Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 November 1884 — A Blast on the Foghorn. [ARTICLE]

A Blast on the Foghorn.

The lonely Bailor has always been a subject of solicitude to sentimental people. I rather envy the sailor who has grown accustomed to seasickness. There’s an awful lot of bosh talked about the dangers of the sea. lam not opposed to any arrangement which will make the sailor’s life, or anybody else's safer. But I protest against the foghorn. Wherever there is fog on the bay that cursed foghorn begins, and makes a fellow's back creep. It is the most painfully lugubrious noise that is known to creation. It is enough to make a ship founder so full is it of warning and sensation of disaster. It starts all sorts of miserable ideas. Suppose a ship should strike on the rocks and everybody go down, would it not be horrible? And yet to come down to the plain facts, it is far less likely that a ship should strike on the rocks than that a railway train should fall off a trustle, or that a dummy should run away on one of the hills and the brakes refuse to work. But what I want to get at is the value of the foghorn. When there is a fog on the bay will anybody be so venturesome as to bring in a ship? How often does it really warn people on board steamers with any value, that could not be obtained in a more agreeable way. To save a few people a certain amount of danger, the whole northern pavt of San Francisco, say 100,000 people, are compelled to suffer the painful effect on the nerves of a foghorn. It is a costly benefit that discommodes a whole city to save the weary manner who ought to be wrecked if he is fool enough to take so much risk. —San Fancisco Chronicle “ Undertones .” Repentance without amendment is like ..continually pumping without mending the leaks \