In all ways the ocean greyhound of to-day is imposing and impressive to one who carries in his head no ship-pictures of a recent date. In bulk she comes near to rivalling the Ark; yet this monstrous mass of steel is driven five hundred miles through the waves in twenty-four hours. I remember the brag run of a steamer which I travelled in once on the Pacific—it was two hundred and nine miles in twenty-four hours; a year or so later I was a passenger in the excursion-tub ‘Quaker City,’ and on one occasion, in a level and glassy sea, it was claimed that she reeled off two hundred and eleven miles between noon and noon, but it was probably a campaign lie. That little steamer had seventy passengers and a crew of forty men, and seemed a good deal of a beehive; but in this present ship we are living in a sort of solitude, these soft summer days, with sometimes a hundred passengers scattered about the spacious distances, and sometimes nobody in sight at all; yet, hidden somewhere in the vessel’s bulk, there are (including crew) near eleven hundred people. The stateliest lines in the literature of the sea are these: Britannia needs no bulwark, no towers along the steep— Her march is o’er the mountain wave, her home is on the deep! There it is. In those old times the little ships climbed over the waves and wallowed down into the trough on the other side; the giant ship of our day does not climb over the waves, but crushes her way through them. Her formidable weight and mass and impetus give her mastery over any but extraordinary storm-waves. The ingenuity of man! I mean in this passing generation. To-day I found in the chart-room a frame of removable wooden slats on the wall, and on the slats was painted uninforming information like this: Trim-Tank Empty Double-Bottom No. 1 Full Double-Bottom No. 2 Full Double-Bottom No. 3 Full Double-Bottom No. 4 Full While I was trying to think out what kind of a game this might be, and how a stranger might best go to work to beat it, a sailor came in and pulled out the ‘Empty’ end of the first slat and put it back with its reverse side to the front, marked ‘Full.’ He made some other change, I did not notice what. The slat-frame was soon explained. Its function was to indicate how the ballast in the ship was distributed. The striking thing was, that that ballast was water. I did not knew that a ship had ever been ballasted with water. I had merely read, some time or other, that such an experiment was to be tried. But that is the modern way; between the experimental trial of a new thing and its adoption there is no wasted time, if the trial proves its value.