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"Couldn't have been a bell-buoy, I suppose?" he suggested, with a tentative laugh as he pushed his cap upwards away from his ears. "No bell-buoys out here," replied the captain, rather sharply, with his usual self-confidence. They stood side by side in silence for five minutes or more. The mist was a little thinner now, and Captain Dixon looked upwards to the sky, hoping to see the stars.
Farther to the north it widened a little with the curve of the shore, and through a swaying curtain of rain I could follow it to a point we called the Notch, near the entrance of the Cat's Mouth; of late years they have dredged the channel and moored a bell-buoy off this headland.
When the wind dropped, as it did at brief intervals, the sea was heard moaning on the distant beach, strangely mingled with the desolate warning of the bell-buoy as it rocked to the waves. Then the wind rose again, and the noise of the sea was lost in the fierce gusts which, finding no obstacle on the open marshes, swept with their full fury upon the house by the creek.
"There's danger all along that beach as far as the Spear Point. Adam will tell you the same. When it's a spring tide there's times when there's such a swell that it's round the Point and over the pool like a tidal wave. You'll hear the bell-buoy tolling when there's a swell like that. We call it the Death Current hereabouts, because there's nothing could live in it, and the bell always tolls.
Under the war regulations then in force, no vessels other than those belonging to the United States navy were permitted to enter or leave the port of Key West between late evening twilight and early dawn, and we were, therefore, forced to anchor off the bell-buoy until 5 A. M. Just as day was breaking we got our anchor on board and steamed in toward the town.
One day it chanced, after the heavy spring rains had swollen every watercourse, that he came upon the little curly poll, tumbling and tossing like a bell-buoy in a gale, down the flood of the river that runs to the sea at Port Mooar. Pete rescued the child and took her home, and then, as if he had done nothing unusual, he went on to school, dripping water from his legs at every step.
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.
At a somewhat different angle of the same opinion, Dr. Crothers suggests in an essay that instead of being directed to the best books, we need to be warned from the worst. For is it not better, he asks, to put a lighthouse on a reef than in the channel? The open sea does not need a bell-buoy to sound its depth.
Hence the whistling-buoy is used in roadsteads and the open sea, while the bell-buoy is preferred in harbors, rivers, and the like, where the sound-range needed is shorter, and smoother water usually obtains. In July, 1883, there were 24 of these bell-buoys in United States waters. They cost, with their fitments and moorings, about $1,000 each. Locomotive-Whistles.
The bell-boat, which is at most a clumsy contrivance, liable to be upset in heavy weather, costly to build, hard to handle, and difficult to keep in repair, has been superseded by the Brown bell-buoy, which was invented by the officer of the lighthouse establishment whose name it bears.
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