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But of the Life-Saving Service the public can have, under conditions, little or no real knowledge. In a general way it is understood that all along the dangerous portions of our sea-coast are stationed smalls crews of hardy, courageous men, supplied with the best scientific devices for saving the lives of ship-wrecked persons, but there is nothing pretentious or spectacular in them or their outfit at such times as straggling adventures from the sight-seeking multitude are likely to come upon them. And most people have very nebulous and vague ideas of how it is possibly for these men–operating on beaches, where boats, in time of storm, can not be used–to establish communication with wrecked vessels and rescue men and women from death. This perilous and heroic work is done at night frequently, always when furious gales are raging and generally in winter. The summer-day conditions of a life-saving crew are no more suggestive of what daring, endurance, skills and self sacrifice they will be required to demonstrate at the summons of the storm, than a storage-battery conveys to the uninformed an idea of the potency it is capable of exercising.

(Picture)
THE C. S. LIFE-SAVING SERVICE.

To afford to the public an approximately adequate comprehension of the life-saver's work, a model crew, with all its appliances, has been secured for a season's demonstrations in connection with Col. Cody's "Wild West" exhibition, the fact being recognized that in actual service, to so vast a number of American citizens in all parts of the country.

What they do in the arena is but a repitition of what these very men have repeatedly done in the line of their regular duty, when the temperature was below zero, in the teeth of a tremendous gale, on a lonely beach, where the surf ran mountain high. The firing of the shot carrying a line over the mast of the doomed vessel; the planting of the sand-anchor and connecting a hawser from it to the amst by means of the shot-carried line; the rigging of a breeches-buoy on the hawser and working it to and fro, over the surf, with the rescued mariners–all these are, like everything else in teh Wild West, "the real thing."

A more theatrically effective display might be devised, by ingenious scenic contrivances, for simulation of a storm, but it is questionable if such efforts at enhancement would not really detract from the forcefulness of the exhibit as it is now made. Its bold reality impresses intensely the spectators and irresistibly stirs their imagination to surround it with the adjuncts even the dullest mind can conceive as belonging to the scenes in actual service.