More wearing even than life in a lighthouse is that aboard the lightships, of which the United States Government now has forty-five in commission.  The lightship is regarded by the Government as merely a makeshift, though some of them have been in use for more than a quarter of a century.  They are used to mark shoals and reefs where it has thus far been impossible to construct a lighthouse, or obstructions to navigation which may be but temporary.  While costing less than lighthouses, they are not in favor with the Lighthouse Board, because the very conditions which make a light most necessary, are likely to cause these vessels to break from their moorings and drift away, leaving their post unguarded.  Their keepers suffer all the discomforts of a sailor’s life and most of its dangers, while enjoying none of its novelty and freedom.  The ships are usually anchored in shoal water, where the sea is sure to run high, and the tossing and rolling of the craft makes life upon it insupportable.  They are always farther out to sea than the lighthouses, and the opportunities for the keepers to get ashore to their families are correspondingly fewer.  In heavy storms their decks are awash, and their cabins dripping; the lights, which must be watched, instead of being at the top of a firm, dry tower, are perched on reeling masts over which the spray flies thick with every wave, and on which is no shelter for the watcher.  During long weeks in the stormy season there is no possible way of escaping from the ship, or of bringing supplies or letters aboard, and the keepers are as thoroughly shut off from their kind as though on a desert island, although all day they may see the great ocean liners steaming by, and through their glasses may be able to pick out the roofs of their cottages against the green fields far across the waves.

[Illustration:  WHISTLING BUOY]

Less picturesque than lighthouses and lightships, and with far less of human interest about them, are the buoys of various sorts of which the Lighthouse Board has more than one thousand in place, and under constant supervision.  Yet, among the sailor’s safeguards, they rank near the head.  They point out for him the tortuous pathway into different harbors; with clanging bell or dismal whistle, they warn him away from menacing shallows and sunken wrecks.  The resources of science and inventive genius have been drawn upon to devise ways for making them more effective.  At night they shine with electric lights fed from a submarine cable, or with steady gas drawn from a reservoir that needs refilling only three or four times a year.  If sound is to be trusted rather than light, recourse is had to a bell-buoy which tolls mournfully as the waves toss it about above the danger spot, or to a whistling buoy which toots unceasingly a locomotive whistle, with air compressed by the action of the waves.  The whistling buoy is the giant of his family, for the necessity for providing a heavy charge of compressed air compels the attachment to the buoy of a tube thirty-two feet or more deep, which reaches straight down into the water.  The sea rising and falling in this, as the buoy tosses on the waves, acts as a sort of piston, driving out the air through the whistle, as the water rises, admitting more air as it falls.