THE UNITED STATES LIFE-SAVING SERVICE. 183 



there is communication with the Signal Service, there is an additional 

 room in the upper story for the accommodation of the signal officer. 

 The later and better built stations have interior walls of lath and 

 plaster, and are furnished outside with cisterns for the collection of 

 rain-water. The lack of fresh water on the beaches is one of the hard- 

 ships of station-life. 



The life-boat stations are usually twenty-four feet high from base 

 to peakj forty-two feet long by twenty-two feet wide, exterior mea- 

 surements, and contain a loft above, and a room below twelve feet 

 high, twenty feet wide, and forty feet long, for the accommodation 

 of the life-boat and its gear. They are built of matched and grooved 

 pine, with gable roofs shingled with cedar, and are painted like the 

 other stations. They are placed on piles at the water's edge, or set 

 on the inner side of the piers, and are furnished with an incline plat- 

 form, or trap in the floor, along which the life-boat is let down and 

 launched into the water by a windlass. Over the door of each is a 

 tablet inscribed " U. S. Life-Boat Statiox." 



The houses of refuge are two-story structures, of a style common 

 at the South, with broad gabled roofs, an ample veranda eight feet 

 wide on three sides of the structure, and large chimneys in the rear, 

 built outside of the wall. The houses are of pine, raised about six 

 feet from the ground on light wood posts, and the roofs shingled 

 Kdth cypress. Instead of glass, the windows are fitted with wire-gauze 

 mosquito netting. The houses are about thirty-seven feet long by fif- 

 teen feet wide, not including the veranda space. The upper story is a 

 loft, the lower has three apartments. Each house has capacity for 

 succoring twenty-five persons, with provisions to feed that number for 

 ten days. A boat-house is provided for each station, furnished with a 

 galvanized iron boat with sculls. 



A complete life-saving station, fully equipped, costs about $5,000 ; 

 a life-boat station about $4,500 ; and a house of refuge about $3,000. 



The stations are fully equipped with all minor appurtenances appo- 

 site to their purpose, such as anchors, grapnels, axes, shovels, boat- 

 hooks, and wreckers' materials and implements generally ; and those 

 which are inhabited are also furnished with stoves, cot-beds, mat- 

 tresses, blankets, and the utensils requisite for rude housekeeping. 

 The crews find their own provisions. The stations are also provided 

 with all the most approved appliances for saving life from wrecks. 

 First among these is the six-oared surf-boat, the light weight and 

 draught of which make it the only boat yet found suitable for service 

 for the flat beaches and shoaling water of the Atlantic and Gulf coast. 

 Though not invariably of the same model, it is usually of cedar, with 

 white-oak frames, without keel, varying in dimensions, but generally 

 from twenty-five to twenty-seven feet long, from five and one half to 

 six feet wide, and from two feet three inches to two feet six inches in 

 least depth. It has commonly air-cases at the ends and along the in- 



