In the city which stood beside the shore, the case was different. People recognized the fact that the great water highways must be made safe and that mariners must be protected, but the burden of the Siren was hard to bear. Little attention had been paid to its sound at first but the constant iteration had told upon mind and body as tells the constant falling of a single drop of water upon the head. People were seriously affected. In the foggy season strong men became fretful and impatient and weak women were compelled to seek the country. The whole city was threatened with an attack of nervous debility. All night long, and sometimes late into the forenoon, the fog would hang stubbornly above the harbor, and all night long and far into the daylight, the Siren would groan and groan while the people raved. Sanitariums did a thriving business. Some sort of climax was approaching when Hannibal Perkins appeared from the suburbs upon the scene. Hannibal Perkins was a young man about twenty-one years of age. He was born "down East" as he explained, and was tall and gaunt, with pleasant blue eyes and a soft voice. He was ambitious and possessed of an inventive genius which he wished to cultivate. He had graduated from the city high school and desired now to spend two or three years in a famous scientific academy, but could not gratify his wish, because of relative poverty. He helped his father in the work of a small truck farm just outside the city, but there was small yearly surplus to aid in the realization of Hannibal's hopes and plans. There was stuff in the youth, though. Regretting but not dismayed, Hannibal worked doggedly, ever planning as to how he might raise honestly the needed money. The little farm lay close beside the shore and at night the youth's thoughts were frequently disturbed, for the Perkin's family got the full benefit of the Siren's groans. Not only was Hannibal Perkins an inventor, but he had a musical gift as well. He played the violin with skill and feeling, and had studied with an excellent teacher, a friend of the family who had become interested in Hannibal and given him lessons gratis. He possessed an exquisite ear and it is doubtful if in all the city there was a person who suffered more from the Siren's dismal cry than did this robust young man. Night after night he would toss about in his bed and but endure. "Is there no way of stopping it," he thought. "Cannot the same end be attained in some less melancholy and devastating way?" Unable to sleep regularly, at last, in desperation he set his wits to work. Reading a scientific magazine one day, a single sentence impressed itself upon Hannibal Perkin's memory: "It is a well known fact that a musical sound can be heard distinctly at a greater distance than can an unmusical one." Hannibal pondered much.