_This is hardly more than a barge, with a sail plan of a modified form, somewhat suggesting the lateen rig common in the Mediterranean, and something like the lug sails common in French waters._ ] Tugs are even more necessary when sailing ships appear, for a large sailing ship without auxiliary power is hard to handle in a crowded and narrow harbour. Barges, too, require outside power, which the tugs furnish, for few barges have power of their own. Canal boats are barges of a sort, and once in a port can no longer depend upon the mule teams that tow them through canals. So the tug’s life is a busy and a varied one. It swings on the end of a huge hawser in its attempt to keep the _Leviathan_ or the _Majestic_ from sideswiping a pier. It tows barges loaded with coal, or piled high with any other kind of cargo. It tows a string of empty and wall-sided canal boats up the river, or steams along with one lashed to each side. Tugs carry no cargo, but they are for ever straining at hawsers in their energetic furthering of commerce. Lighters are of any size and of a great variety of shapes. In New York they are likely to be capable of carrying from three hundred to six hundred or seven hundred tons of freight, and are merely huge scows, their sides parallel, their ends square, their decks slightly overhanging the water at bow and stern. Often there is a small deck house for the accommodation of the “crew,” which generally consists of one man, who serves as watchman, and also handles the lines as the lighter is made fast to tugs or piers or to the sides of other vessels. Other ports have other types of lighters. In Hamburg they range in size from comparatively small boats to comparatively large ones. The small ones, and even some of the larger, are often propelled along the shallow canals of the port by poles, or are pulled along the quays by men to whom lines are passed. These Hamburg lighters are often built of steel (the New York lighters are usually of wood) and have pointed bows and sometimes pointed sterns. They are broad and sturdy, some have decks, some covered decks, and some are open. In bad weather the freight on these open lighters is covered by tarpaulins. It is interesting that the largest Hamburg lighters about equal in size the smallest New York lighters. In vessels so simple as lighters are, there can be few differences save those of size and general shape, so one will find that most lighters fall into one or the other of the types I have mentioned. They are sometimes loaded directly from ships. They may be loaded from freight put ashore on piers, quays, at grain elevators and ore pockets. At some ports where the draft of water does not permit a heavily laden ship to enter, the lighters are sent out to where the ship is at anchor and “lightens” her, if she is discharging, or takes her her cargo if she is loading. Lighters, then, are floating delivery wagons, subject to many uses.