o out to sea. It was a wonderfully beautiful passage we made
among the islands and along the coast, with the great mountains on the
mainland standing up above everything else. After a while we got to the
Crinan Canal, which is in reality a short cut across the field. It is
nine miles long and not much wider than a good-sized ditch, but it
saves more than a hundred miles of travel around an island. We was on a
sort of a toy steamboat which went its way through the fields and
bushes and grass so close we could touch them; and as there was eleven
locks where the boat had to stop, we got out two or three times and
walked along the banks to the next lock. That being the kind of a ride
Jone likes, he blessed Buxton. At the other end of the canal we took a
bigger steamboat which carried us to Glasgow.

In the morning it hailed, which afterward turned to rain, but in the
afternoon there was only showers now and then, so that we spent most of
the time on deck. On this boat we met a very nice Englishman and his
wife, and when they had heard us speak to each other they asked us if
we had ever been in this part of the world before, and when we said we
hadn't they told us about the places we passed. If we had been an
English couple who had never been there before they wouldn't have said
a word to us.

As we got near the Clyde the gentleman began to talk about
ship-building, and pretty soon I saw in his face plain symptoms that he
was going to have an attack of comparison making. I have seen so much
of this disorder that I can nearly always tell when it is coming on a
person. In about a minute the disease broke out on him, and he began to
talk about the differences between American and English ships. He told
Jone and me about a steamship that was built out in San Francisco which
shook three thousand bolts out of herself on her first voyage. It
seemed to me that that was a good deal like a codfish shaking his
bones out through swimming too fast. I couldn't help thinking that that
steamship must have had a lot of bolts so as to have enough left to
keep her from scattering herself over the bottom of the ocean.

I expected Jone to say something in behalf of his country's ships, but
he didn't seem to pay much attention to the boat story, so I took up
the cudgels myself, and I said to the gentleman that all nations, no
matter how good they might be at ship-building, sometimes made
mistakes, and then to make a good impression on him I wha