extreme end of the cable there was provided, in
the cable-house, a testing table of solid masonry, with a wooden top on
which the testing instruments were to stand; the great delicacy of these
instruments rendering a fixed table indispensable.

When our friends reached the cable-house, native labourers, in
picturesque Oriental costume, were busy thatching its roof or painting
it blue, while some were screwing its parts together; for the house,
with a view to future telegraphic requirements, was built so as to come
to pieces for shipment to still more distant quarters of the globe.

Sam's friend could not go with him, he said, but he would introduce him
to a young acquaintance among the working engineers who was going on
with a party in half an hour or so. Accordingly, in a short time they
were gliding over the bay, and ere long stood on the deck of the big
ship.

"Oh, Letta!" said Robin, with a glitter of enthusiasm in his eyes, as he
gazed round on the well-remembered deck, "it feels like meeting an old
friend after a long separation."

"How nice!" said Letta.

This "how nice" of the child was, so to speak, a point of great
attraction to our hero. She always accompanied it with a smile so full
of sympathy, interest, and urbanity, that it became doubly significant
on her lips. Letta was precocious. She had grown so rapidly in
sympathetic capacity and intelligence, since becoming acquainted with
her new friends, that Robin had gradually come to speak to her about his
thoughts and feelings very much as he used to speak to cousin Madge when
he was a boy.

"Yes," he continued, "I had forgotten how big she was, and she seems to
me actually to have grown bigger. There never was a ship like her in
the world. Such huge proportions, such a vast sweep of graceful lines.
The chief difference that I observe is the coat of white paint they have
given her. She seems to have been whitewashed from stem to stern. It
was for the heat, I fancy."

"Yes, sir, it wor," said a bluff cable-man who chanced to overhear the
remark, "an' if you wor in the tanks, you'd 'ave blessed Capt'n Halpin
for wot he done. W'y, sir, that coat o' whitewash made a difference o'
no less than eight degrees in the cable-tanks the moment it was putt on.
Before that we was nigh stooed alive. Arter that we've on'y bin
baked."

"Indeed?" said Robin, but before he could say more the bluff cable-man
had returned to his bakery.

"Just look here," h