Stories like these are what the pilots tell in their idle hours. Searching for them at such a time, one is most likely to find them at the Pilots' Club, a flourishing social organization, which has roomy quarters just under the roof of a big office building within hailing distance of the Battery. Here at all hours of the day a score or more of pilots are sure to be sitting about spinning yarns, playing cards and checkers and reading the newspapers and magazines. Their well-furnished clubrooms contain a great number of precious curios--relics from all quarters of the globe. There are firearms of curious antique pattern; autograph letters by such famous sea-dogs as Macdonough and Porter; a tiny chest of drawers carved from one of the timbers of John Paul Jones' ship, the Bon Homme Richard; a portrait of Washington by Stuart, surrounded by two large American flags, and a model of the pilot-boat Stingaree, which was built in 1810, and was one of the most famous crafts of her day. This model shows that the years have wrought great changes in the building and rigging of pilot-boats. In old times the boats simply carried mainsail, foresail, and forestaysail and jib. They had no foretopmast, and on their maintopmast carried a flying gaff-topsail, which was hoisted from the deck. Now the boats have both fore and maintopmasts, and each carries a mainsail, foresail, forestaysail, jib, jib-topsail, maintopsail and staysail and fore and main standing-gaff topsails, which give them an immense spread of sail, compared with that used by the boats of earlier times. A schooner-rigged pilot-boat costs from $15,000 to $16,000. That was about the cost of the Caldwell H. Colt, a good example of the typical pilot-boat. She is eighty-five feet long with twenty-one feet beam, 61.43 tons, custom-house register, and a rig as trim and jaunty as that of an ordinary yacht. The pride, however, at present writing, of the New York Sandy Hook fleet is the New York, built of steel, propelled by steam, and able to stand as much buffeting in cyclonic seas as the stanchest of the liners. She was built on the Delaware from designs by A. Cary Smith, is 155 feet long, 28 feet beam, 19 feet 7 inches deep, and is driven by a compound surface-condensing engine of 100 horse-power. Her pole masts are of steel, and she spreads on them enough canvas to steady her. The New York has accommodations for twenty-four pilots, who fare more luxuriously than they ever did on any of the old sailing craft. They have a smoking-room in a separate steel deckhouse, aft of the engine-room, fitted up like a similar room on an ocean steamship, while the lifeboats in which they leave the New York to board incoming vessels are hoisted and lowered by a steam derrick in less than a minute. It is intended that in a few years the entire fleet shall be made up of vessels equal if not superior to the New York. CHAPTER VII THE DEEP-SEA DIVER