et and listened to the despairing screams of
the whistle out in the fog.

"You're right!" he exclaimed. "And whatever's gone adrift'll be ashore
in less than an hour. They'll never hear those whistles at the station
with the wind in this quarter."

He jumped to the telephone and called up the life-saving station a mile
above.

"There's a tug off here," he said, "and she's lost her tow."

"All right," came the answer; "we'll look out for 'em."

[Illustration: TAKEN ASHORE IN A BREECHES-BUOY.]

Half an hour later a big three-masted coal barge, which thirty years
earlier had been an English bark, was in the breakers half a mile above
the life-saving station; but owing to the sharp lookout for her, all her
people, three men, a boy, and a woman, were taken ashore safely in the
breeches buoy. At sunup the other barge, which had been in tow of the
tug, was seen three miles offshore hove to under her leg-of-mutton
canvas. She was picked up by an incoming steamer, and towed into the
harbor.

That is a sample of the experience of a light-house keeper whose light
is on the land. He has a comparatively comfortable berth; but all lights
are not so pleasantly situated. Some are situated at considerable
distances from the shore, on dangerous reefs. Most of the houses so
situated are built on iron-screw piles, like those at Thimble Shoals,
Virginia, Fowey Rocks, Alligator Reef, and Sombrero Key, Florida. These
houses stand on iron legs, which are screwed down into the rocks on the
bottom, and the keeper's only means of leaving his confined dwelling is
by the boat, which swings at davits, as it would aboard a ship. It has
been found that a light-house built in this manner will stand the shocks
of heavy weather much better than one made of solid masonry. The storm
wave of the Atlantic Ocean travels at the rate of about thirty miles an
hour, and when one of these waves, towering from fifteen to thirty-five
feet, strikes an obstacle, such as a light-house, it deals a blow whose
force can be measured only in hundreds of tons. The iron-screw
pile-house, however, is elevated far enough above the level of the sea
to escape the blows of the waves, which meet with no greater resistance
than that offered by the slender legs of the structure.

Let us imagine the experience of a keeper of one of these lights in a
great storm. It is September. All day the sea has been deathly calm, but
with a slow swell of ominous breadth and weight. The sk