tions of the ration, expressed his preference for a service less automatic and rapid.

The routine of work on a lightship is quite simple. At sunrise the watch lowers the lights. At six A. M. the captain or the mate stands in the doorway leading from the cabin into the berthdeck and shouts, " All hands!" The men tumble out of their bunks and dress, breakfast being served at twenty minutes past six. At half-past seven the lamps are removed from the lanterns and taken below to be cleaned and filled. In smooth weather this duty can be performed in about two hours, but if the vessel is rolling and pitching the task may be prolonged an hour or two. When the lamps have been returned to the lanterns there remains nothing for the crew to do except to clean ship and to go on watch until sundown, when the lamps are lighted and the lanterns hoisted. The crew is divided into the captain's watch and the mate's watch of five each. Twice between spring and winter each watch goes ashore for two months, so that each member of the crew is aboard the lightship eight months in the year. It is not believed that they could stand the life longer than this. In fact, many men throw up their work as soon as they can get ashore. Three members of the South Shoal crew have, however, seen unusually long terms of service twenty-one, nineteen, and seventeen years reDectively, and others have served on her a

$1000,the mate $700, and the crew $600. These sums may not seem large, but it must be borne in mind that even the prodigal son would have found it impossible to make way with his patrimony on the South Shoal Lightship, especially as the Government furnishes all supplies. Opportunities for extravagance are absolutely wanting. Occasionally a member of the crew may remark in a sadly jocose tone that he is going around the corner to order a case of champagne or to be measured for a dress-suit ; but there is no corner.

A number of stores in Nantucket sell what are known as lightship-baskets. They come in "nests," a nest consisting of five or eight baskets of various sizes fitting one into the other. These baskets are made only on the South Shoal Lightship. Their manufacture has been attempted ashore, but has never paid. This is because there is a very narrow margin of profit in them for the lightship crew, who make them chiefly for the purpose of whiling away the weary winter hours. In summer the crew occupies its spare time "scrimshawing," an old whaling term for doing ingenious mechanical work, but having aboard the South Shoal the special meaning of preparing the strips of wood and ratan for the manufacture of the baskets in winter. The bottoms are turned ashore. The blocks over which the baskets are made have been aboard the ship since she was first anchored

off the New South Shoal in 1856. The sides of the baskets are of white oak or hickory, filled in with ratan, and they are round or oval, of graceful lines and of great durability, the sizes to a nest ranging from a pint to a peck and a half. But notwithstanding these various attempts at killing time, life on the South Shoal Lightship is at its best a life of desolation, with only a few gulls or Mother Carey's chickens for visitors, who seek refuge aboard in stormy weather. The red buoy bobbing up and down two miles to westward has become almost as much endeared to the crew as if it were a human companion. A man rarely comes up from below without casting a look over the bulwarks to see if the buoy is still there. Fog is dreaded, not only because it throws a pall over the sea and because the dismal tolling of the bell adds to the depression aboard, but also because it hides the buoy from sight; and as the fog recedes all eyes anxiously scan the horizon until the bonny buoy looms up out of the mist. As the ship swings around a good deal with wind and tide, the buoy marks a fixed

towards them from over the sea; and when the mirage melted away, and they felt again that twenty-four miles of ocean rolled between them and land, they turned away dejectedly and silently went below. Once, so one of the crew told me next morning, the mirage had been so strong that they had seen Nantucket plainly enough to discern the dories on Sunset Beach, and that this fleeting sight of land, after they had been exposed for nearly five months to the weary life of the lightship, had so intensified their longing for home that they were dejected enough to have been a set of castaways on a desert island, without hope of ever laying eyes on their native shores.

The emotional stress under which this crew labors can hardly be realized by any one who has not been through a similar experience. The sailor on an ordinary ship has at least the inspiration of knowing that he is bound for somewhere; that in due time his vessel will be laid on her homeward course; that storm and fog are but incidents of the voyage: he is on a ship that leaps forward full of life and energy

point of the compass for the crew, and thus the men have grown to regard it with a feeling of affectionate reliance. When that buoy parts and drifts away, as it sometimes does, the crew seem as depressed as if they had lost their only friend in the world.

