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Those who visited the Crystal Palace at Sydenham during the recent
Electrical Exhibition had an opportunity of seeing the shells here
referred to under a powerful microscope.

CHAPTER TEN.

TELLS OF GREAT EFFORTS AND FAILURES AND GRAND SUCCESS.

Thus happily and smoothly all things went, with little bursts of anxiety
and little touches of alarm, just sufficient, as it were, to keep up the
spirits of all, till the morning of the 30th July. But on that morning
an appearance of excitement in the testing-room told that something had
again gone wrong. Soon the order was given to slow the engines, then to
stop them!

The bursting of a thunder-clap, the explosion of a powder-magazine,
could not have more effectually awakened the slumberers than this abrupt
stoppage of the ship's engines. Instantly all the hatchways poured
forth anxious inquirers.

"Another fault," was the reply to such.

"O dear!" said some.

"Horrible!" said others.

"Not so bad as a break," sighed the hopeful spirits.

"It is bad enough," said the chief electrician, "for we have found dead
earth."

By this the chief meant to say that insulation had been completely
destroyed, and that the whole current of electricity was escaping into
the sea.

About 716 miles had been payed out at the time, and as signals had till
then been regularly received from the shore, it was naturally concluded
that the fault lay near to the ship.

"Now then, get along," said an engineer to one of the cable-men; "you'll
have to cut, and splice, and test, while we are getting ready the tackle
to pick up."

"I don't like that cuttin' o' the cable, Bill," said one of the sailors,
as he went forward, "it seems dangerous, it do."

"No more do I, Dick," replied his mate; "I feel as if it never could be
rightly spliced again."

"Why, bless you, boys," said a cable-man near them, "cables is used to
that now, like eels to bein' skinned; and so are we, for that matter.
We think nothin' of it."

Clearly the cable-man was right, for, while the picking-up apparatus was
being got ready, the cable was cut in no fewer than three places, in
order to test the coils that lay in the tanks. These being found all
right, the picking-up was begun with anxious care. The moment of
greatest danger was when the big ship was swinging round. For a few,
but apparently endless, moments the cable had to bear the strain, and
became rigid like a bar of steel. Then it wa