes, and the whole slowly revolves behind colored glasses so as to make twenty flashes in every revolution. The Illuminating power is French's mineral oil lamp. worked by plunger forcing up the oil, of which on an average from two to three gallons are consumed every night.
 My special object in visiting the Isles of Shoals was geological. Whatever may be going on now, there was once a 1 lively commotion here. The rocks are mostly eruptive or metamorphic.
 Great dykes of trap and porphry run | through lodges of half-melted black or i i white granite, producing very singular effects. The dykes around New Haven
 are harder than the material through
 which they were forced upward, and therefore remain as cliffs, like East Rock and West Rock, after the sur rounding strata have been worn away. But at the Isles of Shoals all this is re- versed The trap-rock, if not actually
 ofter than the surrounding granite, is more amenable to the action of the waves by reason of its stru9ture, and hence Is worn away more rapidly. The
 result is gullies, ravines and small can yons where the basaltic rock nearest the sea is the most worn, while that farthest inland is comparatively intact, thus making natural stairways justify ing the etymology of trap" from the Swedish 'ttrappa," meaning steps er stairs. Many romantic stories are told about ladies who have resolutely sat on such stairs till the waves carried them
 away to their doom. I could not learn
 that any gentlemen had initiated their example. But I do not doubt the le- gends; for there is fascination about
 these huge black stairs, and the foam ing pillows of the rising tide, to which
 an excitable nature mght readily yield
 It should be added that the class of | tourists who resort to the Isles of
 Shoals are unusually genteel and well behaved. There are no steam or trol- ley cars, no bicycles, no merry-go- rounds, and indeed nothing that re
 minds one of the noisy, work-a-day
 world. All is quiet except the waves
 and the "megaphone" and the orches- tra; with an occasional blast from the distant quarries at Cape Ann that
 sounds like remote discharge of ord | nance, and more frequent toots from the Pinafore which plies among the is- lands, or the larger Viking that runs to
 and from Portsmouth, and on which the popular young Fair Havener, Dr. AL bert Loveland acts as agent to whom the writer is indebted for many favors during his visit.
 I find that I have sad nothing about the Spanish sailors and their ghosts;
 nor about the horrible murder on Smut
 ty-Nose twenty years ago and about which I refused to hear one word; nor | IL