Away slipped the wire strands, shackle after shackle: ocean was indeed insatiable; “more” and “more,” cried the daughter of horse-leech from the black night of waters, and still the rope descended. One thousand fathoms--fifteen hundred fathoms--two thousand fathoms--hundreds again mounting up--till at last, at 5·6 p.m., the strain was diminished, and at 2,500 fathoms, or 15,000 feet, the grapnel reached the bed of the Atlantic, and set to its task of finding and holding the Cable. Where _that_ lay was of course beyond human knowledge; but as the ship drifted down across its course, there was just a sort of head-shaking surmise that the grapnel might catch it, that the ship might feel it, that the iron-rope might be brought up again--and that the Cable across it might--here was the most hazardous hitch of all--might come up without breaking. But 2,500 fathoms! Alas!--and so in the darkness of the night--not more gloomy than her errand--the Great Eastern, having cleared away one of the great buoys and got it over her bows, was left as a sport to the wind, and drifted, at the rate of 70 feet a minute, down upon the imaginary line where the Cable had sunk to useless rest. \ _August 3rd._--All through the night’s darkness the Great Eastern groped along the bottom with the grapnel as the wind drifted her, but cunning hands had placed the ship so that her course lay right athwart the line for which she was fishing. There were many on board who believed the grapnel would not catch anything but a rock, and that if it caught a rock or anything else it would break itself or the line without anyone on board being the wiser for it. Others contended the Cable would be torn asunder by the grapnel. Others calculated the force required to draw up two miles and a-half of the Cable to the surface, and to drag along the bottom the length of line needed to give a bight to the Cable caught in the grapnel, so as to permit it to mount two and a-half miles to the deck of the Great Eastern. After the grapnel touched the bottom, which was at 7·45 o’clock, p.m., last night, when 2,500 fathoms of rope were payed-out, the strain for an hour and a-half did not exceed 55 cwt.; but at 10 p.m. it rose to 80 cwt. for a short time, and the head of the ship yielded a little from its course and came up to the wind. It then fell off as the strain was reduced to 55 cwt. which apparently was the normal force put on the ship by the weight of the rope and grapnel. This morning the same strain was shown by the dynamometer, and it varied very slightly from midnight till 6 o’clock a.m. Then the bow of the ship and the index of the dynamometer coincided in their testimony, and whilst the Great Eastern swayed gradually and turned her head towards the wind, the index of the machine recorded an increasing pressure. It began to be seen that there was some agency working to alter the course of the ship, and the dynamometer showed a strain of 70 cwt. The news