There was an old timber pier going into the sea from off a projection of land, upon the northernmost point of which the lifeboat house stood; this pier had a curl like the crook of a sailor's rheumatic forefinger; but it was not possible to find any sort of harbour in the rude, black, gleaming embrace of its pitched and weedy piles, save in smooth and quiet weather. It was an old pier, and had withstood the wash and shocks of fifty years of the Atlantic billow--enough to justify a man in staring at it, since ours was a wild and stormy seaboard, where everything had to be as strong as though we were at sea and had the mighty ocean itself to fight. At times a collier would come sailing round Bishopnose Point, a tall, reddish-hued bluff past Deadlow Rock, and slide within the curve of the pier, and discharge her freight. Here, too, in the seasons might be seen a cluster of fishing-boats, mainly the sharp-ended luggers of Penzance; but this morning, as I have already said, all was vacant from the horizon to the white sweep of sand--vacant and, in a manner, motionless too, with the quality of stagnation that came into the picture out of the sullen, breathless, gloom-laden atmosphere, nothing stirring, as it seemed, save the heave of the swell, and a few active figures of 'longshoremen down by the pier hauling up their boats high and dry upon the sand, with an eye to what was coming in the weather. I entered the lifeboat house and killed ten minutes or so in surveying the fabric inside and out, and seeing that everything was in readiness should a call come. A ship's barometer--a good instrument--hung against the wall or bulkhead of the wooden edifice. The mercury was low, with a depression in the surface of the metal itself that was like emphasizing the drop. Our manner of launching the _Janet_ was by means of a strong timber slipway, that went in a pretty sharp declivity from the forefoot of the boat to some fathoms past low-water mark. There could be no better way of getting her water-borne. The sand was flat; there was little to be done with a heavy boat on such a platform, let us have laid what greased woods or rollers we chose under her keel. But from the elevation of her house she fled, when liberated, like a gull into the rage of the water, topping the tallest comber, and giving herself noble way in the teeth of the deadest of inshore hurricanes.