As the ship loafs slowly down past the foot of Market Street a tug puffs up alongside, our captain steps from its bow to the rail of our ship, for we are deeply laden, and the lowest sections of our decks are hardly more than four feet above water, waves to the skipper of the tug, mounts to the bridge, speaks to the mate, orders “half speed ahead,” and we steam sedately through the ferry lanes and gradually leave the busy section of the river behind. Usually a pilot is aboard, but sometimes port rules permit captains to take their own ships out, and with an American ship loaded with coal out of Philadelphia that is the case, saving the owners the expense of the pilot. So our captain, sitting on a high office stool, which looks very much out of place on the bridge, takes us down the river, turning here and there as he makes out the buoys, which are red and conical to port and black and cylindrical to starboard as we leave the port. As the deeper water of Delaware Bay is reached the speed is increased to its maximum, which is only about nine knots an hour, and the captain, after hours on the bridge, is relieved by the first mate and goes below. The ship, having been loaded with coal, at a “coal pocket,” where tons and tons have roared down into her holds through great chutes, is covered with a thick layer of coal dust, and looks like an unfit habitation for men. The deck hands are set to work cleaning the deck amidships, but one wonders if the ship will ever be clean again. And then the first of the swells from the Atlantic raises her bow gently. Another follows and another, and then one climbs straight over the blunt bow, cascades over the forecastle, and one begins to realize that the tumbling waves are already at work cleaning the dust from the grimy ship. Dusk has fallen, and the Fourteen-Foot-Bank Lighthouse and the one on Cape May gleam mysteriously, and as darkness hides the restless sea the lights still gleam. A steamer passes us, her running lights and range lights clear green and red and white, and then we are alone, bound outward to the heaving bosom of the great Atlantic. The light on Cape May fades from sight, and only the fading ray from the Fourteen-Foot-Bank Lighthouse is left to bind us to the busy world of North America—and finally that, too, is gone, and we are alone upon the dark and pathless sea beneath a clouded sky, dependent for our directions upon a swaying compass card lighted by a dim lamp mounted in the side of the brass binnacle.