t if you will. That life-car, sir, was
invented by Captain Douglass Ottinger, and this is the first one ever
used. It was sent out to the ship Ayrshire, and more than two hundred
souls were saved by it when there was no other way of giving them
human help. There she is, sir." He laid his hand with a good deal of
feeling on the queer shell that hung from the ceiling.

The Ottinger life-car, the patent for which the generous inventor gave
to the; public, is simply an egg-shaped case with bands of cork about
it. Along the top are iron rings through which it is slung on the
hawser. The car is drawn by another line from the shore to the vessel.
It opens by means of a door or lid two feet square on top. Eleven
passengers can be crowded inside. The lid is then screwed down and the
car drawn ashore.

"Eleven!" cried one of the party. "It would not hold four
comfortably."

"Men in that extremity are not apt to stand on the order of their
going," said another.

"Nor women, neither," added the captain; "though women always do cry
out to go in the open boat rather than the car, though there isn't
half the chance for them."

"How is it ventilated?"

"Ventilated? Lord bless you! What would be the good of it if it wasn't
air-tight? It's under the water all the time, upside down, over and
over a hundred times. There's air in it enough to last 'em for three
minutes, and it's calculated that it can be brought ashore in less
time. I've seen husbands put their wives into it, and mothers their
little babies--them standing on deck, never hoping to live to see them
again."

"And when it was opened--"

"Well, sir, there's curious things seen on the beach on nights of
shipwreck. I'm no hand at describing. Some men stagger out of the car
sick, some crying or praying, some as cool as if they'd just stepped
off the train."

The captain locked the rocket-closet, hung the key on the nail and
rearranged a coil of rope which had been displaced. "Things have to
be shipshape when the lives of a crew may depend on a missing match
or wet powder. The houses," he added as we came out of the door and
he stopped to close it, "are built every three miles along the beach.
From November 15 until April 15 the keeper and six surfmen live in
this house, and take watches, patrolling the beach night and day,
meeting halfway between the stations. Chief Kimball's plan is that
there shall be an unbroken line of sentries along this dangerous coast
during th