ulty discovered, it must be localized. A hush falls over the
ship. Down to the testing room go the experts. Seconds, minutes, hours
crawl by. At last some one leaves the consultation for a brief space,
frowning heavily and apparently deep in thought. No one dares address
him, or ask the questions all are longing to have answered, and when
his lips move silently we know that he is muttering over galvanometer
readings to himself. During this time everyone talks in whispers,
and not always intelligently, of the electrostatic capacity of the
cable, absolute resistances, and the coefficients of correction, while
the youngest member of the expedition neglects her beloved poodle,
sonorously yclept "Snobbles," and no longer hangs him head downward
over the ship's rail.

At last the fault is discovered, cut out, and a splice made, the tests
showing the cable as good as new, whereupon the women return to their
chiffons, the child to her games, and the men, not on duty, to their
cigars, until the cessation of noise from the cable machinery, or the
engine-room bell signalling "full speed astern" warns us something
else may be amiss.

In the testing room, that Holy of Holies on board a cable-ship, the
fate of the _Burnside_ hangs upon a tiny, quivering spark of light
thrown upon the scale by the galvanometer's mirror. If this light
jumps from side to side, or trembles nervously, or perhaps disappears
entirely from the scale, our experts know the cable needs attention,
and perhaps the ship will have to stop for hours at a time until the
fault is located. If the trouble is not in the tanks, the paying-out
machinery must be metamorphosed into a picking-up apparatus, and
the cable already laid will be coiled back into the hold until the
fault appears, when it will be cut out and the two ends of cable
spliced. After this splice grows quite cool, tests are taken, and
if they prove satisfactory, we again resume our paying out, knowing
that while the spot of light on the galvanometer remains quietly in
one position, the cable being laid is electrically sound, and we can
proceed without interruption.

As may be imagined everyone on the ship got to think in megohms,
and scientific terms clung to our conversation just as the tar from
the cable tanks clung to our wearing apparel, while few among us but
had wild nightmares wherein the cable became a sentient thing, and
made faces at us as it leapt overboard in a continuous suicidal frenzy.