"Now," said Nick, as he hung up his apron, "if you could only give me a few beds to make, I 'd feel quite at home." Then Dorinda got out the tennisrackets, and those who wished played with balls and others with puppies. Pete continued to hover near Grandmother. And all too soon, before the girls could believe it was time, the young soldiers had to sprint for their train. "We 've had a bully good time!" they assured Dorinda. "I'm sorry you missed Mother and the girls." "Be sorry for nothing," advised Rex. Pete lingered behind the others and kissed the little old grandmother's hand softly, and she drew his dark head down and kissed him between the eyes. "Well, we had a good time, did n't we?" she said to her granddaughter, when the last khaki back had vanished. "We did. We truly did," agreedDorinda. "Very tired, Grandmother?" "No, not yet. Probably I shall stay in bed to-morrow, my dear. But it was worth it! It was worth it!" ON their return, Mother and the girls. were somewhat dazed to learn of the visit. "But who entertained them?" asked Bella. "Dorry," said Grandmother, promptly. "Gail and I helped her." They were more mystified in the course of a few days when the mail came. There were letters from each of the four, enthusiastic letters. And grandmother had one all to herself, besides. "What did you do to them, Dorry?" asked Laura, curiously. "Why, nothing-just nothing at all," said Dorinda. THE ICE-PATROL CUTTER ON HER LONELY STATION OFF SABLE ISLAND." ent from the functions of a man-of-war. I am referring to the cutters of the United States Coast-Guard, which we formerly knew as the Revenue-Cutter Service, an organization established by our first Congress and receiving President Washington's approval in 1790. The Coast-Guard cutter is a restless thing of the sea. If she could make a harbor at nightfall, she did so; but at sunrise her anchor was hove to the hawsepipe; and when morning mess-call was sounded, she was hull down on the horizon, hunting for something big to do. If the wind was so ugly that flags refused to stay in the halyards and the tops of green seas broke to whip like shot against her bridge-work, there was a certainty of "something doing" very soon for a CoastGuard ship. These vessels, which were kept like yachts and had naval discipline maintained aboard them, were ever ready for any sort of task which floated on the Seven Seas, from chasing filibusters through a West Indian passage, to ramming ice-fields with the Arctic whale-ship or running down the slant-eyed pirate of the South China Sea. It was all in the day's and the night's work of a Coast-Guard cutter. lookout for the crystal giants that float down from Greenland and whosé terrorism we well remember in the loss of the great White Star liner Titanic. Since that appalling marine disaster, our Government has maintained this unceasing vigil on the Grand Banks, so as to warn by radio the transatlantic steamers of danger from the dreaded iceberg. While the ice-patrol cutter was on her lonely station far out from Sable Island among the ice masses, we found four of her sister-ships along the stretches of the bleak New England district. These vessels hovered off the coast-line in sight of land; in fact, they did some hair-breadth manoeuvers in and about the hidden shoals that mark the Maine and Massachusetts coasts as very undesirable localities on thick and stormy nights. The wind had dropped at sundown, and perhaps we saw the Androscoggin calmly at anchor in the roadstead of Boston Harbor; but if it was in December and the barometer had likewise fallen, there was a stir aboard the coast-guard ship. The wind had reached the force of a gale, and the cutter's crew observed through the dusk that everything with sail and steam was pressing frantically for an anchorage. A COAST-GUARD CUTTER BREAKING THROUGH ICE TO AID A WHALER IN BERING SEA. rectly that the cutter on the Boston station had weighed anchor, and through the spume and blackness of that midwinter night, was off past the harbor mouth and plunging into the Atlantic combers that savagely whipped their tops against her blistered funnel. A radiogram from Cape Cod told the cutter she was urgently wanted on the ocean side of the cape. Her men recalled that the submerged fangs which jut out from Cape Cod are known as the gateway of New England's marine graveyard, and this fact spurred them on to hurry their vessel through the riot of wind and snow to save the Italian bark that had been reported dragging her anchors onto the terrible Peaked Hill Bar. Now let us shift to scenes adjacent to the land of the totem-poles and see what the cutters were doing on the Bering Sea Station-where the coast-guards were watching for illegal sealers, wretches who infest Alaskan waters, and who would place the seal amongst the extinct mammals before many years by their wholesale killing of these soft-coated swimmers of the frigid seas were it not for the iron hand of the United States Coast Guardsmen. "Cutters then ran up to the "rook eries" at Pribyloff and jealously circled from setting foot on the islands. So we see why the men of Uncle Sam's cutters in preserving this valuable fur-supply, should not be forgotten, up in that bleak, silent region where they watch so zealously over the fur seal. However, this was not all that called the Coast Guard toward the land of the midnight sun. It also had to watch over the whaling-fleet which ventured past Point Barrow and took such desperate chances with the treacherous Arctic drift. But the iron-hulled Bear, now among the oldest of the big cutters and a veteran of many Arctic cruises, is known as the ice-breaker of the North and she has been found ramming the frozen fields night and day until she smashed a passage to the imprisoned whale-ships. These cutters are veritable Samaritans of the northern seas and they never hesitate to battle with wind and sea or mammoth ice-floe, risking the chance of their own destruction to bring aid to the hard-handed whalemen of Bering Sea. One of the Coast-Guard ships was never painted white; neither had she a buff-colored funnel. The Seneca was grim black, with a red-and-white striped band on a smoke-stack of the same hue as that of the hull, and her holds were filled with gun-cotton mines, electric cables, and all sorts of detonating apparatus. She scoured the North Atlantic wastes for the derelicts, those abandoned hulks that drift to and fro in midocean and which are even more treacherous to the mariner than is the huge iceberg. Barely visible by daylight in their almost submerged condition, these death-traps of the marine highways are totally invisible at a safe distance. When the lieutenant threw a battery switch, there was an upheaval somewhere in the Atlantic, and word was immediately wirelessed to the Hydrographic Office in New York City that no obstruction existed in latitude and longitude While these intrepid officers and men of the Coast-Guard cutters were hailed as the "Big Brothers" of the sea, they also enjoyed the fierce hatred of all marine. "THERE WAS AN UPHEAVAL SOMEWHERE IN THE ATLANTIC." night-time, and it is then that the fast liner drives on to the sodden hulk to sink quicker than if torpedoed. It was these deep-sea assassins that were the prey of the Seneca as she zigzagged over the steamer lanes, trailing them with the persistency of a bloodhound. Sometimes the derelict was worth thousands of dollars, if the Seneca's officers figured that towing her to port was practicable. But if the cutter's captain said no, then her dynamiting crew would load their gear into a whale-boat, and, after placing their high-explosive mine in a vital spot of the condemned vessel, float a conductor-cable and then row away to transgressors who had to square accounts with these deep-water policemen. The pirates that once prowled along the north coast of Borneo and to the west of Luzon died hard in their combats with the cutter on the China Station when she wiped out the buccaneering sampans and junks that had been so long a terror to the boatmen of the Eastern Seas. But when the Coast-Guard cutter came upon the scene, soon after our acquisition of the Philippines, the grand rout of the sea-robbers took place, with the customary "strong arm" tactics of the service, so that to-day no fear of piratical visitation is entertained by either the captain of the |