hook his enthusiastic nephew's hand.

"There," he added, "I'll not say another word against iron kettles or
Atlantic cables. If you succeed I'll give batteries and boilers full
credit, but if you fail I'll not forget to remind you that I _said_ it
would all bu'st up in course of time."

With note-book and pencil in hand Robin went down the very next day to
the works of the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, where
the great cable was being made.

Presenting his letter of introduction from Mr Smith, Robin was
conducted over the premises by a clerk, who, under the impression that
he was a very youthful and therefore unusually clever newspaper
correspondent, treated him with marked respect. This was a severe trial
to Robin's modesty; nevertheless he bore up manfully, and pulling out
his note-book prepared for action.

The reader need not fear that we intend to inflict on him Robin's
treatise on what he styled the "Great Atlantic Cable," but it would be
wrong to leave the subject without recording a few of those points which
made a deep impression on him.

"The cable when completed, sir," said the clerk, as he conducted his
visitor to the factory, "will be 2300 nautical miles in length."

"Indeed," said Robin, recording the statement with solemn gravity and
great accuracy; "but I thought," he added, "that the exact distance from
Ireland to Newfoundland was only 1600 miles."

"You are right, sir, but we allow 700 miles of `slack' for the
inequalities of the bottom. Its cost will be 700,000 pounds, and the
whole when finished will weigh 7000 tons."

Poor Robin's mind had, of course, been informed about ton-weights at
school, but he had not felt that he realised what they actually
signified until the thought suddenly occurred that a cart-load of coals
weighed one ton, whereupon 7000 carts of coals leaped suddenly into the
field of his bewildered fancy. A slightly humorous tendency, inherited
from his mother, induced 7000 drivers, with 7000 whips and a like number
of smock-frocks, to mount the carts and drive in into the capacious hold
of the Great Eastern. They turned, however, and drove instantly off his
brain when he came into the august presence of the cable itself.

The central core of the cable--that part by which the electric force or
fluid was to pass from the Old World to the New, and _vice versa_, was
made of copper. It was not a solid, single wire, but a strand composed
of seven fine wires