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At last the Farallones looked over the ocean's edge to the north; then came the whistling-buoy, the Seal Rocks, the Heads, Point Reyes, the Golden Gate flanked with the old red Presidio, Lime Point with its watching cannon; and by noon of a gray and boisterous day, under a lusty wind and a slant of rain, just five months after her departure, the "Bertha Millner" let go her anchor in San Francisco Bay some few hundred yards off the Lifeboat Station.
As the buoy rolls on the sea, this ball rolls on the plate, striking some side of the bell at each motion with such force as to cause it to toll. Like the whistling-buoy, the bell-buoy sounds the loudest when the sea is the roughest, but the bell-buoy is adapted to shoal water, where the whistling-buoy could not ride; and, if there is any motion to the sea, the bell-buoy will make some sound.
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.
It gave the low circle of hills round Gloucester Harbor, Ten Pound Island, the fish-sheds, with the broken line of house-roofs, and each spar and buoy on the water, in blinding photographs that came and went a dozen times to the minute as the We're Here crawled in on half-flood, and the whistling-buoy moaned and mourned behind her.
Throughout the whole of that strange meal these were the only words spoken. When Wilbur came on deck again he noted that the "Bertha Millner" had already left the whistling-buoy astern. Off to the east, her sails just showing above the waves, was a pilot-boat with the number 7 on her mainsail. The evening was closing in; the Farallones were in plain sight dead ahead.
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