Hood's Magazine and Comic Miscellany Author:Thomas Hood Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SEA-SIDE LORE. GATHERED BY THE MOUNTAINEER. A NIGHT IN THE LIGHTHOUSE. It was the time of the equinox. The wind raged and beat against the brown-red isl... more »and with unusual fury. For days a ship had not been seen upon the reeking ocean, and the boldest of pilots had not dared to encounter the battling of the elements. The business of the pilot had ceased, and by degrees a desolate tranquillity reigned upon the shore. Next-door neighbours were neglected, and the universal friend, mine host of " The Red Water," found himself almost without a companion : now and then — but at very long intervals — a solitary figure might be seen leaning against the Fallm, and a few old pilots, to whom it had become almost a condition of their existence to read the wind and weather in the open air, crawled out in spite of the elements, and looked with quiet eye and folded arms upon the dashing waters. Protected by the beaconage, they sat for hours together, defying the briny vapour, hurled over the rocks to them by the boisterous surge, and watched in vain for the appearance of a sail. Shells, seaweed, and shingle were flung by angry Neptune into the streets of the highland, and whirled against door and easement. Heligoland, the storm-accustomed, shrunk from the violence of the unprecedented tempest, and she trembled and writhed again as though suffering from an ague fit. The watchman of the lighthouse, although more exposed to the fury of the hurricane than any other, was perhaps the only man in the island of whom it could be said that he looked upon the appalling weather with perfect equanimity. He was a fine, very old, greyheaded man, with nothing young about him save his clear water- bright eyes and unfading memory. The greater part of his long life had been spent upon the sea, in conflict...« less