teen days she bore steadily to the west while we kept up our communication with the old world that we had left behind.

Toward the end of the voyage we watched for land as Columbus watched for the first sign of a new world. At length, on July 27th, we cast anchor in Trinity Bay in the little harbor of Heart's Content, that seemed to have been christened in anticipation of the joy of that hour.

All the ship's crew joined to lift the heavy shore end off the Great Eastern into the boats, and then to drag it up the beach to the telegraph house, where every signal was answered from Ireland, not in broken utterances, as with the old cable, but clearly and distinctly, as a man talks with his friend; and we knew that the problem was solved and that telegraphic communication was firmly established between the old world and the new.

But our work was not quite ended. There was the last year's cable with its broken end lying in the depths of the sea. As soon as the work of unloading the Great Eastern was done, she bore away to grapple for the lost cable.

Captain Moriarty, with Captain Anderson, had taken most exact observations at the spot where the cable broke in 1865, and they were so exact that they could go right to the spot. After finding it they marked the line of the cable by a row of buoys, for fogs would come down and shut out sun and stars, so that no man could take an observation. These buoys were anchored a few miles apart. They were numbered, and each had a flagstaff on it, so that it would be seen by day, and a lantern, so that it could be seen by night. Thus having taken our bearings, we stood off three or four miles, so as to come broadside on, and then casting over the grapnel, drifted slowly down upon it, dragging the bottom of the ocean as we went. At first it was a little bit awkward to fish in such deep water, but our men got used to it, and soon could cast a grapnel almost as straight as an old whaler throws a harpoon.

Our fishing line was of formidable size. It was made of rope twisted with wires of steel, able to bear a strain of thirty tons. It took about two hours for the grapnel to reach bottom, but we could tell when it struck. I often went to the bow and sat on the

rope, and could feel by the quiver that the grapnel was dragging on the bottom, two miles under us. But it was a very slow business. We had storms and calms, and fogs and squalls. Still we worked on day after day. Once, on the 17th of August, we got the cable up, and had it in full sight for five minutes — a long slimy monster, fresh from the ooze of the ocean's bed- but our men began to cheer so wildly that it seemed to be frightened, and suddenly broke away and went down into the sea.

This accident kept us at work two weeks longer; but finally on the last night of August we caught it. We had cast the grapnel thirty times. It was a little before midnight on Friday night that we hooked the cable, and it was a little after midnight Sunday morning that we got it on board. What was the anxiety of those twenty-six hours! The strain on every man's life was like the strain on the cable itself. When finally the cable appeared the hour was near midnight; the lights of the ship and in the boats around our bows, as they flashed in the faces of the men, showed them eagerly watching for the cable to appear on the

water.

At length it was brought to the surface. All who were allowed to approach crowded forward to look; yet not a word was spoken; only the voices of the officers in command were heard giving orders. All felt as if life and death hung on the issue. Only when the cable was brought over the bow and on to the deck did the men dare to breathe. Even then they hardly believed their eyes. Some crept toward it to feel of it to be sure it was there. Then we carried it along to the electrician's room to see if our long-sought treasure was alive or dead. A few minutes of suspense and a flash told of the lightning current again set free. Then did the feeling, long pent up, burst forth. Some turned away their heads and wept. Others broke into cheers, and the cry ran from man to man and was heard down in the engine room, deck below deck, and from the boats on the water and the other ships, while rockets lighted up the darkness of the sea. Then with thankful hearts we turned our faces again to the west. But soon the wind arose, and for thirty-six hours we were exposed to all the dangers of a storm on the Atlantic. Yet in the very height and fury of the gale, as I sat in the electrician's

room, a flash of light came up from the deep which, having crossed to Ireland, came back to me in mid-ocean telling me that those so dear to me were well.

In looking back over these eventful years, I wonder how we had the courage to carry it through in the face of so many defeats and of almost universal unbelief. A hundred times I reproached myself for persisting in what seemed beyond the power of man. And again there came a feeling that, having begun, I could not turn back; at any cost I must see it through.

At last God gave us the victory. And now, as we see its results, all who had a part in it must feel rewarded for their labors and their sacrifices.

That iron chain at the bottom of the sea is a link to bind nations together. The magnetic currents that pass and repass are but the symbols and the instruments of the invisible yet mighty currents of human affection that, as they pass to and fro, touch a thousand chords of love and sympathy and thus bring into nearer, closer, and sweeter relations the separated members of the one great family of mankind.

