the reign of Louis XVI. The drawing-room is
furnished in a style of equal sumptuousness, in the Crimean Tartar
style; but the rest of the imperial apartments are in a simpler order of
decoration. Behind the funnels there is another deck-house, containing
the captain's quarters and rooms for the Grand Duke Constantine. It
will thus be seen that the _Livadia_ is literally a floating palace,
equipped and decorated with that almost Eastern love of sumptuous
display which characterises the Russians as a people.

All the three screws with which the _Livadia_ is furnished are wholly
submerged in the water--another novelty in the construction of the
vessel. One or even two of these screws might suffer serious injury and
the ship still remain manageable.

It is not wonderful that the launch of a craft, at once so splendid and
so curious, should have caused much interest and excitement in the
neighbourhood in which it took place. A distinguished company witnessed
the ceremony, while the crowd which lined the banks of the river Clyde
numbered 10,000. A short service was conducted by three priests of the
Greek Church, and the bows of the vessel were then sprinkled with holy
water. After the conclusion of this ceremony, the yacht received her
name from the Duchess of Hamilton, and was then launched. The launch
was a complete success, the _Livadia_ taking the water in gallant style,
though the task was one of more than ordinary difficulty from the
circumstance of the great breadth of the ship's keel-less bottom, which
much increased the friction to be overcome. At the luncheon which
concluded the day's proceedings, Mr Pearce, the chairman, who
represented the firm of Elder and Company, stated that the principle
adopted in the building of the _Livadia_ would probably be more useful
in the case of ships of war than of merchant vessels, but that builders
of the latter might also derive valuable hints from the construction of
the new ship. Whether this will prove to be the case time has yet to
show.

A most interesting discovery of a Norse war-ship has recently been made
at Sandefjord in Norway. The vessel, there can be no doubt, is one of
the kind in which those formidable buccaneers, the Norsemen, used to
harry the coasts of Great Britain and France ten hundred years ago. It
was found buried in the ground, and seems to have been the sepulchre of
some great Viking chieftain, who had probably many a time sailed forth
in it