Each flag represents a number, and four flags can be hoisted at once on the staff.  With the flags there is given a book containing the meaning of each number.  Thus, a wrecked ship cries silently to the shore, “Send a lifeboat” by flags 3, 8, 9, or says that she is sinking by 6, 3, 2; or a vessel under full sail hails another by 8, 6, 0, or bids her “bon voyage” with 8, 9, 7.  Owing to the difficulty of distinguishing colors in cloudy days or when the flags will not fly, other systems of signaling are used:  that of cones similar to umbrellas being considered in the English service one of the most efficient, a different arrangement of cones on the staff representing the nine numerals.  Men may convert themselves into cones in an emergency by raising or letting fall their arms, and two men thus give any signal necessary.  As the flags, however, belong more especially to Sergeant G——­ ’s duty on the field of battle or to exceptional cases of storm and danger, we pass them by to examine into his daily round of duty.  Outside, a queer little house of lattice-work perched on a headland shelters the thermometers and barometers:  on a still higher point directly over the foaming breakers is the anemometer, the little instrument which measures the swiftness of the fiercest cyclone as easily as the lightest spring breeze.  It consists of four brass cups shaped to catch the wind, and attached to the ends of two horizontal iron rods, which cross each other and are supported in the middle by a long pole on which they turn freely.  The cups revolve with just one-third of the wind’s velocity, and make five hundred revolutions whilst a mile of wind passes over them.  A register of these revolutions is made by machinery similar to a gas-meter.  The popular idea, by the way, of the speed of the wind runs very far beyond the truth:  we are apt to say of a racer that he goes like the wind, when the fact is the horse of a good strain of blood leaves the laggard tempest far behind; the ordinary winds of every day travel only five miles an hour, a breeze of sixteen and a quarter miles an hour being strong enough to cause great discomfort in town or field:  thirty-three miles is dangerous at sea, and sixty-five miles a violent hurricane, sweeping all before it.

Our friend the sergeant examines seven times a day at stated periods the condition of the atmosphere as to heat, weight and moisture, the velocity of the wind, the kind, amount and speed of the clouds, and measures the rainfall and the ocean swell:  all these observations are recorded, and three are daily reported to headquarters at Washington.  In these telegrams a cipher is used—­as much, we presume, to ensure accuracy in the figures as for purposes of secresy.  In this cipher the fickle winds are given the names of women with a covert sarcasm quite out of place in the respectable old weather-prophet whom every housewife consults before the day’s work begins.  Thus, when the telegraph operator receives the mysterious message, “Francisco Emily alone barge churning did frosty guarding hungry,” how is he to know that it means “San Francisco Evening.  Rep.  Barom. 29.40, Ther. 61, Humidity 18 per cent., Velocity of wind 41 miles per hour, 840 pounds pressure, Cirro-stratus.  N.W. 1/4 to 2/4, Cumulo-stratus East, Rainfall 2.80 inch.”?