CLASS ACTIVITIES

1. Give an explanation for including this narrative in "Crossing Great Waters."

2. Which of the diagrams pp. 27, 107, and 375 best represents the plan of this selection? If there is difference of opinion, have a debate, and see who can make the best case.

3. What qualities of success did Field possess? Look over the poems in "Carrying Hard Tasks Through," Book One, pp. 613-634, and decide which best describes Field and his co-workers.

4. Find the story of the Atlantic Cable in your school history or in an encyclopedia. What differences do you find in details as compared with this account? Which account is more reliable?

5. Volunteer investigations and reports. Report during the General Review, p. 487, No. 5.

a. Peter Cooper's place in American history.

b. Other transcontinental cables.

c. The history of the Great Eastern.

d. The early life of Cyrus W. Field.

e. Read to the class "How Cyrus Laid the Cable," by John G. Saxe, in P. Pressey, A Vocational Reader, 107–110.

5. OPERATING A MODERN SUBMARINE

FARNHAM BISHOP

Read this article through twice. During the first reading, get a general idea of the submarine; during the second study carefully the explanations of the various operations.

Lieutenant Perry Scope, commanding the X-class flotilla, was sitting in his comfortable office on the mother-ship Ozark, when I entered with a letter from the Secretary of the Navy, giving me permission to go on board a United States submarine. Without such authorization no civilian may set foot on the narrow decks of our undersea destroyers, though he may visit a battleship with no more formality than walking into a public park.

"We're too small and full of machinery to hold a crowd," explained the lieutenant, "and the crowd wouldn't enjoy it if they came. There are no nice white decks for the girls to dance on or fourteen-inch guns for them to sit on while they have their pictures taken. Besides, everything's oily; you'd better put on a suit of overalls instead of those white flannels.”

There were plenty of spare overalls on the Ozark, for she was the mother-ship of a family of six young submarines. Built as a coast-defense monitor shortly after the Spanish War, she had long since been retired from the fighting-line, and was now the floating headquarters, dormitory, hospital, machine-shop, bakery, and general store for the six officers and the hundred and fifty men of the flotilla.

Moored alongside the parent-ship, the submarine X-4 was filling her fuel-tanks with oil through a pipe-line, in preparation for the day's cruise and target-practice which I was to be lucky enough to witness. Two hundred fifty feet long, flat-decked and straight-stemmed, she looked, except for the lack of funnels, much more like a surface-going torpedo-boat than the landsman's conventional idea of a submarine.

"I thought she would be cigar-shaped," I said as we went on board.

"She is underneath," answered Lieutenant Scope. "What you see is only a light-weight superstructure or false hull built

over the real one. See those holes in the superstructure, just above the water line? They are to flood it with whenever we submerge; otherwise the water pressure would crush in these thin steel plates like veneering. But the superstructure makes us much more seaworthy for surface work, gives us a certain amount of deckroom, and stowage-space for various useful articles."

Part of the deck rose straight into the air, like the top of a freight-elevator coming up through the sidewalk. Beneath the canopy thus formed was a short-barreled, three-inch gun.

“Fires a twelve-pound shell, like the field-pieces the landingparties take ashore from the battleships," explained the naval officer, as he trained the vicious-looking little cannon all around the compass. "Small enough to be handy, big enough to sink any merchant ship afloat, or smash anything that flies." Here he pointed the muzzle straight up as if gunning for hostile aeroplanes.

"And please observe," he concluded, as the gun sank into its lair again, “how that armored hatch-cover protects the gun-crew from shrapnel or falling bombs."

"She isn't a submarine at all," I replied presently, as the X-4 swept on down the coast at a good twenty-two knots, her foredeck buried in foam and the sea-breeze singing through the antennæ of her wireless. "She's nothing but a big motorboat."

"And she has some big motors," replied the lieutenant. "Better step below and have a look at them."

I went down through the open hatchway to the interior of the boat and aft to the engine-room. There I found two long, manycylindered oil-engines of strange design, presided over by a big blond engineer whose grease-spotted dungarees gave no hint of his rating.

"What kind of machines are these?" I shouted above the roar of the engines. "And why do you need two of them?" "Diesel heavy-oil engines," he answered. "One for each propeller."

"What is the difference between one of these and the gasoline engine of a motor-car? I know a little about that."