Fogs and mists are two great perils peculiar to this northern waterway, so the splendid lighting arrangements are supported by excellent and powerful fog-signals. The northern light has a diaphone giving a blare lasting three and a half seconds every minute, while the southern station has a siren giving a double tone. First there is a low note of two and a half seconds followed by silence for two and a half seconds; then a high note of two and a half seconds and a silent interval of 112½ seconds. This signal is emitted from a point midway between the upper and lower lights, the air for the blast being compressed by water-power. Another humane provision is the depot at the southern station, which is kept stocked with food supplies for the benefit of shipwrecked mariners. In 1898 a freighter carrying a deck-load of 400 oxen went ashore beneath this light and became a hopeless wreck. The crew, realizing the impossibility of saving the animals, fired the ship, so that the animals were suffocated and bruised, thereby sparing the inhabitants of the island a deadly risk, and solving the difficult problem which otherwise would have arisen, had the brutes been drowned in the ordinary way and their decomposing carcasses cast up on the beach. In the following year the Dominion liner _Scotsman_ crashed on to the rocks near the same spot, and likewise became a total loss, with a death-roll of nine. By dint of great effort the survivors scrambled ashore, and had a weary trudge of nine miles over a broken, rock-strewn wilderness to gain the lighthouse station and assistance, arriving in a famished and exhausted condition, to be tended by the light-keepers and their families. Belle Ile is a lonely station in the fullest sense of the word, although the keepers are better off now than they were a few years ago. The straits are busy in the summer, being crowded with shipping, but with the coming of November all life disappears, and the liners do not return until the following May or June. The rock is cut off from the mainland by the masses of ice which pile up in the estuary, together with the crowds of icebergs which come down from Greenland. For six months the guardians of the light are isolated from the world at large, although they have a slender link of communication in the submarine cable. But the storms and stress of winter often rupture this line, and, as the wireless installation is closed down when navigation ceases, the keepers and their families settle down to a silent, weary vigil, knowing nothing of the rest of the world, and all but forgotten by civilization, because an interruption in the cable cannot be repaired until the ice disappears. [Illustration: UPPER TRAVERSE LIGHTHOUSE IN THE RIVER ST. LAWRENCE.] [Illustration: _By courtesy of Lieut.-Col. W. P. Anderson._ AN “ICE SHOVE” UPON THE BACK RANGE LIGHT IN LAKE ST. PETER. This photo gives a striking idea of the trouble experienced with ice in Canadian waters.]