A special bit of history comes to light respecting our little wooden shed at the head of Barnegat Bay.  An act of Congress approved March, 1873, authorized the establishment of signal stations at lighthouses or life-saving stations along dangerous coasts, and the connection of the same by telegraphs, thirty thousand dollars being appropriated for that end.  In consequence, signal stations were established on the Massachusetts coast, from Norfolk, Va., to Cape Hatteras, and more closely along this dangerous lee-shore of New Jersey, and telegraph-lines were laid connecting them with each other and also with the central office.  The plan for the future is to net the whole coast—­the lake, Atlantic and Pacific shores—­with these stations and telegraph-wires.  By this means information of coming storms can be conveyed by signal to vessels, or of wrecks, by telegraph, to other life-saving stations:  the close watch kept upon the ocean-swell and currents will give warning inland of approaching changes in the weather; for it is a singular fact that the ocean-swell communicates this intelligence more quickly than the barometer, in quite another sense than the poet’s

  Every wave has tales to tell
  Of storms far out at sea.

Our little station belongs to the advanced guard of this proposed line which is to encircle the coast, the whole work of establishing these stations and telegraph-lines having been, done by Sergeant G——­ and his comrades.  Indeed, when we look at all the work done by our blue-coated friend, his steady, unintermitting attention to duty by day and night year after year, his comfortless quarters in the wooden shed on the lonely beach, and the almost absolute solitude for an educated man during many months of the year, we begin to think his station not the least honorable among the soldiers of the republic.  Almost any man, set down on the battle-field, one army to meet and another to back him, with the crash of music and arms, the magnetic fury of combat blazing in the air, would rise to the height of the moment and prove himself manly.  But to be faithful to petty tasks hour after hour, through all kinds of privation and weather, for years, is quite a different matter.

The reports of the chief officer give us a hint of some of the privations borne by the observer-sergeants, educated young fellows like our friend.  In 1872 the chief ordered one of these men to establish a station on the western coast of Alaska and on the island of St. Paul in Behring Sea, which was done, the observer continuing for a year in that farthest outpost.  His record of frozen fogs which wrap the island like a pall, of cyclones from the Asian seas that lash its rocky coast, of vast masses of electric clouds seen nowhere else which sweep incessantly over it toward the Pole, reads more like the story of a nightmare dream than a scientific statement.