It was burning evenly and with a white clear light. But warm as the lamp room was and strong as was the reflection of the light upon the outer panes, the sleet had frozen to the glass, making a lacework curtain which the warning ray of the lamp could pierce only with difficulty. Tobias took a steel scraper and an old broom, opened a door at the back, and went out upon the leeward gallery of the light. The snow wraiths swept past the staff on either hand, whipping away over the sand dunes and disappearing in the pall of darkness that hovered over the land. When he ventured around to the front gallery he found a pallid radiance on the sea superinduced by the muffled ray of the lamp. The snow, driven by the gale, plastered the light tower on this side from its cap ten feet above the lamp to that point twenty feet above its base to which the spray from the wavecaps was thrown. There was a drift of snow, too, on the railed balcony, through which the lightkeeper waded. "Whew!" he gasped, turned his back to the blast, and began using the scraper vigorously. "I can see I’ve got an all night’s job at this off an’ on if this sleet holds to it. Ain’t going to be heat enough from that old lamp to melt the ice as fast as it makes." He muttered this into the throat-latch of his storm coat while using the scraper. The frozen sleet rattled down in long ribbons. He dropped the scraper finally and seized his broom. It was then that he first heard that cry which was the tocsin of the unexpected series of events which marched into Tobias Bassett’s life out of this late winter storm. He dropped the broom and strained his ears for a repetition of the cry. Was it the voice of some lost seafowl swept landward on the breast of the storm? A gale out of the northeast brought many such to be dashed lifeless at the foot of the lamp tower. There was a human quality to this sound he had heard that startled Tobias. If from the sea, then the craft on which the owner of the voice was borne, was doomed. There had not been a wreck on the Twin Rocks within the present lightkeeper’s experience. He shuddered to think of the horror of such a catastrophe. A vessel driven upon the grim jaws of the reef that here were out-thrust from the sands, would be wracked to mere culch within the hour. The life savers from Lower Trillion could never put off a boat or shoot a line into the teeth of such a gale as this. Tobias stooped for the broom again. Then he heard the cry repeated. If it came on the wings of the wind—— He scrambled around to the leeward side of the tower. Here the savage pæan of the storm was muffled. The drumming of the waves on the rocks, the eerie shriek of the wind, the clash of the snow and sleet as they swept by, left the lightkeeper in a sort of unquiet eddy. Against the gale came a repetition of the cry—a faint "Ahoy!"