A detailed description of the dockyard is beyond the scope of the present volume; but its existence cannot be entirely overlooked. It is not difficult to “get over”--some, and we are inclined to agree with them, assert it is far too easy--but after all one is only shown what it is good for the stranger to see; unless, indeed, one’s patriotism and respectability (as was ours) is vouched for by some high official; but when once inside the evidence of activity and of naval greatness is almost appalling. Within a comparatively small area one finds gathered together battleships of all types of the last twenty years or so--smart new cruisers; long, low torpedo boats; and the bigger destroyers, wicked-looking in their neutral-tinted slaty-greyness, by scores; huge travelling cranes and shears rearing their clustered beams heavenwards, and capable, some of them, of lifting 100 tons as easily as a man could a fourteen-pound shot; Nasmyth hammers, Titanesque instruments which, whilst beating iron plates flat and thin as easily as a smith moulds a horseshoe, can yet close upon a watchglass without cracking it. Amid all these gigantic and impressive instruments of destruction and construction one is able to feel how insignificant an atom man, the originator of all these things, often is in comparison with his own handiwork. [Illustration: PORTSMOUTH. ENTRANCE TO HARBOUR] Then there is generally a terrible object-lesson of the destructive powers of modern guns and gunnery in some out-of-date battleship, which, as a target, has been subjected to a hail of projectiles. Riddled and rent asunder almost as though her sides were of cardboard instead of foot-thick steel plates, battered out of semblance of anything resembling a ship, one is made to feel in some measure what the horrors of a modern naval battle would be. One can scarcely believe that within the few short minutes in which the poor maimed craft was exposed to the hail of shot and shell, such destruction could have been wrought. Certainly one is made to realize that between her decks, which in real warfare would have held seven or eight hundred men, no living creature could have existed long.