One night when I was on deck the mate, who had the watch, rushed to the hatch and shouted down into the berth-deck, "Sankaty!" It seemed but an instant before the entire crew had scrambled up the gangway and were crowded at the bulwarks watching the light from Nantucket's grandest headland flash out VOL. XLII.-70.

with every lash of the tempest. But no matter how the lightship may plunge and roll, no matter how strong the favoring gales may be, she is still anchored two miles southeast of the New South Shoal.

Those who endeavor to form an idea of the motion of the South Shoal Lightship must remember that she is as much at the mercy of the waves as a vessel stripped of sails or deprived of motive power in mid-ocean. Even in smooth weather the motion is entirely dif ferent from that of a ship under way. For a few minutes she will lie on an even keel, and

then without warning she will roll so that the water streams in through her scuppers. In the expressive language of her captain, "She washes her own decks." For this reason the port-holes of the cabin and the berth-deck are never opened, she being liable at any moment to swing around into the trough of the sea and to roll so as to take in water at them. In winter the violence of the pitching and rolling is such as to try the hardihood of the men to the utmost. On one occasion she rolled so sheer to starboard that she filled the starboard life-boat, which was swung high on davits, and then rolled so sheer to port that the boat emptied itself down the hatch into the berth-deck, drenching every one.

In winter, when the rigging begins tuning up until it fairly shrieks like a gigantic æolian harp at the touch of the hurricane, the poor fellow who, while dreaming of home, is awakened to take his turn at the watch on deck is exposed to the full fury of the elements. Then the ship, being unable to "use herself," butts at the waves so that the bow is submerged one moment and the boom the next, while the spray flies like a "living smoke" all over her, sheathing even the masts to the height of fifty feet with ice. At times the water and spray freeze so quickly upon her that the ice extends for twelve feet or more on each side of the bow, and a thick layer of it covers her deck, while the bulwarks are built up with it until holes have to be chopped through it to enable the crew to

look out to sea. It also forms to the thickness of a barrel around the rigging. In fact, it has covered the ship so completely that not a splinter of wood could be seen. In some seasons the severest storms have burst over the vessel about Christmas time, so that on Christmas eve each man has passed his watch standing forward on the icy deck pulling at the rope of the lightship bell, with the wind shrieking in the stays, the spray dashing over him, and sleet drifting wildly about him. What a celebration of the most joyous festival of the year, with the thought of wife and children ashore!

Besides enduring the hardships incidental to their duties aboard the lightship, the South Shoal crew have done noble work in saving life. While the care of the lightship is considered of such importance to shipping that the crew are instructed not to expose themselves to dangers outside their special line of duty, and they would therefore have the fullest excuse for not risking their lives in rescuing others, they have never hesitated to do so. When, a few winters ago, the City of Newcastle went ashore on one of the shoals near the lightship and strained herself so badly that although she floated off she soon filled and went down stern foremost, all hands, twenty-seven in number, were saved by the South Shoal crew and kept aboard of her over two weeks, until the story of the wreck was signaled to some passing vessel and the lighthouse tender took them off. This is the largest number saved at one time by the South Shoal,

but the lightship crew have faced greater danger on several other occasions. One stormy morning about the middle of January the watch descried a small, dark object over the water several miles to windward, and drifting rapidly away on the strong tide. The captain, on examining it through the glass, thought he perceived signs of life. In spite of the heavy sea that threatened every moment to stave the life-boat, it was lowered, and the crew pulled in the teeth of the furious gale towards the object. As they drew nearer they made out a man feebly waving a cloth. A full view, as they came up, disclosed the evidence of an ocean tragedy. Here, driven before wind and tide, and at the mercy of a winter storm, was a small raft. Stretched upon it was a corpse, held fast by the feet, which had caught under the boom. On the corpse sat a man, his face buried in his hands, and nearly dead with exposure. The man who had waved to them stood upon the grating holding himself upright by a rope which, fastened at two ends of the raft, passed over his shoulder. Having taken the two men who were still alive into the boat, the captain of the South Shoal at once asked them what disposition he should make of the corpse. Being, like all sailors, superstitious, he was unwilling to take the dead body into the boat and bury it from the South Shoal, lest it should sink directly under the lightship and bring ill luck upon her. The poor fellow's shipmates agreed that he should be given over to the sea then and there. So the captain, raising his voice above the storm, pronounced a verse of Scripture, and, drawing the corpse's feet from under the boom, allowed it to slide off the raft. But the sleeves of the dead man's oilers, having filled with air, prevented him from sinking, and, as it would have been a bad omen had he been allowed to float, one of the lightship crew slit the sleeves, and the waves closed over the frozen body of poor Jack. Often vessels lie to near the lightship for provisions and water, and during the war, when the Confederate cruiser Tallahassee destroyed the fishing fleet on St. George's Bank, three of the crews, rather than be made prisoners, took to their

boats and pulled all the way in to the South Shoal.

