ends its hoarse bellow
booming through the gray mist to the alert ears of the sailor miles away.

The regulations do not prescribe that the keeper of a light shall hold
himself ready to go to the assistance of castaways or of wrecked vessels;
but, as a matter of fact, not a few of the most heroic rescues in the
history of the coast have been performed by light-keepers. In the number
of lives saved a woman--Ida Lewis, the keeper of the Limerock Light in
Newport Harbor--leads all the rest. But there is hardly any light so
placed that a boat can be launched that has not a story to tell of brave
men putting out in frail boats in the teeth of a roaring gale to bring in
some exhausted castaways, to carry a line to some stranded ship, or to
guide some imperiled pleasure-seekers to safety.

While the building of the Minot's Ledge light had in it more of the
picturesque element than attaches to the record of construction of the
other beacons along the coast of the United States, there are but few
erected on exposed points about which the builders could not tell some
curious stories of difficult problems surmounted, or dire perils met and
conquered. The Great Lakes, on which there are more than 600 light
stations, offer problems of their own to the engineer. Because of the
shallowness of their waters, a gale speedily kicks up a sea which old
Ocean itself can hardly outdo, and they have an added danger in that
during the winter they are frozen to such a depth that navigation is
entirely abandoned. The lights, too, are abandoned during this season, the
Lighthouse Board fixing a period in the early winter for extinguishing
them and another in spring for reilluminating them. But between these
dates the structures stand exposed to the tremendous pressure of such
shifting floes of ice as are not found on the ocean outside of the Arctic
regions. The lake lighthouse, the builders of which had most to apprehend
from this sort of attack, is that at Spectacle Reef, in Lake Huron, near
the Straits of Mackinaw. It is ten miles from land, standing on a
limestone reef, and in the part of the lakes where the ice persists
longest and moves out with the most resistless crush. To protect this
lighthouse, it was necessary to build a rampart all about it, against
which the ice floes in the spring, as the current moves them down into
Lake Huron, are piled up in tumultuous disorder. In order to get a
foundation for the lighthouse, a huge coffer-dam was