St Catherine’s Lighthouse stands on the point of that ilk, the most southerly projection of the Island, where it has Lloyd’s signal station for neighbour. Its recently intensified electric light is said to be the most powerful in the world, every few seconds flashing over the sea a beam of concentrated glare equal to millions of candles. It is also equipped with a fog-horn, whose hoarse note of warning resounds for miles, not altogether to the satisfaction of neighbours safe on land. Yet they may take comfort to think how this screech is more fearsomely disquieting when heard at sea. I once had such a note ringing in my ears for two days together running through a chill fog off Newfoundland, with icebergs about us that could be felt but not seen. Our boat was one of the few that have crushed into an iceberg and crawled to land with the tale; then to keep us cheerful we had on board a survivor of that adventure, the perils whereof it pleased him to depict as looming through a somewhat befogged imagination.
Another of our fellow-passengers was an American gentleman, who in Europe had been qualifying himself to come out as an opera tenor. He was coy of giving us a specimen of his talent, till one night we persuaded him to begin _Ah, che la morte!_ But at once the officer of the watch stepped up to silence him, explaining that his singing might drown the sound of fog-horns. The vocalist was much offended at his organ being coupled with a fog-horn; and I fear I gave him fresh offence by suggesting “Signor Fogorno” as a suitable _nom de guerre_, when he consulted me as to Italianising his rather commonplace patronymic. But that careful officer was right, if the story be true that a German liner ran ashore on the back of the Island because her own brass band deafened her to the warning note that surely should have drowned all sweeter sounds. And if our insulted tenor had known it, this artificial organ has a very old theatrical connection, for _persona_ seems the earliest form of such a sounding contrivance, originally a megaphonic mouthpiece fitted to a mask which, as one of the classical stage properties, came to denote the personage thus represented; and in time the name gained respectability as the person or parson of a parish, who more or less loudly warned his convoy of souls from the rocks and shoals of ill-doing.