s brief history the doctor had seen the volunteer
crew, aroused from their cabins along the shore by the boom of a gun
from some stranded vessel, throw wide its door and with a wild cheer
whirl the life-boat housed beneath its roof into the boiling surf, and
many a time had he helped to bring back to life the benumbed bodies
drawn from the merciless sea by their strong arms.

There were other houses like it up and down the coast. Some had
remained unused for years, desolate and forlorn, no unhappy ship having
foundered or struck the breakers within their reach; others had been in
constant use. The crews were gathered from the immediate neighborhood
by the custodian, who was the only man to receive pay from the
Government. If he lived near by he kept the key; if not, the nearest
fisherman held it. Fogarty, the father of the sick child, and whose
cabin was within gunshot of this house, kept the key this year. No
other protection was given these isolated houses and none was needed.
These black-hooded Sisters of the Coast, keeping their lonely vigils,
were as safe from beach-combers and sea-prowlers as their white-capped
namesakes would have been threading the lonely suburbs of some city.

The sound of the mare's feet on the oyster-shell path outside his cabin
brought Fogarty, a tall, thin, weather-beaten fisherman, to the door.
He was still wearing his hip-boots and sou'wester--he was just in from
the surf--and stood outside the low doorway with a lantern. Its light
streamed over the sand and made wavering patterns about the mare's feet.

"Thought ye'd never come, Doc," he whispered, as he threw the blanket
over the mare. "Wife's nigh crazy. Tod's fightin' for all he's worth,
but there ain't much breath left in him. I was off the inlet when it
come on."

The wife, a thick-set woman in a close-fitting cap, her arms bared to
the elbow, her petticoats above the tops of her shoes, met him inside
the door. She had been crying and her eyelids were still wet and her
cheeks swollen. The light of the ship's lantern fastened to the wall
fell upon a crib in the corner, on which lay the child, his short
curls, tangled with much tossing, smoothed back from his face. The
doctor's ears had caught the sound of the child's breathing before he
entered the room.

"When did this come on?" Doctor John asked, settling down beside the
crib upon a stool that the wife had brushed off with her apron.

"'Bout sundown, sir," she answered, her t