Page:Ballantyne--The Battery and the Boiler.djvu/90



with us now, good reader, to another and very different scene—out upon the boundless sea. The great Atlantic is asleep, but his breast heaves gently and slowly like that of a profound sleeper.

The Great Eastern looks like an island on the water—steady as a rock, obedient only to the rise and fall of the ocean swell, as she glides along at the rate of six knots an hour. All is going well. The complicated-looking paying-out machinery revolves smoothly; the thread-like cable passes over the stern, and down into the deep with the utmost regularity.

The shore-end of the cable—twenty-seven miles in length, and much thicker than, the deep-sea portion—had been laid at Valentia, on the 22d of July, amid prayer and praise, speech-making, and much enthusiasm, on the part of operators and spectators. On the 23d, the end of the shore