Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/308

 MARK TWAIN-

it has splintered a heavy oaken rail into broom- straws instead of merely breaking it in two, as would have been the seemingly natural thing for it to do. At the time of the awful Johnstown disaster, accord ing to the testimony of several witnesses, rocks were carried some distance on the surface of the stu pendous torrent; and at St. Helena, many years ago, a vast sea-wave carried a battery of cannon forty feet up a steep slope and deposited the guns there in a row. But the water has done a still stranger thing, and it is one which is credibly vouched for. A marlin-spike is an implement about a foot long which tapers from its butt to the other extremity and ends in a sharp point. It is made of iron and is heavy. A wave came aboard a ship in a storm and raged aft, breast high, carrying a marlin-spike point first with it, and with such lightning-like swift ness and force as to drive it three or four inches into a sailor s body and kill him.

In all ways the ocean greyhound of to-day is im posing and impressive to one who carries in his head no ship pictures of a recent date. In bulk she comes near to rivaling the Ark; yet this monstrous mass of steel is driven five hundred miles through the waves in twenty-four hours. I remember the brag run of a steamer which I traveled in once on the Pacific it was two hundred and nine miles in twenty-four hours; a year or so later I was a passenger in the excursion tub Quaker City, and on one occasion in a level and glassy sea it was claimed that she reeled off two hundred and eleven miles between noon and noon, but it was probably a campaign lie. That

�� �