r ever. The uproar and the agony increased. In quiet
studios and offices clear brains were busy with drawings and
calculations and subtle elaborate mathematical processes, sifting and
applying the tabulated results of years of experience. The drawings came
in time to the place of uproar; were magnified and subdivided and taken
into grimy workshops; and steam-hammers and steam-saws smote and ripped
at the brute metal, to shape it in accordance with the shapes on the
paper. And still the ships, big and little, came nosing in from the high
seas--little dusty colliers from the Tyne, and battered schooners from
the coast, and timber ships from the Baltic, and trim mail steamers,
and giants of the ocean creeping in wounded for succour--all solemnly
received by the twin gray horses and escorted to their stations in the
harbour. But the greatest giant of all that came in, which dwarfed
everything else visible to the eye, was itself dwarfed to insignificance
by the great cathedral building on the island.

The seasons passed; the creatures who wrought and clambered among the
iron branches, and sang their endless song of labour there, felt the
steel chill beneath the frosts of winter, and burning hot beneath the
sun's rays in summer, until at last the skeleton within the scaffolding
began to take a shape, at the sight of which men held their breaths. It
was the shape of a ship, a ship so monstrous and unthinkable that it
towered high over the buildings and dwarfed the very mountains beside
the water. It seemed like some impious blasphemy that man should fashion
this most monstrous and ponderable of all his creations into the
likeness of a thing that could float upon the yielding waters. And still
the arms swung and the hammers rang, the thunder and din continued, and
the gray horses shook their manes and cantered along beneath the shadow,
and led the little ships in from the sea and out again as though no
miracle were about to happen.

A little more than its own length of water lay between the iron forest
and the opposite shore, in which to loose this tremendous structure from
its foundations and slide it into the sea. The thought that it should
ever be moved from its place, except by an earthquake, was a thought
that the mind could not conceive, nor could anyone looking at it accept
the possibility that by any method this vast tonnage of metal could be
borne upon the surface of the waters. Yet, like an evil dream, as it
took the