It might be supposed that after the crew have been subjected to the desolation of a winter twenty-four miles out at sea, their hearts would bound with joy when the Verbena heaves in sight in the spring. But the sight of her is as apt to raise the anxious thought, "What news does she bring from home?"

But after all is said of the hardships endured by the crew of No. 1, Nantucket, New South Shoal, the fact remains that the men are about as hale a looking set of fellows as one can find anywhere. Then, too, they at times discover in very gratifying ways that their vocation is appreciated. A fruiterer may lie to long enough to transfer to the lightship a welcome gift of bananas or oranges, and not infrequently passing vessels signal their readiness to take the crew's mail off the ship and to forward it from port.

The lightship's utter isolation from other parts of the world is, from certain points of view, a great hardship, but from others it has its advantages. When there is a heavy sea running, the view of the ocean as one "lays off" in a warm sun is unrivaled. The proximity of the rips and shoals gives the scene a beauty entirely its own. On every shoal there glistens at regular intervals the white curve of a huge breaker. Sunsets can be witnessed from the deck of this vessel which, if faithfully reproduced on canvas, would be unhesitatingly pronounced the gorgeous offspring of the artist's imagination. I remember one evening when the sun vanished beneath a bank of fog, permeating it with a soft purple light and edging it with a fringe of reddish gold. Right above it the sky melted from a soft green into the lovely blue that still lingered from the glorious day. Overhead the clouds were whipped out in shreds of fiery yellow, while in all directions around the ship was an undulating expanse of rose-colored sea. Gradually the colors faded away; the creaking of the winches, as the crew raised the lanterns, broke upon the evening silence; two pathways of light streamed over the wavesand No. 1, Nantucket, New South Shoal, was ready to stand guard for another night.

SEVEN O'CLOCK: SALVOS OF ARTILLERY.

HIS was the first announcement on the program for the feast, industrial, commercial, and agricultural, at Arles, signed by M. le maire, and painted on great posters that we had seen for the last few weeks on the walls not only of that town but of all Provence.

Now the morning of the feast had come. We awoke to the banging, we dressed to the banging, we drank our coffee to the same music. In the South half the fun of the holiday is the noise made to celebrate it.

EIGHT O'CLOCK: SERENADE OF THE TAM

BOURINES.

FROM a distance first, but drawing nearer and nearer, we heard the strangest music we had ever listened to. Shrill flute-like notes gave the tune, a dull drumming beat the accompaniment. It was not in the least like a fife and drum corps; it was not in the least like anything else. The musicians reached our hotel shortly after the hour. They were eight or ten in number. Each carried suspended on his left arm a long, antiquated-looking drum,-it was not really a tambourine at all,—and with the left hand he held to his mouth a little threefingered flute, upon which he blew, while with the right he beat his drum. They were the most famous tambourinaires left in Provence: one was from Barbantane, another from Bolbonne, a third from Fontvieille-from Salon, from Maillane, from all around Mistral's country, they came. But unlike Daudet's Valmajour, these men were gray-haired and bent with age. Not one could have been under sixty-five. A crowd marched at their heels. At the first sound of their music people rushed to their doors and waited. All the morning they kept up their concert. Wherever we walked we heard the old-fashioned airs shrilly piped.

In the narrow streets small children joined hands and danced along in front of them.

THE FARANDOLE.

CODA.

In front of St. Trophime and on the Lices, the wide, shady boulevard, market-women were driving hard, noisy bargains over their fruit, vegetables, and poultry, and traveling showmen had set up their gilded vans. But as the music passed everybody stopped to look up and listen. You could see that the old men felt their importance and enjoyed their success; they held themselves proudly, despite their bent backs. And when there was a min