The directors and shareholders of the two companies represented something more than the enormous stake they had put in the undertaking. Their feelings were shared by the mass of the people, and Her Majesty was animated by the same solicitude as her subjects. For there had been prophets of evil before the expedition sailed, and now their voices were raised again, and found credence among those who distrusted the magnificent ship which was then calmly breasting the billows of the Atlantic--the envy of her guardians--as well as among the class whose normal condition is despair of every scheme, good, useful, novel, or great. The newspapers began to admit speculations and argumentative letters into their columns, and although the original articles did not indicate any apprehension of a catastrophe, it was evident the public mind was becoming uneasy. The feeling increased. The correspondence augmented in volume, and, let it be said, in wildness of conjecture and unsoundness of premises and conclusions. Those who were inclined to believe that the Great Eastern had gone to the bottom were comforted by the reflection that the two men-of-war would save those who were on board. Had they known that the Sphinx had disappeared, and that the Great Eastern was much better able to help the Terrible, in a time of watery trouble, than the Terrible would be to aid her, they would have despaired indeed. All the while those on board engaged in their work--grappling and lifting, drifting and sailing--were enjoying themselves as far as the uncertainty attendant on their work would allow them, and were in a state of repose barely disturbed, as the time wore on, by surmises that people at home might begin to entertain doubts as to what had become of the expedition. Even these speculations would have had no agitating influence had the electricians on board communicated with the shore before they cut the end of the Cable on the last occasion. It would have surprised and amused officers and crew if they could have known that the vessel, which they were never tired of praising and admiring, was pronounced by eminent engineers to need strengthening; that she had sunk in the middle, or had fagged; or if they could have read confident assertions that the grand fabric in which they were so comfortably lodged and entertained and borne was unsafe and radically faulty; that good authorities had declared she was hogged. Undoubtedly there were grounds of anxiety, but none for anticipations and predictions of the worst. It would not be fair to omit to mention that in some instances the most correct and close conjectures were made concerning the position of the ship and the work in which she was engaged, as well as the causes of the long-continued silence. Several letters appeared, in which the writers tried, with singular justice of reasoning, to stem the current of alarm. The press generally abstained from any adverse speculations;