k to get to his ship. He draws no regular salary, but his
fee is graduated by the draft of the vessel he pilots. When a ship is
sighted coming into port, the pilot-boat makes for her. If she has a blue
flag in her rigging, half way up, by day, she has a pilot aboard. At
night, the pilot-boats show a blue flare, by way of query. If the ship
makes no answer, she is known to be supplied, and passes without slowing
up; but if in response to signal she indicates that she is in need of a
pilot, the exciting moment in the pilot's trade is at hand. Perhaps the
night is pitchy dark, with a gale blowing and a heavy sea on: but the
pilot slips on his shore clothes and his derby hat--it is considered
unprofessional to wear anything more nautical--and makes ready to board.
The little schooner runs up to leeward of where the great liner, with her
long rows of gleaming portholes, lies rolling heavily in the sea. Sharp up
into the wind comes the midget, and almost before she has lost steerage
way a yawl is slid over the side, the pilot and two oarsmen tumble into
it, and make for the side of the steamship. To climb a rope-ladder up the
perpendicular face of a precipice thirty feet high on an icy night is no
easy task at best; but if your start is from a boat that is being tossed
up and down on a rolling sea, if your precipice has a way of varying from
a strict perpendicular to an overhanging cliff, and then in an instant
thrusting out its base so that the climber's knees and knuckles come with
a sharp bang against it, while the next moment he is dropped to his
shoulders in icy sea-water, the difficulties of the task are naturally
increased. The instant the pilot puts his feet on the ladder he must run
up it for dear life if he would escape a ducking, and lucky he is if the
upward roll does not hurl him against the side of the ship with force
enough to break his hold and drop him overboard. Sometimes in the dead of
winter the ship is iced from the water-line to the rail, and the task of
boarding is about equivalent to climbing a rolling iceberg. But whatever
the difficulty, the pilot meets and conquers it--or else dies trying. It
is all in the day's work for them. Accidents come in the form of boats run
down by careless steamers, pilots crushed against the side or thrown into
the sea by the roll of the vessel, the foundering of the pilot-boat or its
loss on a lee shore; but still the ranks of the pilots are kept full by
the admission to a