156 AN OCTOBER ABROAD. 



added the delightful thought that the " devil's hole " 

 would soon be cleared and my long fast over. 



Presently, after the darkness had set in, signal 

 rockets were let off from the stern of the vessel, writ- 

 ing their burning messages upon the night, and when 

 answering rockets rose slowly up far ahead, I suppose 

 we all felt that the voyage was essentially done, and 

 no doubt a message flashed back under the ocean, 

 that the Scotia had arrived. 



The sight of the land had been such medicine to 

 me that I could now hold up my head and walk 

 about, and so went down for the first time and took 

 a look at the engines those twin monsters that had 

 not stopped once, or apparently varied their stroke at 

 all since leaving Sandy Hook ; I felt like patting their 

 enormous cranks and shafts with my hand ; then at 

 the coal bunks, vast cavernous recesses in the belly of 

 the ship, like the chambers of the original mine in 

 the mountains, and saw the men and firemen at work 

 in a sort of purgatory of heat and dust. When it is 

 remembered that one of these ocean steamers con- 

 sumes about one hundred tons of coal per day, it is 

 asy to imagine what a burden the coal for a voyage 

 alone must be, and one is not at all disposed to laugh 

 at Dr. Lardner, who proved so convincingly that no 

 flteamship could ever cross the ocean because it could 

 \iot carry coal enough to enable it to make the pas- 

 lage. 



On the morrow, a calm lustrous day, we steamed at 

 ur leisure up the Channel and across the Irish Sea, 



