more, till we cut it out, and re-spliced it. How far away it was no one could tell precisely; but from a comparison of time it was imagined that the faulty part was not far astern, and that it was in the portion of Cable which went over at 8 o’clock in the morning, or a little before it; and although the time was not accurately fixed when Mr. Field heard it, the grating noise was supposed to arise from some cause connected with the fault. Had the engineers foreseen what subsequently occurred they might have resolved to go on, and take the chance of working through the fault. Professor Thomson has since given it as his opinion that the fault could have been worked through, and that the Cable could have transmitted messages for a long time at the rate of four words a minute--making an amply remunerative return. Mr. de Sauty also entertained the belief that the Cable could have worked for several months, at all events. But it does not appear that Mr. Canning had any reason to act on the views of these gentlemen, and it was quite sure, when the end was landed in Heart’s Content, Mr. Varley could not have given his certificate that the Cable was of the contract standard. Neither Mr. Varley nor Mr. Professor Thomson had any power to interfere, or even to express their opinions, and electricians and engineers are generally inclined to regard with exclusive attention their own department in the united task, and to look to it solely. Nothing was left but to pick up the cable. Steam was got up in the boilers for the picking-up machinery, the shackles and wire rope were prepared, and, meantime, as the ship drifted the Cable was let run out, and the brakes were regulated to reduce the strain below 30 cwt. As they were cutting the Cable near the top of the tank in the forenoon to make a test, one of the foremen perceived in the flake underneath that which had passed out with the grating noise when the fault was declared, a piece of wire projecting from the Cable, and when he took it in his fingers to prevent it catching in the passing coil, the wire broke short off. I saw it a few minutes afterwards. It was a piece of the wire of the Cable itself, not quite three inches long; one end rather sharp, the other with a clean bright fracture, and bent very much in the same way as the piece of wire which caused the first fault. This was a very serious discovery. It gave a new turn to men’s thoughts at once. After all, the Cable might carry the source of deadly mischief within itself. What we had taken for assassination might have been suicide. The piece of wire in this case was evidently bad and brittle, and had started through the Manilla in the tank. How many similar pieces might have broken without being detected or causing loss of insulation? The marks of design in the second fault were very striking; but the freaks of machinery in motion are extraordinary, and what looked so like purposed malice might, after all, be the effect of accidental mechanical agency.