140 



AN OCTOBER ABROAD. 



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 enor- 

 mous 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 re- 

 membered that one of these ocean steamers consumes 

 about one hundred tons of coal per day, it is easy 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 steam- 

 ship could ever cross the ocean because it could not 

 carry coal enough to enable it to make the passage. 



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

 our leisure up the Channel and across the Irish Sea, 

 the coast of Wales and her groups of lofty mountains 

 in full view nearly all day. The mountains were in 



