A thistle bloomed in a garden. A small boy forgot to pull it up. His twin sister saw it, but said that thistle-pulling was not her work, so it went to seed. One seed was caught up by a wind and went drifting, drifting, a little balloon of thistledown, until it reached the clouds and travelled westward with them for thousands of miles. Then the cloud struck a mountain and burst into rain. The seed went down among the drops. Months afterward a boy with a dark skin came stealing along that mountain slope, trying to get shot at a deer, and put his bare knee on an unknown plant that pricked him sharply,--so sharply that he said, "Oh!" or a word in his language which meant the same. It was lucky for the deer, which took fright and ran away, but the boy had no dinner that day. I like to think that splinters from my Iron Star are journeying across the world somewhat more solidly than thistledown, yet making themselves felt wherever they stop to rest. I like to think that possibly one splinter was forged into the identical steel needle which formed the indicator in the office of the first Atlantic cable, that three-thousand-mile-long wire, covered with gutta percha to keep out the salt water, which was laid from England to America under the ocean. You know that we telegraph by electricity, which is lightning in harness. But you may not know that this first deep-sea wire sent messages which were read by the way in which a flash of light was reflected in a mirror, wavering to and fro; and that the very first message was a greeting of peace and goodwill from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan. The first message sent by the cable read as follows:-- "To the President of the United States, Washington "The Queen desires to congratulate the President upon the successful completion of this great international work, in which the Queen has taken the greatest interest. "The Queen is convinced that the President will join with her in fervently hoping that the electric cable, which now connects Great Britain with the United States, will prove an additional link between the nations, whose friendship is founded upon their common interest and reciprocal esteem. "The Queen has much pleasure in thus communicating with the President, and renewing to him her wishes for the prosperity of the United States." Let us pick up the thread of the story of one sharp splinter which we have lost sight of;--the sword which Louis of Daneshold lost in battle, which Wulf had carried and which Ulf had made far back in the days of the Northmen.