Our representative, while on the Herman Winter, observed the perfect operation of the apparatus when approaching, passing, and leaving the Pollock Rip lightship. It had been prearranged that the signal should be the number 73, the number of the lightship. This locality was reached shortly before daylight, yet when the ship was seven miles from the lightship, tossed by tempestuous seas, the signal, seven strokes, then three, was faintly but distinctly heard. Within two miles it was quite loud, and the peculiar A musical note of the bell was plainly noticeable. It is feasible to signal words with a special code, and no doubt such a system of communication will soon be perfected. (Text.)—The Scientific American.
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SIGNALS UNHEEDED
The engineer of the Philadelphia and Reading flyer, which on the night of January 27, 1903, plowed its death-dealing way without warning into the splintered cars of the Eastern express on the New Jersey Central Railroad, near Westfield, N. J., was extricated from the wreck suffering terribly from wounds from which he afterward died. When first carried to the hospital and questioned concerning the cause of the wreck, he could give no clear idea of how it happened that he ran by the red signal. In his agony he kept murmuring: “I saw nothing!” His later testimony was somewhat confused, but it hardly added to or subtracted from the force of that short, sad lament, “I saw nothing!” Many a mortal spirit rushes through this world seeing nothing, speeding on and on toward eternity, and recklessly running by signal after signal set by merciful hands to warn it of the dangers ahead.—Grace and Truth.
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SILENCE
The purple flushing of the eastern sky;
The stately progress of the sun toward even;
Night’s mantle dropping from the quiet heaven;