“The American liner _Paris_ and the Cunarder _Etruria_, which arrived on Saturday, had a rough-and-tumble battle before daylight on Tuesday morning with a summer gale that had an autumn chill and a winter force in it. The wind blew a whole gale and combed the seas as high as they are usually seen in the cyclonic season. The crest of a huge wave tumbled over the port bow of the _Etruria_ with a crash that shook the ship from stem to stern, and momentarily checked her speed; a rent was made in the forward hatch through which the water poured into the hold, flooding the lower tier of staterooms ankle-deep. The ship’s bell was unshipped, and it carried away the iron railing in front of it, snapping iron stanchions two inches in diameter as if they had been pipe-stems. The _Paris_, about the same hour and in the same locality, shipped just such a sea as that which hit the _Etruria_, but received less damage. It fared much worse, however, with the sailing ship _Ernest_, from Havre, which was fallen in with on the morning of the gale showing signals of distress. The French liner _La Bourgogne_, came to her rescue and gallantly took off the captain and his crew of eleven men, abandoning the shattered ship to her fate with ten feet of water in her hold.” It is not often that a tidal wave visits the St. Lawrence, but in October, 1896, the SS. _Durham City_, of the Furness Line, when off Anticosti, was struck by a big wave which carried away her deck-load, including sixty eight head of cattle and everything movable. It was only one sea that did the damage, but it made a clean sweep. By a figure of speech, ocean waves are frequently spoken of as running “mountains high,” and the popular tendency is doubtless towards exaggeration. The estimate of experts is that storm waves frequently rise to forty feet, and sometimes even to sixty or seventy feet in height from the wave’s base to crest. [Illustration: H. M. SS. “CRESCENT.” Presented by publishers of the “Star Almanac,” Montreal, 1896. This outline represents one of the smaller types of British warships, known as first-class cruisers. The _Crescent_ was launched at Portsmouth in 1892, and cost £383,068. She is 360 feet long and 60 feet beam. Her tonnage is 7,700 tons; her indicated horse-power 12,000, and her speed 19.7 knots an hour. Her armament consists of one 22-ton gun, twelve 6-inch quick-firing, twelve 6-pounder _do._, five 3-pounder _do._, seven machine guns and two light guns. The _Crescent_ was for several years the flagship of Vice-Admiral James Elphinstone Erskine, on the North American and West Indies Station, and is consequently well known in Canadian waters. She visited Quebec several times.] FOOTNOTES: