quiet
sea, while this devilish pother went on. There is a buoy adrift! No,
it is a sodden cask, perhaps of spoiling meat, while the people in the
town yonder are starving; and still the huge iron, gluttonous monster
bursts its foam of blood and death, while the surly crew curse and
think of mothers and babes at home. Better to look at the bay, the
idle, pleasing summer water, with chips and corks and weeds upon it;
better to look at the bubbling cask yonder--much better, captain,
if you only knew it! But the reluctant, heavy iron turret groans and
wheezes on its pivotal round, and it will be a minute or half a minute
before the throated hell speaks again. But it _will_ speak: machinery
is fatally accurate to time and place. Can nothing stay it, or
stop the trembling of those bursting iron spheres among yon pretty
print-like homes? No: look at the buoy, wish-wash, rolling lazily,
bobbing in the water, a lazy, idle cask, with nothing in the world
to do on this day of busy mischief. What hands coopered it in the new
West? what farmer filled it? There is the grunting of swine, lowing of
cattle, in the look of the staves. But the turret groans and wheezes
and goes around, whether you look at it or not. What cottage this
time? The soft lap-lap of the water goes on, and the tedious cask gets
nearer: it will slide by the counter. You have a curious interest in
that. No: it grates under the bow; it--Thunder and wreck and ruin!
Has the bay burst open and swallowed us? The huge, invulnerable iron
monster--not invulnerable after all--has met its master in the idle
cask. It is blind, imprisoned Samson pulling down the pillars of the
temple. The tough iron plates at the bow are rent and torn and twisted
like wet paper. A terrible hole is gashed in the hull. The monster
wobbles, rolls, gasps, and drinks huge gulps of water like a wounded
man--desperately wounded, and dying in his thirsty veins and arteries.
The swallowed torrent rushes aft, hissing and quenching the fires;
beats against the stern, and comes forward with the rush of that
repulse to meet the incoming wave. Into the boats, the water--anywhere
but here. She reels again and groans; and then, as a desperate hero
dies, she slopes her huge warlike beak at the hostile water and rushes
to her own ruin with a surge and convulsion. The victorious sea sweeps
over it and hides it, laughing at her work. She will keep it safely.
That is the unsung epic of the Milwaukee, without which