"Wake up, Tom!" shouted the assistant keeper, who was on watch. "There's a tug out yonder that's parted the hawser of her tow."
The keeper sprang to his feet and listened to the despairing screams of the whistle out in the fog.
"You're right!" he exclaimed. "And whatever's gone adrift'll be ashore in less than an hour. They'll never hear those whistles at the station with the wind in this quarter."
He jumped to the telephone and called up the life-saving station a mile above.
"There's a tug off here," he said, "and she's lost her tow."
"All right," came the answer; "we'll look out for 'em."
TAKEN ASHORE IN A BREECHES-BUOY.
Half an hour later a big three-masted coal barge, which thirty years earlier had been an English bark, was in the breakers half a mile above the life-saving station; but owing to the sharp lookout for her, all her people, three men, a boy, and a woman, were taken ashore safely in the breeches buoy. At sunup the other barge, which had been in tow of the tug, was seen three miles offshore hove to under her leg-of-mutton canvas. She was picked up by an incoming steamer, and towed into the harbor.
That is a sample of the experience of a light-house keeper whose light is on the land. He has a comparatively comfortable berth; but all lights are not so pleasantly situated. Some are situated at considerable distances from the shore, on dangerous reefs. Most of the houses so situated are built on iron-screw piles, like those at Thimble Shoals, Virginia, Fowey Rocks, Alligator Reef, and Sombrero Key, Florida. These houses stand on iron legs, which are screwed down into the rocks on the bottom, and the keeper's only means of leaving his confined dwelling is by the boat, which swings at davits, as it would aboard a ship. It has been found that a light-house built in this manner will stand the shocks of heavy weather much better than one made of solid masonry. The storm wave of the Atlantic Ocean travels at the rate of about thirty miles an hour, and when one of these waves, towering from fifteen to thirty-five feet, strikes an obstacle, such as a light-house, it deals a blow whose force can be measured only in hundreds of tons. The iron-screw pile-house, however, is elevated far enough above the level of the sea to escape the blows of the waves, which meet with no greater resistance than that offered by the slender legs of the structure.