The above letter is now in the possession of Mr. John M. Ross, of Pictou. But to return to the first sailing of the new company: the _Britannia_ started the mail service in no conventional manner. Not merely was she to throw time-honoured custom to the winds by carrying the mails by the help of steam, but she dealt another blow to sailor-conservatism by setting forth on her maiden voyage on a Friday, which also happened to be the fourth of July, a day commemorative of another kind of Independence. Of course, the old-fashioned prophesied that so flagrant a disregard for superstition would spell disaster; but somehow the _Britannia_ managed to arrive quite safely at Boston, on July 18th, 1840, after a voyage of just eight hours beyond a fortnight, though she had touched at Halifax after eleven days, four hours. The citizens of Boston celebrated the event with banqueting and wild enthusiasm as the forging--shall we not say?--of the first of those stronger links which were to bind the two countries more closely and more securely together. Four years later, one bitter February, when this same _Britannia_ was hemmed in, icebound in Boston harbour, the same enthusiasts liberated her by cutting a canal seven miles long and a hundred feet wide through the ice, and this entirely at their own expense. Facing page 102 will be seen an illustration of a model of this _Britannia_. Old paintings show her rigged as a barque, with a couple of ship’s boats in davits on either side, and another hung over the stern in a manner that will be familiar to those readers who have seen the American sailing schooners, and some of the Norwegian craft. The space for boilers and engines still causes that long gap between the fore- and main-mast that we mentioned earlier. The square stern, the old-fashioned bows, and her lines generally, show that this first Atlantic liner was hardly a thing of beauty, if even she is to be remembered for ever as the first of a new series. Her paddle-wheels were 28 feet in diameter, and had 21 floats, which measured 8 feet by 2.8 feet. The mean draught of this little ship was 16.8 feet. Her engines were of the side-lever type, of course, the making of which Napier understood so well. Steam was generated in four boilers with twelve furnaces, and there were two cylinders. As we have already dealt with the working of these engines we need do little more than ask the reader to turn to the next page, where he will find a sectional model of an engine very similar to that which was installed in these first four Cunard liners. The non-technical reader will find this some considerable help in following our previous references to engines of this type, and the section of the cylinder at the extreme left-hand of the picture will be found illustrative of the working of the piston inside the cylinder. As we are writing the story of the steamship, and not a history of engineering, we need not digress from our historical