Shortly after interesting himself in this matter Mr. Newell was elected to Congress, and there worked untiringly to persuade the national Government to lend its aid to the life-saving system of which he had conceived the fundamental idea.  In 1848 he secured the first appropriation for a service to cover only the coast of New Jersey.  Since then it has been continually extended until in 1901 the life-saving establishment embraced 270 stations on the Atlantic, Pacific, and lake coasts.  The appropriation for the year was $1,640,000.  For many years the service was a branch of the revenue marine, and when in 1878 it was made a separate bureau, the former chief of the revenue marine bureau was put at its head.  The drill-masters for the crews are chosen from the revenue service, as also are the inspectors.

[Illustration:  LAUNCHING A LIFEBOAT THROUGH THE SURF]

The methods of work in the life-saving service have long been familiar, partly because at each of the recurring expositions of late years, the service has been represented by a model station and a crew which went daily through all the operations of shooting a line over a stranded ship, bringing a sailor ashore in the breeches-buoy or the life-car, and drilling in the non-sinkable, self-righting surf-boat.  Along the Atlantic coast the stations are so thickly distributed that practically the whole coast from Sandy Hook to Hatteras is continually under patrol by watchful sentries.  Night and day, if the weather be stormy or threatening, patrolmen set out from each station, walking down the beach and keeping a sharp eye out for any vessel in the offing.  Midway between the stations they meet, then each returns to his own post.  In the bitter nights of winter, with an icy northeaster blowing and the flying spray, half-frozen, from the surf, driven by the gale until it cuts like a knife, the patrolman’s task is no easy one.  Indeed, there is perhaps no form of human endeavor about which there is more constant discomfort and positive danger than the life-saving service.  It is the duty of the men to defy danger, to risk their lives whenever occasion demands, and the long records of the service show uncounted cases of magnificent heroism, and none of failure in the face of duty.

A form of seafaring which still retains many of the characteristics of the time when Yankee sailors braved all seas and all weather in trig little wooden schooners, is the pilot service at American ports, and notably at New York.  Even here, however, the inroads of steam are beginning to rob the life of its old-time picturesqueness, though as they tend to make it more certain that the pilot shall survive the perils of his calling, they are naturally welcomed.  Under the law every foreign vessel entering an American port must take a pilot.  If the captain thinks himself able to thread the channel himself, he may do so; but nevertheless he has to pay the regular pilot fee, and if the vessel is lost, he alone is responsible,