Another curious piece of ordnance, locally known as _Jubbar Jung_, fell into our hands at Ghuzuee in 1842. It was of brass and beautifully ornamented; it carried 64-pound shot, and these being of hammered iron whizzed as they passed through the air. It made some havoc among the tents of our 40th Regiment, and the Huzarehs, followers of Ali, who joined General Nott at the siege, implored him to destroy "Jubbar Jung," for which they appeared to entertain a deep religious horror. There are at this hour cannon at Bejapore, beside which our "Woolwich Infants" and Armstrong 100-ton guns sink into insignificance. One of these, called the _Mulk-e-Meidan_, or "Sovereign of the Plains," cast by Roomi Khan, "the Turk of Roumelia," or first Monarch of Bejapore, an Ottoman of Constantinople, weighs forty tons; and, to crown all, Major Rennell mentions an old iron cannon at Dacca, which threw a shot 465 pounds in weight! The last great gun actually used was King Theodore's huge bombarde at Magdala in 1868, for which he had an enormous number of stone balls made, and which he believed to be the Palladium of Abyssinia. It was shattered to pieces among his troops, on their first attempt to use it. The last and most remarkable invention in artillery is a much needed fire-arm, which may supersede our boasted steel mountain ordnance, "the jointed gun" of Sir William Armstrong, which can be unscrewed into three separate pieces, each of which is light enough for conveyance on the back of a horse, and when put together form a powerful and long-range cannon, similar to the present field-piece. Such a gun would have been invaluable in Ashantee, or among the mountains of Abyssinia; and the want of some such fire-arm was sorely felt at times during the Indian mutiny, especially about its close, when our moveable columns pursued the rebels in the deserts of Bekaneer, where the gun carriages of even the flying artillery at times sunk axle deep in the dry heavy sand, rendering them almost useless for service. In Europe, this is peculiarly the age of enormous cannon. "Armour of two feet in thickness," says a recent writer, "and guns of one hundred tons in weight being now accomplished facts, and ships already bigger than the _Inflexible_ being already in hand, we may well ask ourselves, _What will be the next step?_" STORY OF A MERCHANT CAPTAIN.