"Were there many lives lost?"
"It's likely. This is the worst bit of coast in the country, The Creole was a three-decker," looking at it reflectively, "Lot of good timber there."
As we turned our field-glasses to the black lump hunched out of the water, like a great sea-monster creeping up on the sand, we saw still farther up the coast a small house perched on a headland, with a flag flying in the gray mist, and pointed it out to the Jerseyman, who nodded: "That there wooden shed is the United States signal station;" adding, after a pause, "Life-saving service down stairs."
"Old Probabilities! The house he lives in!"
"Life-boats!"
Visions of the mysterious old prophet who utters his oracles through the morning paper, of wrecks and storms, and of heroic men carrying lines through the night to sinking ships, filled our brains. Townspeople out for their summer holiday have keen appetites for the romantic and extraordinary, and manufacture them (as sugar from beets) out of the scantiest materials. We turned our backs on the fisherman and his squid-line. The signal station and the hull of the lost vessel were only a shed and timber to him. How can any man be alive to the significance of a wreck and fluttering flag which he sees twenty times a day? Noah, no doubt, after a year in the ark, came to look upon it as so much gopher-wood, and appreciated it as a good job of joinery rather than a divine symbol.
We believe, however, that our readers will find in the wrecked Creole and the wooden shed, and the practical facts concerning them, matter suggestive enough to hold them a little space. They fill a yet unwritten page in the history of our government, and of great and admirable work done by it, of which the nation at large has been given but partial knowledge. Or, if we choose to look more deeply into things, we may find in the old hulk and commonplace building hints as significant of the Infinite Order and Power underlying all ordinary things, and of our relations to it, as in the long-ago Deluge and the ark riding over it.
The little wooden house stands upon a lonely stretch of coast in Ocean county, New Jersey. Several miles of low barren marshes and sands gray with poverty-grass on the north separate it from Manasquan Inlet and the pine woods and scattered farm-houses which lie along its shore, while half a mile below, on the south, is the head of Barnegat Bay, a deep, narrow estuary which runs into and along the Jersey coast for more than half its extent, leaving outside a strip of sandy beach, never more than a mile wide. All kinds of sea fish and fowl take refuge in this bay and the interminable reedy marshes, and for a few weeks in the snipe-and duck-season sportsmen from New York find their way to "Shattuck's" and the houses of other old water-dogs along the bay. But during the rest of the year the wooden shed and its occupants are left to the companionship of the sea and the winds.
The little building (with a gigantic "No. 10" whitewashed outside) stands close to the breakers, just above high-water mark in winter. It is divided into two large rooms, upper and lower, with a tiny kitchen in the rear and an equally comfortless bedroom overhead. The doors of the lower room (which, like those of a barn, fill the whole end of the house) being closed, we sought for Old Probabilities up stairs, and found very little at first sight to gratify curiosity or any craving for mystery. There was a large wooden room, with walls and floor of unpainted boards, the ceiling hung with brilliantly colored flags, a telegraphic apparatus, one or two desks, books, writing materials—a scientific working-room, in short, with its implements in that order which implied that only men had used them.
There were in 1874 one hundred and eight such signal stations as this, modest, inexpensive little offices, established over the United States, from the low sea-coast plains to the topmost peak of the Rocky Mountains.