How to Send Money—By post-office or express money-order, registered letter, bank check or draft, at our risk. At your own risk if sent by currency, coin, or postage-stamps in ordinary letter.
Receipts—Receipt of your remittance is acknowledged by proper change of number on your label. If not correct you have not been properly credited, and should let us know at once.
|
Ormond G. Smith, George C. Smith, | } | Proprietors. |
STREET & SMITH, Publishers, 79-89 Seventh Avenue, New York City. |
[THE MASKED LIGHT.]
San José Lighthouse shone from the back of a tunnel-like creek on a barren stretch of the Chilian seaboard. Passing ships caught its secret rays most suddenly; much in the same manner as a lonely wayfarer might be startled at a swift glance of a light far down a secret entrance.
The moment the light of San José fell upon a ship, that vessel at once hugged the land and crept warily along the inshore water. A false order, a mistake at the helm, and the "Devil's Teeth," the offshore reef, would grind her ribs to matchwood.
The light was built on top of an old chapel whose ponderous walls could have carried the Eddystone itself. This building crouched in the left-hand corner of the creek, with its back built into the angle of the cliff, which, on that side, rose plumb as a wall and ran out into deep soundings. There was, however, one break in it about eighty yards in front of the lighthouse. From this opening an overhead traveling cable passed across the creek to the mid-level of "Cassandra Mine," which honeycombed the right bank.
This latter side, though rocky, was fairly easy of ascent by means of buttress-like masses of rock jutting out from the cliff, and the rubbish shot out from the mine.
Such was the lonely creek of San José when the revolution broke out against President Balmaceda, and left us, Gilbert and myself, stranded helplessly on a foreign shore.