The light-keeper then gave some details of our lighthouse service. His paper deeply interested his auditors.
Subsequently Annie Fletcher asked, "What is that ringing like the sound of a little church-bell?"
"Then your ears were quick enough to catch it?" replied the keeper. "The window, too, is up, and so you could hear it. That is a bell-buoy at a bad ledge off in the sea."
"Yes. It is a frame from whose top is suspended a bell. The bell is fixed, while the tongue, of course, is movable. The buoy floats on the water--fastened, you know, to the rocks beneath; and as the waves move the buoy the bell moves with it, and rings also--like a cradle rocking!"
"The buoy is the cradle, and the bell is the baby in it," suggested Dave.
"And waves are the mother’s hand rocking the cradle," added May Tolman.
"Mother’s hand--that is, the ocean--is pretty rough out there sometimes," said the light-keeper. "In a storm, when the wind brings the sound this way, the baby cries pretty loud."
"I’d like to see that bell-buoy," said Johnny Richards.
"Should you?" replied the keeper. "Well, the sea is smooth, and we can all go easily in two boats.--James, you manage one, and I’ll cap’n the other. It won’t take more than twenty minutes to row there."
The two boats now commenced their journey.
The two boats from the lighthouse were quickly at the bell-buoy. It was a bell hung in a frame, which was swung by the waves. It was an object of deep interest to the visitors, and they lingered about it, and then rowed back to the lighthouse.
Toby Tolman, keeper of the light at Black Rocks, sat by the kitchen stove in this lighthouse on the frothing, stony rim of the sea. He liked the seclusion of this kitchen in the strong rock tower. He liked to hear the steady beating of the clock--"tick, tick, tick, tick." He liked the feeling, too, of the warm fire, and especially on this cool, windy day. True it was August, but then the wind was blowing from the north-west as if from an ice-floe up in Alaska, and the air was chilly. As he glanced out of either of the two windows--the deep recessed windows in the kitchen--he saw a cold, angry sea broken up into little waves, each seeming to carry a white snow-flake of the size of the crest of the wave. The distant ships, too, had a cold look, as if they also were snowflakes.