from their respective mines. A steam-launch was used to bump them, and a prodigious upheaval of water on each explosion showed clearly enough what would have been the fate of an iron-clad if she had been over the mine.

“Oh, shade of Nelson!” I could not help exclaiming, “how shocked you must be if you are permitted to witness such methods of conducting war.”

“Ah, yes!” sighed Firebrand; “the bubble reputation, you see, is being transferred from the cannon’s mouth to the torpedo.”

I made no reply, for my mind reverted to my laboratory in Devonshire, where lay the working-model of the terrible weapon I had spent so much time in perfecting. It seemed strange to me now, that, in the eager pursuit of a scientific object, I had scarcely ever, if at all, reflected on the dire results that the use of my torpedo involved, and I felt as if I were really guilty of the intent to murder. Just before leaving home I had charged my model, which was quite a large one, capable of holding about 50 pounds of dynamite, in the hope that I might prevail on the First Lord of the Admiralty and some of his colleagues to come down and see it actually fired. I now resolved to throw the dynamite into the sea, break up my model, and have done with explosives for ever.

While my mind was running on this, I was startled by an explosion close alongside. On turning towards the side of the ship, I found that it was caused by the rending of a huge iron chain, the links of which were more than one and a quarter inch in thickness. This powerful cable, which could have held an iron-clad, was snapped in twain like a piece of thread by the explosion against it of only two and a half pounds of gun-cotton.

“Very well done,” I said to Firebrand, “but I think that a much smaller quantity of dynamite would have done it as effectively.”

“Now, Mrs Childers,” said the young lieutenant, “the last experiment is about to be made, and I think it will interest you even more than the others. See, they are about to send off the electrical steam-pinnace.”

As he spoke, a boat was being prepared alongside the ship.

“Why!” exclaimed my mother, almost speechless with surprise, “they have forgotten to send its crew in it.”

“No, madam,” said Firebrand, with one of his blandest smiles, “they have not forgotten her crew, but there are services so dangerous, that although the courage of the British 

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