There didn’t seem to be any answer to that, so I suggested that he listen in for Arlington’s signals calling shipping board vessels with orders. He jumped at the suggestion, and I plugged in another pair of phones for him. To keep him interested until midnight, when the junior came on watch, I started to put down what Arlington was saying. He was immensely interested, and after Arlington signed off I dug up some complicated weather reports he had sent in code and translated them for the “Old Man.” I showed him how Arlington had sent out the wind velocity, the barometer readings, the direction of wind, the precipitation at many Great Lakes points such as Alpena, Marquette, and others. This impressed him a lot, but he was a man of the old school, and didn’t see how fellows in Washington could dope out what the weather of Keeweenaw was going to be on the following day. He could tell more by a sniff of the air and a look at the sky than a dozen barometric charts of the United States would tell him. He wanted to know how the radio signals got to our cabin, whether they went through the air or the water, what happened if two ships listened in at the same time, and a lot of other questions. When I tuned in the station at the Canadian Soo he was struck by the difference in pitch. “It’s just like a person,” he said, as though making a discovery. “These different stations have different kinds of voices.” Of course this was true, and I told him how we could tell one ship from another by the tone of its signals, and how, sometimes, we could tell which operator was at the key by the “fist” he had. Finally he wanted to know why the weather report had not mentioned fog, and I had to admit that I didn’t know. “I never remember hearing a radio report mention fog,” I told him. “Maybe it’s because fog is such a local affair and rather unpredictable.” “Maybe so,” he replied, “but I think we will run into fog before morning. At the entrance to the Portage River Canal we’ll get it.” “That’s a bad place for fog,” I said without thinking. “Yes, I lost my wife there in a fog.” And then he told me the story of how he had run on shore during a fog twenty years before, and how his wife had been drowned. It was not a long story, but it cost him considerable effort to tell it. “That’s why I have never been near Houghton and Hancock since,” he said, and I could agree that it was sufficient reason. With that he was gone, and as it was near midnight, I went to the bunk room and woke the junior operator. * * * * *