ard, it must have
torn us up like paper. The catastrophe would have been invaluable to the
journals of the empire, at this moment of a dearth of news, enough to
make bankrupts of all the coffee-houses in London, and close every club
from Charing Cross to Hyde Park Corner. _We_ should all have been
immortal in paragraphs without number. Coroners, surgeons, poets, and
special juries, would have made their reputation out of _us_; and for a
month of hot weather, we should have been a refreshing topic in the
mouths of mankind. But it was otherwise decreed: the shell dropped
within a foot of the steamer, and we were _quittes pour la peur_.

I fired a poetic shot at Woolwich in return.

THE ROYAL ARSENAL.

Woolwich--Woolwich,
The Thames is thy ditch,
And stout hearts are thy fortification.
Let come who come may,
All is open as day,
Thy gates are as free as thy nation.

Let the King of the French
Build wall, or dig trench,
Though he has no more princes to marry,
_Our_ trench is the sea,
And _our_ walls are the free,
And we laugh at thy "_grande enceinte, Paris._"

Deep and dark on their quay,
Like lions at bay,
Stand the guns that set earth at defiance;
With mountains of ball,
Which, wherever they fall,
With their message make speedy compliance.

Along the Parade
Lies the brisk carronade,
With Wellington's joy, the twelve-pounder.
And the long sixty-eight,
Made for matters of weight,
The world has no arguments sounder.

There stands the long rocket,
That shot, from its socket,
Puts armies, pell-mell, to the rout, sir;
At Leipsic, its tail
Made Napoleon turn pale,
And sent all his _braves_ right about, sir.

And there gapes the mortar,
That seldom gives quarter,
When speaking to ship or to city;
For, although deaf and dumb,
Its tongue is a bomb--
And so, there's an end of my ditty.

The sun had now overcome the mists of the morning, and was throwing a
rich lustre over the long sheets of foliage which screened, but without
concealing, a large and classic villa on the Essex side. The park
reached to the water's edge, in broad vistas, green as the emerald; deer
were moving in groups over the lawn, or on standing still to gaze on the
wonder of our flying ship. A few boats were slowly passing near the
shore, along with the tide; the water