ii8 
WILD WINGS 
I reached my destination at Cape Charles, \nrginia. In a 
few moments I was talking over the telephone with Captain 
Hitchens of the Smith’s Island life-saving station, my host, 
who was to meet me and sail me across. Such modernizing 
of the conditions of the supposedly lonely and retired sea 
islands hardly seemed in keeping with the purj^ose of my 
jonrnev. But after a darky boy had driven me twelve miles in 
a liverv team, and the genial keeper had sailed me four miles 
across the bav to his island home, my hopefulness returned. 
Aside from the abodes of the keepers of the lighthouse and 
life-saving station, the government buildings, there was not 
another human habitation. The tall towers of the new light¬ 
house on the bay side, 192 feet high, and of the old abandoned 
one nearly undermined by the ocean, almost as tall, showed 
up over the sea, flats, and marsh for many a mile. What 
a difference the telephone makes in the lives of these other¬ 
wise isolated families I could vividly realize, as I heard the 
keeper with whom I stayed “call up” in the morning the 
various other island stations along the coast and chat with 
their keepers about the weather and the occurrences of the 
day or night. How different from the so-called good old times ! 
The hrst look from the station southward down the broad 
beach told eloquently of the hoj^eless resistance of these sea 
islands to the onslaughts of the ocean. \Wthin the memory 
of man their shores were a mile farther out to sea. The spot 
occupied by the station was then in the midst of a pine forest. 
Now the buildings are all but undermined by the waves which 
storms drive u]^ around them. From the very beach rise an 
array of decaving stubs and stumps, a warning to the pines 
behind them of what will soon be their fate. 
Somewhere I had received the impression that the condi¬ 
tions of bird-life around my headquarters would be compar¬ 
able to those of Noah’s ark. Really I had almost expected 
