as lightly as a schoolboy flings up a wicket, or heave the biggest railway express engine 100 feet high, to hurl an elephant over the Eiffel Tower, or a cart-horse out of sight to three times the height of Snowdon. Every round from one of the _Monmouth's_ 6-inch guns costs the country L12. The gun itself costs L1700. As a fact, each gun takes five months of work, night and day, to make; and weighs 7-1/2 tons, like all modern naval guns of any size, it is a 'wire gun,' constructed of steel tape wound round an inner tube or 'barrel,' in the same way that the string is laid round the handle of a cricket-bat, and jacketed over by an outer steel tube. Upwards of 18,200 yards of steel 'wire' are used for each 6-inch gun, 10-1/2 miles of it--a length that, pulled out straight, would stretch for half the distance between Dover and Calais. The set of sights for each gun, as an item by itself, costs L80. The _Monmouth's_ 6-inch guns are each capable of firing from five to eight shots a minute, and there are on board, besides, ten 12-pounders, three 3-pounders, and some Maxims. The 12-pounders cost L300 each, and take four months to make. In action, the _Monmouth_, fighting both broadsides at once, would let fly at the enemy at each discharge two-thirds of a ton of projectiles; within the first minute 3-1/2 tons weight of metal; every five minutes, 18 tons--all bursting shells. That is the _Monmouth's_ 'fighting-weight.' To supply her guns the _Monmouth_ carries, stowed away in the different magazines far down in the recesses of the hold, 200 tons weight of ammunition--30 to 40 tons of it in cordite cartridges; the rest in shot and loaded shell, with each projectile painted its differentiating colour--white-banded 'armour-piercers,' red-tipped shrapnel, yellow lyddite, and so on. Electricity works the great hooded turrets on the forecastle and quarter-deck, each of 4-inch nickel steel and carrying a pair of 6-inch guns, mounted side by side in double-barrelled sporting-gun fashion on a twin mounting, training the eighty odd tons of dead-weight to right and left, or from one side of the ship to the other, through three-quarters of a circle, as easily as one wheels one's arm-chair in front of the fire after dinner. Electricity also 'feeds' the guns, both in the turrets and in the casemates, as fast as they can be fired, bringing up the ammunition to the guns directly from the magazines.