THE CABLE IS LAID 135 
Improvements had also been made in the electrical testing- 
devices for discovering faults in the cable and its insulation. 
The new plan was to test the cable in advance of laying more 
continuously than previously, so as to prevent an injured sec- 
tion from passing into the water before it could be stopped. 
Even the lost cable of 1865 could now be tested along its 
twelve-hundred-mile length in the depths of the ocean; it was 
found in good condition. 
Of these improved testing methods, Henry Field wrote in 
exuberant phrases: “As when a master of the organ runs his 
hands over the keys, and tells in an instant if it be in perfect 
tune, so did these skillful manipulators, fingering at the end 
of this mightier instrument, declare it to be in perfect tone, 
ready to whisper its harmonies through the seas.” Although 
a clergyman in a period when Darwin’s theories had made 
science seem dangerous, Henry Field showed a sympathy for 
new ideas. To him, the discoveries and conquests of natural 
phenomena were gifts from God to the race of mankind. 
The Great Eastern had been altered and scraped for the 
new ordeal. Its propeller was now surrounded with an iron 
cage, to keep the cable and ropes from getting caught, as had 
been provided for the Niagara and Agamemnon. Henry Field 
wrote of the cable-loading: ‘““The Great Eastern, that had done 
her part so well before, again opened her sides, and the 
mysterious cord was drawn into her vast, dark, silent womb, 
from which it was to issue only into the darker and more silent 
bosom of the deep.” 
Arrived at the Irish terminus, the fleet laid the thirty miles 
of shore cable—stiff and heavy to withstand anchors and 
abrasions. ‘There was a business-like gravity about these 
operations. The Illustrated London News said: “Speech- 
making, hurrahing, congratulations, and vaunts of confi- 
dence were, as it seemed, avoided as if on purpose. There was 
something far more touching in the quiet and reverent solem- 
nity of the spectators yesterday than in the slightly boisterous 
