top of a firm, dry tower, are perched on
reeling masts over which the spray flies thick with every wave, and on
which is no shelter for the watcher. During long weeks in the stormy
season there is no possible way of escaping from the ship, or of bringing
supplies or letters aboard, and the keepers are as thoroughly shut off
from their kind as though on a desert island, although all day they may
see the great ocean liners steaming by, and through their glasses may be
able to pick out the roofs of their cottages against the green fields far
across the waves.

[Illustration: WHISTLING BUOY]

Less picturesque than lighthouses and lightships, and with far less of
human interest about them, are the buoys of various sorts of which the
Lighthouse Board has more than one thousand in place, and under constant
supervision. Yet, among the sailor's safeguards, they rank near the head.
They point out for him the tortuous pathway into different harbors; with
clanging bell or dismal whistle, they warn him away from menacing shallows
and sunken wrecks. The resources of science and inventive genius have been
drawn upon to devise ways for making them more effective. At night they
shine with electric lights fed from a submarine cable, or with steady gas
drawn from a reservoir that needs refilling only three or four times a
year. If sound is to be trusted rather than light, recourse is had to a
bell-buoy which tolls mournfully as the waves toss it about above the
danger spot, or to a whistling buoy which toots unceasingly a locomotive
whistle, with air compressed by the action of the waves. The whistling
buoy is the giant of his family, for the necessity for providing a heavy
charge of compressed air compels the attachment to the buoy of a tube
thirty-two feet or more deep, which reaches straight down into the water.
The sea rising and falling in this, as the buoy tosses on the waves, acts
as a sort of piston, driving out the air through the whistle, as the water
rises, admitting more air as it falls.

Serving a purpose akin to the lighthouses, are the post and range-lights
on the great rivers of the West. Very humble devices, these, in many
instances, but of prodigious importance to traffic on the interior
waterways. A lens lantern, hanging from the arm of a post eight or ten
feet high, and kept lighted by some neighboring farmer at a cost of $160 a
year, lacks the romantic quality of a lighthouse towering above a hungry
sea, but it is