half hid in sulphurous death shade. No more
shall ye pour forth swarms of boarders with
pike and cutlass to slay, burn, and devastate
the enemy’s ships. Ye are turned to steel and
iron now, though the hearts that man ye are no
braver than before. Ye shall——

But my musing was cut short by the rough
hearty voice of the master gunner, asking “if I
would like to overhaul her ’tween decks?”

I said I should, so down some sudden iron
steps we went, to see this metal vessel, and
steam ram.

But before we had got far, the master gunner
sat down on a favourite gun-carriage, and
informed me that the ship, when fit for sea, would
have cost some four hundred thousand pounds,
and that was fifty thousand pounds less than the
new iron vessels were to cost. Her length was
three hundred and eighty feet, her breadth fifty-
eight feet, and her tonnage six thousand one
hundred and seventy. Her iron armour-plates
weighed nine hundred and fifty tons. The
engines were nearly one thousand two hundred and
fifty horse-power, and the bunkers held coal for
nine days’ steaming. She carried thirty-six sixty-
eight pounders, two one hundred pound
Armstrongs, four forty pounders, and two twenty-
five pounders.

At this point, feeling rather faint with the
sudden dose of so much knowledge, I prayed
the master gunner to rest awhile, and to take me
to some point where I might first see the
thickness of the Warrior’s coat armour.

Master Gunner, with a trip and a heave as at
some invisible rigging, then led me to the gun
deck, and pointed to a porthole, where I could see
one of the iron plates in profile. I had fancied
the plates were mere cuirass plates, of some inch
or so of tempered metal; but I found them great
slabs of iron, four and a half inches wide, backed
with teak, twenty-two inches thick—not to
mention the inner skin of the ship, which was of half-
inch iron.

“The new vessels,” says Master Gunner, “are
to be of an inch or two inches thicker, and it is
not improbable that in these vessels the wood-
work will be altogether done away with; there
are talks, too, of their having four iron masts,
and rigging worked by machinery.“ How any
clock-weight Armstrong shot can punch a hole
through such vessel’s sides I cannot imagine, but
Sir John is a clever and a sanguine man, and
there is no knowing what his terrible new three
hundred pounders may yet do.

Master Gunner now took me down to the
main deck, to show me the ponderous iron doors
that run across in slides, and can be bolted
on the inside, in case boarders get possession
of part of the vessel. At each end of the
vessel there are these doors, that would turn the
inner part of the ship into an invulnerable fort.
And now, feeling anxious to see the rifle-tower,
the model of which, it is said, one of our
Admiralty officials got from the Toulon dockyard,
and which perhaps the wily Napoleon took from
Cæsar’s Commentaries or the Mediæval Wars,
I asked Master Gunner to take me to it.

He led me to the spar-deck, and there it was,
the smiths busy filing and hammering on its
armour. I had imagined it a sort of lighthouse,
twenty feet high; I found it a huge iron caldron
some eight feet high, pierced with loopholes for
riflemen. It has been proposed to cut out
square ports at the base, out of which might be
run short carronades, to sweep the decks with
canister-shot if the boarders once got a footing.
I did not like to ask Master Gunner how far
this immense weight of metal in the centre
of the vessel would affect her speed, or how
riflemen could take any exact aim on board
a rolling ship; besides, just as I was going to
ask something, Master Gunner motioned me
onward.

“The new vessels,” he said, “are to have a
semi-circular iron shield in the bows inside the
teak bulwarks, which are to be made to lower
down. The bowsprit, too, is to be of iron, and
to turn back on a hinge when the ship is used
to run down an enemy’s frigate.”

What a change from the wooden walls that
Nelson led to vomit fire among the French and
Spanish fleets! Iron steam-ships now, armed
with stupendous guns, and coated with almost
impenetrable armour, will crush down their foes
with the rush of a bull and the swiftness of a
leopard.

But here we came to the steam-engine department,
where, in an indifferent atmosphere, with
the usual smell as of bad cookery, Master
Gunner again insisted on sitting on a grating,
and giving me more facts. We were, luckily,
not far from the great canvas tube that brought
down air from above, and the forty furnaces
were not lighted, so I could bear it.

One of the stokers: a grim-faced man, who
paced about moodily, and with an air of suffering
under not being permitted to set the ship agoing:
rubbed spitefully at furnace door-handles, and
here came forward and volunteered information
in a pained and hurt sort of way.

The engine represented, he said, a force of little
short of six thousand horses. A big man could
pass, not only up and down the main steam-
pipe and its branches into the cylinders, but also
through the passages of the slide valves into the
condensers. The Warrior had ten boilers, and
each boiler was fed by four furnaces. Every
boiler had four hundred and forty tubes. The
piston weighed no less than thirteen tons, and
the stroke was four feet, the number of revolutions
being fifty a minute. The steam shaft was
one great piece of malleable iron, thirty feet
long, and twenty inches in diameter. The screw
was of gun-metal, twenty-four feet in diameter,
and weighed about twenty tons. The ship
consumed one hundred and twenty-five tons of coal
every twenty-four hours.

After this second heavy dose of scientific
facts, Master Gunner started me again on a
fresh tour, up all sorts of shiny iron stairs, and
along all sorts of iron-grated passages. Now,
I found myself in a sort of small ball-room,
traversed by a great shaft of iron—now, in a
dark hall, studded on either side with twenty